Movie Review: 'Miles Ahead'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- You've got to admire Don Cheadle's willingness to take such an unconventional and distinctive approach to his directorial debut.
But you've also got to wish that he had noticed how fragmented and inaccessible his passion project was.
Miles Ahead – which he also co-wrote and stars in -- is a biopic, but a chronological, cradle-to-grave drama it is anything but.
Instead, it's a risky, highly fictionalized exploration of the life and music of the legendary Miles Davis, the jazz musician, trumpeter, band leader, and composer.
But this virtual snapshot restricts itself to a five-year stretch in the 1970s – his "lost years" -- when the legendary Davis is in self-imposed seclusion, having aggressively retreated from the spotlight. He hasn't exactly retired and he hasn't exactly disappeared, but he hasn't exactly produced anything musical in a long time.
We find him holed up in his house, usually stoned, turning down interview request after interview request and refusing to have anything at all to do with record company executives.
The executives, as you might expect, want him to get back to work and turn out a new album, which would be his first in years.
So they're after the recording that they know Davis has completed and locked away.
But Davis seems angry at just about everybody and is willing to be as nasty as he feels like being, especially when the drugs and his temper take over.
Ewan McGregor plays one Dave Brill, a fictional Rolling Stone reporter who desperately wants an interview with Davis and is willing to do just about anything to get it. And that includes accompanying Davis on a covert mission to retrieve the potentially new musical material from the villainous execs, who have purloined it.
Michael Stuhlbarg portrays Davis's corrupt manager. He wants to get his hands on those hidden recordings so that he can force Davis to work with his up-and-coming protégé (Keith Stanfield).
And Emayatzy Corinealdi plays Davis's dancer ex-wife. Their failed, abusive marriage we see in flashbacks.
The screenplay by Cheadle and Steven Baigelman, based on a story by Cheadle, Baigelman, Steve J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson, tries to juggle disparate elements and has scattered subplots that pull us in different directions.
Clearly, Cheadle wants to capture Davis's story with a filmmaking style that's the equivalent of Davis's music in its complexity and originality.
But by the third act, when the film suddenly turns into a buddy action comedy about a heist, it has become a grab bag of genre.
In music parlance, that is, there are plenty of notes being played, but they just don't seem to go together.
Cheadle, who learned to play the trumpet, captures the man's gravelly voice and his essence. But the script fails to fully reveal him: we get too many of the the much-larger-than-life Miles and not enough of the life-sized Davis.
And Cheadle's free-form direction sacrifices clarity and allows for too many awkward time shifts and detours.
So we'll compose 2 stars out of 4. Some passages of Miles Ahead are music to our ears while some are miles from it. But it's the music for our eyes that's largely missing.
