‘Born to Be Blue is a perfectly decent bio-pic of the late, great jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. The film serves up some clever reinventions of overly familiar bio-pic forms in the hopes of reinventing the genre. For a while, it’s a rather clever take on an old standard, but unfortunately the movie eventually reverts to the expected rhythms, which proves to be all the more frustrating because there’s a pretty damn great Ethan Hawke performance at the center of it. <\/p>\n
Rather than attempt to condense Baker’s entire life into a single feature length narrative, the movie focuses on a brief period in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Around that time, uber-producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted to make a movie with Chet starring as himself that never came to pass. Here, Canadian writer\/director Robert Budreau imagines that movie had been made (for a bit), which allows viewers to get a traditional backstory on Baker in black-and-white as a movie-within-a-movie. Carmen Ejogo cleverly plays multiple women in Chet’s early life before going on to become one of those composite love interests of oh-so many bio-pics. The dual movie structure lets Budreau condense a lot of expository information and comment on bio-pics in amusing ways. However, the fake bio project eventually collapses and the flick gets far less interesting once it’s over.<\/p>\n
After Baker gets beaten up and loses his Hollywood gig, he finds himself bottoming out in Los Angeles, unable to even play thanks to a fresh set of false teeth. But he has a good woman by his side, a burned-out producer (Callum Keith Rennie) who kind of believes in him, and an amazing natural talent. So dammit, the guy just might make a comeback! That is, if he can stay away from his second love: heroin. Yes, it’s that old song again \u2013 one that admittedly the entire cast commits to admirably. Budreau has a few more twists to toss in, but ultimately what started as a unique take on the Chet Baker life story turns into exactly the one you’d expect.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, it’s not a total disaster. That first half is fascinatingly meta, and Ethan Hawke is excellent throughout. At first, the Baker husk that Hawke adopts sounds like it might be a distracting affectation. However, it slowly feels more natural and the center of a pretty transformative performance for an actor who usually plays variations on himself (wonderfully so, but he’s still not a chameleon). Hawke even attempts to sing a few Baker tunes and doesn’t embarrass himself. The movie is worth watching for his work alone and he gets a good cast to support him, they’re sadly stuck with characters far less complex. <\/p>\n
‘Born to Be Blue’ is a perfectly acceptable new entry in the seemingly endless bio-pic genre. It’s just frustrating to watch Budreau’s movie settle into that predictable fate after promising so much more in the early going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
‘Born to Be Blue is a perfectly decent bio-pic of the late, great jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. The film serves up some clever reinventions of overly familiar bio-pic forms in the hopes of reinventing the genre. For a while, it’s a rather clever take on an old standard, but unfortunately the movie eventually reverts to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":72824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4508],"tags":[2086,8453,8787,9624,8454,5712,1234,1303,1233],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72823"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72823"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76380,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72823\/revisions\/76380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}