Here is another fictionalized story of another great jazz trumpeter and Jack and I liked it a lot. Ethan Hawke is pretty great as Chet Baker at a low point in his life. I was already a fan in 1988 when I learned that Baker fell out of a window that year in Amsterdam, dying at the age of 58. This movie is a lovely, though sad, companion piece to Miles Ahead, which we saw the day before, last week.
Hawke (last blogged for Boyhood, which earned him a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination) has been getting rave reviews. Kudos also to Carmen Ejogo (most recently in Selma) who plays his wife, a compilation of several women, and to Callum Keith Rennie (14 episodes of Californication and lots of other things) as the manager and friend. Stephen McHattie (so familiar but I can't quite place him, even after reading his credits), who plays Chet Sr., looks more like Chet Baker than Hawke and actually played him in a short film, The Deaths of Chet Baker (2009), by the same director/writer Robert Budreau (he's new to me and this is his second feature).
Unlike Miles Ahead, the soundtrack has been posted on youtube, and here's the imdb list of songs. I had to look to find instrumentals by Baker to play while writing. Here are some: one, two, three. Hawke sings many songs himself in the movie. In this example, #6 on the album, his pitch isn't great, but the feeling is there.
This had a short run here and no DVD release date has been announced but I imagine it'll get there eventually. Watch for it. Averaging 88 and 85%, Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences liked it quite well, As did we.
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