“Let’s do a movie that Miles Davis would say, ‘I want to be the star of that movie. Not the one about me. The one where I’m the one running it, and I tell everybody what happens.’”
And here we have a movie about Miles Davis. “In an age when everyone from Hank Williams to the Notorious B.I.G. has been blessed with a biopic, a musical giant like Miles Davis had long eluded big-screen treatment.” One of the primary reasons for that could have been the difficulty in justifying a career that spans so many facets,traits and musical endeavors. “When asked what he’d accomplished,the jazz trumpeter and composer replied with, “Well, I guess I changed music five or six times,” and it wasn’t an idle boast.”
That’s how Don Cheadle decided to do something entirely different. If you can’t do justice by the rulebook, you scrap away all pretensions to doing so.
“Miles Ahead (named after the trumpeter’s 1957 album with Gil Evans, and in theaters on April 1st), eschews everything from his bebop roots to his Bitches Brew fusion explorations; instead, the free-form portrait toggles between the late 1950s, when dancer/future wife Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi) came into his life, and the “Dark Magus” period of the mid-1970s when Davis stopped recording and went into drug-addled seclusion. It also introduces a fictional Rolling Stone reporter named Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), who instigates a literal wild ride involving shoot-outs, stolen master tapes and some incredibly close calls. “It’s less a Miles biopic,” McGregor says, “than an attempt to cast Miles in a caper flick that he might like to have been part of.””
Here’s the trailer of this movie, both directed and acted by Don Cheadle.
(Quotes from Rolling Stone)
