Born To Be Blue

If "Born to Be Blue" shares its DNA with any film, it is "All That Jazz," exploring a condensed period of its protagonist's life and using it as a lens to interpret his entire life and legacy.

While "Born to be Blue" has more modest pretensions, writer-director Robert Budreau has delivered an intimate and delicate exploration of Chet Baker's life and career without the usual droll history that can sink a biopic.

The "facts" here are probably more fantasy than is the case with most biopics, which is also why it's more in line with Fosse's film. But so much of this iconic jazz musician's life was a haze of drugs and similar-looking women that shaping the narrative as a dislocating series of jumps and cuts between the filming of his story in 1966 and events as depicted in the film itself works brilliantly. The counterpoint to a sort of heroin haze is the punchy bebop of the music.

Ethan Hawke's Chet Baker is most at home in the haze and most alive in the music. It's the pull between the two that forms the central thesis of the film. Hawke soulfully admits he got hooked on heroin because "it just makes me happy." In "Born to Be Blue" there isn't a "period" of drug use followed by a victorious rehabilitation, nor is there the deep tragedy of a complete collapse or tragic death. In fact, from 1978 until his death 10 years later, Baker lived in Europe and it's considered his most prolific and mature period of work.

But the movie keeps its lens tightly focused around the late 1960s. In keeping with the fantasy quality, Carmen Ejogo plays Jane, an actress who plays his wife in the movie within the movie, and becomes Baker's latest sole means of support (in one scene he takes Jane back to the family home in Oklahoma to get sober, and it's clear that he's not particularly welcome -- and neither is his "nice colored gal"). Jane is an amalgamation of several women from Baker's life, adding another dimension to the hazy, fantasy quality.

"Born to Be Blue" presents a sweet, gentle, insecure and fragile Chet Baker who, despite his many failures, continued to be a junkie and to make incredible music until his death at 58. But he could never be the musician he wanted when he was sober. When he was high, the pain (emotional and physical -- midway through his career a dealer knocked his front teeth out and he lived with immense pain when he played) disappeared.

This is all delicately and beautifully told in the gorgeous final movement of the movie. When his old manager and friend Dick (Callum Keith Rennie) has gotten him a final chance to play Birdland, he must decide whether to play the gig sober or to get high. As Jane watches from the wings and understands that he's chosen the drugs, she removes the engagement ring from around her neck, hands it to Dick, and says, "Give this to Chet." All he can say is, "I'm sorry."

Baker wails on the trumpet and weeps for the music he's making. Miles, Dizzy and the rest applaud. Hawke steps to the microphone: "Born to Be Blue." And the music plays, and the standard "this is what happened after" rolls, but close your eyes and listen. That's where Chet Baker lives.