I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty confident that in his autobiography, Miles Davis breaks the world record for using the word “motherfucker” the most times in a single piece of writing. It’s quite an accomplishment, and it might be the only thing “Miles Ahead,” a new biopic about the bad-mouthed jazz trumpeter, captures that doesn’t feel like it was shot through a rose-colored lens.Don Cheadle directs, co-writes, and stars in “Miles Ahead,” in what apparently has been a passion project for quite some time. And it starts out promising, deviating from a traditional biopic mode. We get very little from the early life of Davis — which means no Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, or John Coltrane — and very few flashbacks. When the film does move away from the present, it is through dreams, even nightmares, fleeting moments that continue to haunt the musician. We’re introduced to Davis during his famous “lost period,” roughly around 1980, when he had stopped making music for the previous five years. By many accounts, including his own, he spent most of that time alone inside his Manhattan apartment, doing drugs. And that’s where we find him, sitting in filth, when there’s a knock at the door. A writer named Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor), claiming he’s on assignment for Rolling Stone, wants to talk to Davis. We quickly learn that he is not on assignment; he’s just a random reporter trying to get a story, and what he gets is a lot more.The framing device of the journalist trying to write the “comeback” story on Davis will rankle purists, who will peel apart what is real and what is fictionalized. But the film is at its strongest when it veers from the record, and it displays an understanding on the part of the filmmakers that all biography is constructed, and fact and fiction can stand together. The problem with “Miles Ahead” is that it doesn’t use its fictionalized narrative as a way to arrive at some greater truth about Davis or his work. “I wanted to make a movie Miles Davis would have wanted to star in,” Cheadle said during the press conference that followed last week’s world premiere of “Miles Ahead” at the New York Film Festival. It was a telling statement. Cheadle turns the film into an action movie, with Davis and his new journalist pal on the run from record company thugs — what could have been a draft of the script that featured his appearance in an episode of “Miami Vice.” And by all accounts Davis was reckless in his real life, involved with fights with police, shootings, and various drug deals gone bad, not to mention the many bridges he burned, personal and professional. But would this have really been the movie Davis would have wanted to star in? In his autobiography, he is quite open, or at least not embarrassed, about the pain he caused people, especially the women in his life, even if you get the sense that he still, at the moment of that writing, hadn’t fully grasped the damage he had caused. He was certainly haunted by the ghosts from his past, and in “Miles Ahead,” the only ghost that haunts him is that of his ex-wife Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), and only in terms of the fact that he let her slip away. It’s the specter of lost love that hangs over him, not regret, or pain, or the trauma of his life.Cheadle makes a last-minute push for the contemporary relevance of Miles’s music when none is needed. The work speaks for itself. Listen to “Jack Johnson” or “On the Corner” or anything from his live albums of the 1970s, and it’s clear how important a figure he was and remains, how far-reaching the music was and how influential it became. But the film, in what might be the most ill-conceived ending I’ve seen in a long time, pushes the idea, through a quote from Miles, who calls his work “social music.” Cheadle as Davis even sports a leather vest with #socialmusic on the back in the final scene, in case we didn’t understand. It’s a baffling choice, and one that elicits giggles. In its attempt to rewrite the story of Davis, “Miles Ahead” ends up diminishing his personality. It presents Davis as a man of one-note when, as anybody who has listened to his music can attest, he contained multitudes.
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