Miles Ahead, film review: an open-ended biopic with a glorious performance from Don Cheadle

Cheadle relives jazz legend Miles Davis beautifully

Don Cheadle jazz legend Miles Davis (Sony Pictures)

“If you’re going to tell a story, come with some attitude,” jazz legend Miles Davis (Don Cheadle) whispers in his hoarse voice to feckless Scottish music journalist Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor) in Miles Ahead. Attitude is what the film has in abundance.

This is the reverse of the usual tidy, cradle to grave biopic. It’s a deliberately messy and open-ended film with a glorious performance from Cheadle, who also directed and co-wrote. He is giving us an interpretation, a riff, on Davis and doesn’t seem remotely bothered whether it is accurate or whether the trumpeter emerges in a sympathetic light. He wants to capture the spirit of the character and he will let others worry about the details.

As first encountered here in the 1970s, Miles Davis is a wreck: an aristocrat of the jazz world gone very far to seed. He’s a Howard Hughes-like recluse, “revered and reviled” in equal measure. He hasn’t recorded for five years; is taking far too many drugs and is paranoid and obnoxious in the extreme. The cynics are already saying he is worth more to his record company dead than alive. McGregor’s Dave, a fictional character, is shady and opportunistic - and that’s why Miles eventually takes a shine to him and grants him the interview he is so desperate for.

There’s a hint of Citizen Kane in the storytelling structure. A blast of the trumpet whisks us back to the 1950s, when Davis was working with legendary producer Gil Evans. We learn of his courtship of the beautiful dancer Frances (Emayatzy Corinealdi), his muse, first wife, and the most precious person in his life.

Between flashbacks, the film is an essay in chaos. Like James Brown in the early scenes of Get On Up (also co-written by Steven Baigelman), Davis is out of control. He hits Dave the first time he sees him and is ready to point a gun at anyone who crosses him, whether record company execs, a slimy manager (Michael Stuhlbarg) of a young trumpeter, or an affluent drug dealer who claims to be a fan. Davis’s behaviour is monstrous but Cheadle plays him with such charisma that he seems perversely sympathetic anyway. We root for him. The plot, such as it is, hinges on a recording that Miles has made but doesn’t want the record company to take. When this recording is stolen, the trumpeter and his Scottish sidekick venture out on to the mean streets to retrieve it.

Vignettes hint at the turbulence in Davis’s life. A scene in which he is arrested for no reason underlines the racism he encountered early in his career. A ferocious row with Frances (shown without dialogue but with a jarring jazz accompaniment) signals his jealousy and the cracks in his marriage. He is in constant pain thanks to degenerative hip disorder. In his music, he feeds off the destructiveness and waste around him - and Cheadle never loses sight of just how prodigious his achievements were.

Don Cheadle, 100 mins, starring: Don Cheadle, Emayatzy Corinealdi, Ewan McGregor, Michael Stuhlbarg