When I heard that “Miles Ahead,” the bio-pic about Miles Davis starring and directed by Don Cheadle, would be set in the late nineteen-seventies, when Davis had stopped performing in public—and would be centered on the story of Davis’s friendship with a white journalist—I was excited, because I knew of such a real-life story, and it’s a good one. The journalist Eric Nisenson (who died in 2003) was befriended by Davis in that period and wrote about the story of their friendship in his biography of Davis, “ ’Round About Midnight.” It’s the story of an earnest lover of jazz who spent lots of time in the combination apartment and music studio of the bassist Walter Booker. One night, Davis came to Booker’s place, met Nisenson, and, to the journalist’s surprise, became a pal. The resulting portrait of Davis by Nisenson was an unsparingly intimate, complex, and oddly whimsical view of the artist in retreat.
That’s not the story that’s told in the movie “Miles Ahead.” There, the journalist, Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), a Scotsman who writes for Rolling Stone, is looking for a scoop. He knocks on Davis’s door, gets a punch in the face for his troubles, then darts past Davis and locks the jazzman out of his own home. Davis proceeds to pull a gun on him, Braden claims to have been sent by Columbia (the record company with which Davis was under contract), and Davis gets Braden to drive him there in Davis’s Jaguar. When, at the record company, Braden’s ruse is exposed, Davis is ready to dump him and ignore him, until Braden promises to score him some top-quality cocaine. That score proves to be the start of a none-too-beautiful friendship.
Fact checking a movie that’s based on a real and famous person and a true story is only one—and not the most significant—way to criticize it. The truth may often be stranger than fiction, but the point is usually less clear, and a movie director with insight into character and a comprehensive worldview can transform true stories into better ones—albeit not without risk. One of the revelations of interviewing artists about their activities is the discovery that their transformative powers often carry over into their own versions of their lives. A tale told by an accomplished writer or filmmaker is likely to shear off many piquant details and bend some lines to make them meet up in meaningful ways. When the same incident is described by a participant of more modest narrative talents, it’s usually filled with a range of details and a spray of loose ends that may pique the imagination but don’t bear much dramatic shape or make a sharpened intellectual or moral point.
Nonfiction’s profusion of details has an intrinsic fascination that fiction risks emptying out. It takes a high level of creation to redeem the dramatized, tailored version—particularly of an artist’s life, because whoever’s telling the story needs to bring a level of insight and imagination comparable to that of the protagonist. The bio-pic of an artist is a severe test for a filmmaker, because the subject will be reduced and deadened by anything less than great inspiration. Unfortunately, Don Cheadle, a superb actor who invests the role of Davis with a sculptural majesty, doesn’t achieve anything comparable with the movie’s direction—or, in particular, with the script, written by him and Steven Baigelman (based on a story that they, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson wrote).
Cheadle and his collaborators give the story a double-flashback framework. The movie starts with a filmed interview that Davis grants Braden, and then it cuts to a chase—a car chase, in which Braden is driving, Davis is the passenger, and pursuers in another car are shooting at them and wound Davis. The MacGuffin is a tape of Davis’s music that he made on his own during his time of quasi-retirement and that he’s keeping from his record label, and the pursuers are revealed to be working on behalf of the record label.
This is supposed to have happened in 1978 or ’79. In fact, Davis was shot in a car—on October 9, 1969. He discussed the incident in his autobiography. It took place in Manhattan, when he was in a parked car with a woman, after he performed a concert at a Brooklyn club called the Blue Coronet (which was on Fulton Street). He explained it in terms of his playing at a white-owned club when a black-owned club in the neighborhood wanted him to perform there instead. Here’s how the owner of the Blue Coronet, Dickie Habersham-Bey, who died in 2013 (and who, in fact, was black), told the story in a 2011 interview aptly titled “Who Shot Miles?”:
But Davis played there anyway—and, for good measure, Habersham-Bey said, Davis’s attorney insulted the extortionist, who then hired a gunman “to make a point, to show you how bad he was.”
As for the tape in question, the one for which (in “Miles Ahead”) an agent looking to get into Columbia’s good graces was willing to kill, there was one (or, rather, two), from 1978. The songwriter Eleana Steinberg was indirectly responsible for the recording—Davis spent several months as a guest at her home in Connecticut, where the idea of making music suddenly and unexpectedly coalesced. There was a cassette tape that Davis recorded with Larry Coryell and other musicians in Connecticut, and it prompted Davis to bring that impromptu band to Manhattan to make a recording at Columbia’s studio. The company’s executives were in attendance, and the session was widely reported on at the time. Though the music done there—supposedly multiple takes of a single piece—was never released commercially, Davis gave the Connecticut tape to Coryell (who declined to release it). The story of those two sessions, which Steinberg and two other participants, the keyboard player George Pavlis and the bassist T. M. Stevens, have discussed, could be a terrific movie in itself.
