Critics reviews

The decision to fixate on Miles's "silent period," roughly 1975 to '79, when he was strung-out and creatively and physically drained, and the choice to fashion a sort of madcap heist comedy out of it, are baffling. Miles's theft of his own recordings from his label might be historically accurate, but the resultant car chases and undignified buffoonery are a jarring contrast with the few snippets of Cheadle as the dapper, more serious 1950s Miles.

While Miles Ahead is set during the 1970s, its beautifully shot sequences take us back into the 1950s and '60s, to Miles's princely elegance during his nightclub years, to the romance and chauvinism that marked his relationship with dancer Frances Taylor.

The biopic genre has been mined so many times by lackluster filmmakers with no vision that Cheadle's imperfect, elliptical mish mash feels slightly revolutionary. His nutty performance is equally riveting, a combination of grating insecurity and established bravado that hides a layer of longing underneath. Genius innovators like Davis can never truly be pegged, not by labels (music or otherwise), critics or films. Cheadle has come close to giving us a better understanding of why.

With the music so freely available elsewhere, present-day biopics about musicians are deeply in hock to the quality and purpose of the impersonations, with too timidly cautious attempts wasting everyone's time. Watchable if flawed, director-star Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead is as boldly conceived as it is obliquely realised. Your judgement on its success or otherwise is likely shaded b the extent of your impatience with such cosplay projects.

Avoiding monotony and cliché is one thing; turning Miles Davis' life story into a lame buddy movie about the adventures of a monomaniacal badass and his dorky sidekick is another. At times, Miles Ahead feels like it should have been made in the '80s, with Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal in the lead roles.

Does it matter that stretches of "Miles Ahead" came out of the filmmakers' imagination rather than Davis's life? Purists may howl, but they'll also miss the pleasure and point of this playfully impressionistic movie... Most [biopics] are polite exhumations that follow the often great man of history/art/politics arc with the usual highs and lows, witchy and whiny women, and transcendent payoff. "Miles Ahead" has these, including the transcendence; this is, after all, about Miles Davis.

It's almost unbearable to consider the creator of great beauty to be responsible for actions of great ugliness. That's why Cheadle and the other writers, in their extreme filtering and altering of Davis's experiences and actions, do his art no favors but, rather, an injustice. Yet the fact remains: Cheadle is a majestic performer, whose acting captures something of Davis's fierce, proud, volatile radiance.

The story has too many moving parts, and Cheadle can't keep them all in play gracefully—but his portrayal of this fantasy Miles seems to strike an almost cosmic connection with the spirit of a man we could never really know.

The film is undone not by its interpretation of Davis's legacy but by its caper plot, in which a hapless journalist (Ewan McGregor) gets entangled in the chase for a missing session tape. As more characters are trotted out, a shade of irony is inadvertently thrown on Davis's oft-repeated notion of "social music." Far from evoking jazz's communal ecstasies, Miles Ahead prompts us to ask how a genius could attract so many boring people into his orbit.

Cheadle, whose compact, wiry frame is a good match for Davis's, gives a brilliant physical performance, nailing the musician's raspy whisper of a voice, his imperious stare, and the rocking walk he adopted to favor an injured hip. But in the end, looking the part isn't enough. Less a character study than an impressionistic portrait of a troubled artist's internal chaos, Miles Ahead supplies just enough Davis to leave us jonesing for more.

Cheadle's gifts as a filmmaker are myriad. He has a good sense of pace and a knack for montage—constructing jumps in time that snap like a snare drum, like a jump through several months using only Polaroids scattered around a bedroom. He can visualize internal drama splendidly... "Miles Ahead" is a hell of a great time. It makes you grateful there are people willing to follow their muse, to take their time and do work that respects the complexities of their subject.