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Ethan Hawke not looking all that blue
B+Musicians and drugs have had a long and unhappy relationship with each other, one that almost invariably ends in divorce (kicking the habit) or disaster. Jazz trumpeter Chet Baker was a rare exception, a man who managed to produce great music while remaining an admitted heroin addict for the last decades of his life. Writer/director Robert Budreau and star Ethan Hawke explore Baker’s life and art in the fanciful Born to Be Blue.
Hawke plays Baker in the 1960’s and 70’s (Born to Be Blue‘s timelines are vague), as the trumpeter tries to recover from a stint in an Italian jail and a severe beating by drug dealers that shatters his front teeth. Baker begins methadone treatment, and, with the aid of dentures, Baker gradually and painfully regains most of his old form. Eventually, Dick, Baker’s former manager (Callum Keith Rennie) persuades record producers to give the trumpeter another audition.
Director Budreau freely admits that many of the events in Born to Be Blue are completely fictional. Jane (Carmen Ejogo), the actress who becomes Baker’s supportive live-in girlfriend when he goes to California to rebuild his career, is a composite of Baker’s long-time wife and other women in his life. And the climactic performance at Harlem’s legendary Birdland Jazz Club, where Baker begins using heroin again, never occurred—the club closed two years before Baker lost his teeth. Instead of merely recreating key events in Baker’s life in Born to Be Blue, Budreau instead uses real and fictional events to show what made Baker the artist he was, drugs and all. The scene at Birdland in which Baker confesses to Dick that he needs heroin to make him play his best is so powerfully tragic that it might land Hawke an Oscar nomination. Indeed, it’s Hawke’s mournfully passive demeanor and the pain he shows while practicing in the bathtub until his mouth bleeds that make Baker a far more real character that many recent biodrama leads ever became. Born to Be Blue also benefits from a score featuring trumpet solos by Kevin Turcotte, who mimics Baker’s sound almost perfectly (Hawke also took trumpet lessons so he could play in time with the score). Truth may well be stranger than fiction, but Robert Budreau skillfully uses fiction in Born to Be Blue to show audiences the essential truth about Chet Baker.
In this scene, Ethan Hawke plays “My Funny Valentine” for record producers. Our full review of Born to Be Blue is now available on Silver Screen Cinema as soon as it is available.
Photo credit: “66eme Fetival de Venise (Mostra)” by Nicolas Genin / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
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