‘Born to Be Blue’: Bored Being Bland

“As a young man in the 1950s, the cool jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker had the casual deviltry and the ‘Blame It on My Youth’ handsomeness to become a screen idol,” Pauline Kael wrote in her review of the 1988 documentary Let’s Get Lost. With his eyes seemingly carved around thick bones and the sensuous curve of his upper lip, Baker was the most beautiful of musicians. I can understand Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis’ reluctance to take him seriously. He was the white boy to whom everything came easy. In photos like this, he invited the audience to come, easy.

Ethan Hawke broke my own reluctance to imagine him as Baker in Born to Be Blue, a fictionalized account of the years when thugs knocked out his two front teeth and heroin debilitated him before a triumphant comeback at Birdland. Aware that Hawke is no one’s idea of what Kael called “the love object, the fetish,” writer-director Robert Budreau keeps his camera at a tactful distance but otherwise lets his star distort his voice into Baker’s cheerful wheeze: the product of years of smoking and blowing through a mouthpiece. Hawke’s talent for projecting amiable superficiality, used to good effect in 2014’s Boyhood, shines. When Baker sang “My Funny Valentine,” he glanced off its melancholy, turning the song into a tease, a series of patty cake moves; he didn’t try for depth, he was content with a gorgeous surface, which also irritated colleagues. Hawke goes for similar effects. Budreau’s film, however, glides on surface without much charm. It’s cocktail hour jazz; I can count the beats before I hear the melodies.

The insistence on showing Baker suffering for his art while not giving a damn about his career is the central paradox of Born to Be Blue, and a resourceful filmmaker would have, as the kids say, interrogated it with a cocked eyebrow. Set in 1966, the film begins with the smack-addicted Baker buckling under the burden of playing himself in a movie. He begins a romance with costar Jane, played with no-nonsense vigor by Carmen Ejogo. I know little about Baker’s life and can’t attest to the veracity of this relationship, but it was odd to watch an interracial romance in the period before Loving v. Virginia without anyone besides Jane’s parents commenting on it.

But this matters little, for Budreau is interested in hitting a series of thesis points. “You are really competitive!” she crows after a bowling game. During a gruesome sequence shortly after the mugging in which Baker sits in a bathtub and blows his trumpet despite doctor’s orders, splattering blood all over the place for his trouble, Budreau frames Baker to highlight his sad clown expression; we’re meant to conclude that he suffers for his art. A stint in jail and a drying out on methadone culminate in a purgatorial period during which Baker is reduced to playing in a mariachi band and enduring advice from amateurs at a pizza parlor. With a pair of dentures he has to start from scratch, and you better believe Budreau forces a certain person to say, “Maybe a new technique will give [Baker’s] talent a new character.”

Budreau might entertain a similar notion; it explains the mess onscreen. Although he seems to nod towards an I’m Not There experiment in reality-versus-fiction interplay, he lacks Todd Haynes’ imagination, and Born to Be Blue gets conventional awfully fast anyway. Instead of explaining why Baker’s producer Dick Bock (Callum Keith Rennie) changes his mind about setting up gigs for him, Budreau includes too many scenes showing Elaine and Chet’s healthy sex life. But he gets out of his star’s way when Baker sings “My Funny Valentine” with live orchestral accompaniment — a performance which convinces Gillespie and a scowling Miles that Baker was right about playing at Birdland after all. He’s also, according to the film, back on smack. New technique or not, he was at his most impressive on the old one, i.e. sticking a needle in his vein. It goes double for Budreau. Born to Be Blue isn’t even memorable at the conventional old approach. Stick to playing “Almost Blue” on loop.