Or, to put it another way, Davis’s life itself would have made a fine movie—it couldn’t have been a worse movie than the one that Cheadle and the other writers inflate with major chunks of movie-land clichés. (Even the unusually fragmented and impressionistic narrative makes its leaps in time through unfortunately facile visual rhymes and echoes.) Nonetheless, the filmmakers do unfold significant elements of the historical record, and they catch some noteworthy details (such as the derelict state of Davis’s luxurious home during his time of troubles in the late seventies). They pay apt attention to two white police officers’ beating and arrest of Davis outside Birdland, in 1959—but they miss a few remarkable aspects of the incident, including the instant protest of a crowd that blocked traffic, and the remarkable declaration of the judge who dismissed charges against Davis with the affirmation that there’s no such crime as resisting an illegitimate arrest.
The movie depicts Davis’s possessiveness toward his first wife, the celebrated dancer Frances Taylor (played with calm grace by Emayatzy Corinealdi)—including his demand that to be with him she stop working, and his drug- and alcohol-induced jealous paranoia. But it also attributes a chronic injury to Davis’s hip to a knock-down, drag-out fight with Taylor around 1965, in the course of which Taylor strikes the first blow before Davis hits her back. In fact, Davis, in his autobiography, admitted to hitting Taylor early in their relationship, before their marriage, and to having done so thereafter on several occasions. As for his hip, he had been suffering for years from a degenerative condition. (As early as 1963, it caused him to miss many concerts.) Even the suave scene of their meeting is a clichéd fabrication, and the stories that Davis tells in his autobiography of their first date are deeply imbued with the fear of racist violence from the Los Angeles police (something that’s completely absent from the film’s version of the story).
Davis had hip-replacement surgery in 1975, spent nearly a year recovering, and drank and used cocaine and heroin to deal with the pain. In his autobiography, Davis discusses those years away from the music business: “Sex and drugs took the place that music had occupied in my life until then and I did both of them around the clock.” He writes about going to after-hours joints, about a brief time in jail in 1978 for “non-support” of one of his children, and also about living like “a hermit” for months at a time. Nisenson was a witness to that time of reclusion, when Davis often relied on Nisenson for errands, including drug runs. Davis also spoke with Nisenson at length for a planned authorized biography, which led to “ ’Round About Midnight,” in which (in the second edition, published after Davis’s death) Nisenson is plain about Davis’s “inexcusable treatment of women.” Here’s one scene:
In the movie, Davis’s return to performance, and his healing, are sparked by his unwilling but inevitable connection to a young trumpeter who seems to have sold out but has a true musical mind. In fact, Davis was more or less nursed back to health and coaxed back into activity by the actress Cicely Tyson; they married in 1981. There’s no sign of her, or any cognate character, in the film.
Davis’s life, in his own telling, is a trouble-filled adventure, in which racism and drugs, hedonism and violence, artistic vision and brute desire are intertwined. The hardest thing for an artistic biography to accomplish is to associate the art with the life without reducing the pure artistic drive to psychological and sociological determinism. Even though “Miles Ahead” fails in this regard, I have sympathy for Cheadle’s odd uses of some of Davis’s greatest music. For instance, Davis’s violent fight with Taylor is depicted as occurring while the other four members of Davis’s superb “second quintet” are rehearsing in the basement; the effect is to associate the saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s composition “Nefertiti” with domestic violence. Similarly, a snippet of a heavily electric and percussive performance of the sort that Davis was giving in 1974-75 is used as the soundtrack for the car chase and shootout.
Even though these scenes cheapen and reduce the music to mere atmospherics, they make a significant point, one that is all too often lost in the romanticism of artistic creation: great artists whose lives are filled with trouble, including of their own making, aren’t great artists despite such behavior and experiences but, rather, in inseparable relation to it. The long-standing desire of art lovers to separate the art from the artist, to appreciate the work while disdaining the behavior, reflects the kind of fastidious oversimplification that good artists avoid. The messy complexity of character and of the world at large, the expression of realms of experience that most prudent spectators or readers would rather avoid, is precisely what the best art embodies. Artists’ turbulent lives are their very stock in trade, and if they were purified to fit the moral standards of Supreme Court nominees art itself would be the poorer for it. Nisenson’s use of the word “inexcusable” is exactly right. 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. Though much of Cheadle’s direction is photographically undistinguished, the one figure of style that stands out is his close-ups of himself as Davis. They suggest no vanity or actorly preening but a keen self-awareness—and understanding of Davis—through the lens. Like Davis, Cheadle is complete in repose; Davis’s existential force emerges fully through the still frame of a single photograph, and Cheadle embodies it vitally. It’s precisely the actor’s own power to incarnate Davis as one artist to another that makes the movie’s reliance on artificial dramatic conventions unnecessary, even absurd. Davis is a drama unto himself, and to bring it into being Cheadle doesn’t have to do anything but be there.
P.S. The reason for a movie about Davis is his music; here’s a Spotify playlist with a few of my favorite recordings.
https://open.spotify.com/user/richardalanbrody/playlist/09dNcvxdDDoq8wgHS9WjPc
