Miles Ahead and Miles Behind

Actor Don Cheadle, long involved in Hollywood’s prostitution of actors — especially black actors (cf. Steven Soderbergh’s egregious Ocean’s caper franchise and the abominable cable-TV series House of Lies) — outdistances his previous career with Miles Ahead. In this ostensible bio-pic, Cheadle combines both the human and the ideological legends of Miles Davis: genius, jazz innovator, drug addict, paranoid, domestic abuser, class-crossing violent Negro, covert intellectual, pop star, and egotist. All this is presented in an art-movie format. Miles Ahead freely shifts time periods and narrative perspectives. It is held together by Cheadle’s regard for its subject, which clearly emboldened him, as a first-time director, to attempt filmmaking as complex and original as Davis’s musical compositions and improvisation.

For those reasons, Miles Ahead will not be popular; the era of Star Wars Redux is not one in which masses enthuse over artistic and personal expression. But Miles Ahead still makes history for offering Davis’s essence and respecting the idea of art.

As director, writer, and star, Cheadle does not shy away from what made Davis complex and even, at times, insufferable. But the film is such a daring venture that it justifies Cheadle’s insistence on Davis as a singular figure, an artist and a black man who won recognition while sustaining his own terms — The Great Intransigent.

First appearing behind enigmatic dark glasses, the glowering, Afro-headed image is familiar yet intriguing. After Cheadle’s successful imitation of the Miles voice — light yet growly, profane and beautifully articulate (just like the music) — the rest of the performance is phantomlike. Characters such as Davis’s first wife, dancer Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), and journalist-hustler Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor) participate in free-flowing anecdotes that conform to Davis’s wily life. Biographical high drama and myth combine when Davis storms the Columbia Records offices, pulls out a gun, and demands payment for a recording. The classic horror story of industry exploitation and the horrifying class-based story of a black artist rejecting decorum to assert his temper and self-respect finally make it to the screen. It’s nearly surreal, setting up a format where Davis’s actions interweave with memories. Every character — from shady music-bizzer Harper Hamilton (Michael Stuhlbarg) and producer Gil Evans (Lare Roberts) to a talented junkie protégé (Keith Stanfield), representing generations who are both inspired and misled by Davis’s example — becomes an emanation of Davis himself. Our Miles.

Named after the 1957 album Miles Ahead (Davis’s first collaboration with producer Evans), the movie seems to improvise its themes — career and personal concerns, love and theft, creation and self-defiance. Cheadle even evokes how an artist’s imagination can include paranoia. A boxing motif (recalling Davis’s 1970s Jack Johnson suite) is one of many metaphors that pay homage to the black radical tradition of struggle, trouble, and precariousness (with subtle, knowing acknowledgment of a mythic scene from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man).

The way Cheadle sustains an on-going montage structure is impressive. In contrast, however, to the vivid characterizations (McGregor’s cadging journalist is a full-fledged but admiring opportunist, and Corinealdi’s Frances gives emotional variety to a muse, an apologetic vision of a woman tormented by a difficult man’s neediness), the film’s unconventional structure begins to spin its wheels. It prevents the time-bending “live” musical finale from seeming as immediate as it should. Still, Miles Ahead does the basic things right, as did Tate Taylor’s very different James Brown film, Get On Up.

Most importantly, Miles Ahead is not part of the vulgarization of African-American history seen in Selma and Straight Outta Compton, which are largely the product of what can politely be called cultural-imperialist thinking — the political manipulation that means to appropriate and control the content and image of black culture in order to sustain the social authority of such public institutions as the media and arts organizations that function as the established rule-makers and gatekeepers — the very authorities that subculture artists must always struggle against in order to work, achieve, and sometimes, plainly, survive.

It isn’t just vulgar Hollywood that Cheadle reproves. When a snooty publication recently inventoried a black singer’s legendary body of work and said of one recording that it is “as precise an artifact as a Ming vase,” you know that is exactly the kind of embalming and exoticizing categorization that artists never want, and that goes against the essence of their art and life. Resistance to that pigeon-holing — and cultural ownership — is precisely what Cheadle captures. In these Obama days, black public figures are praised for representing liberal ideas, saying and doing the things that satisfy and win approval from the white power elite. In Miles Ahead, Cheadle holds fast to Miles Davis’s obstinacy in order to honor his history.

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I Saw the Light, the new bio-pic about country-music artist Hank Williams, seems to have been made indifferently, as if director Marc Abraham had no sincere interest in Williams or anything pertaining to him. Beginning in 1943, when Williams (played by Tom Hiddleston) married his first wife, Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen), the film contrasts their disorderly marriage with Williams’s gradual success as a songwriter and performer of authentic white Southern expression, a genuine hillbilly artist.

Abraham ignores cultural specifics that could illuminate the society that produced a figure like Hiram King Williams, who enjoyed his cultural heritage and took his masculine freedom as brazenly as Miles Davis did. Abraham models Hank and Audrey’s competitive co-dependence partly on Johnny Cash and June Carter in Walk the Line and partly on John Reed and Louise Bryant in Reds. I Saw the Light is as much a structural mess as Reds but without the fancy pedigree and blind to how Williams reflected the social issues of his time.

#related#This oddly framed, dimly photographed film often suggests a mood piece — as when a concert scene focuses on Williams’s broad-brimmed white hat rather than establishing the concertgoers’ presence. But these images should be evocative. During a Hank Williams Day performance in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1951, he wears a white fringe outfit with sequins that’s so blindingly symbolic, one wonders where Williams stood on his culture’s race issues. Yet there’s no sense of the everyday culture epitomized in Williams’s songs. Cherry Jones as Williams’s tough-talking mother (and Audrey’s distrusting mother-in-law) always hits the right twang and brings the only authenticity to this film.

The tall, pale Hiddleston makes a striking Williams icon, but this British actor (superb in Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, though best known as Loki in the Thor movies) can’t play the rascality that one hears in Williams’s records. He has a haunting drunken moment — Williams laughing at his new automatic garage door as if amazed at his own, uncontrollable life and career — but the film only zeroes in on an angry newspaper interview to make Williams yet another nihilistic movie figure: “There’s darkness in people. Anger, misery, sorrow. I show it to them and they don’t have to take it home.” Genuine American pop art isn’t as simple as that. Marc Abraham, unlike Don Cheadle, never gets inside his subject’s head. Plus, for an unrepentant hellraiser-artist like Williams, the film’s title is a misnomer.