Jazz legend Chet Baker gets the full muso-biopic treatment with "Born to Be Blue", a fictional treatment of the singer/trumpeter's comeback attempt in the mid-1960s. It stars Ethan Hawke, whose own youthful pretty-boy looks have grown haggard and weatherbeaten in a way that mirrors Baker, who was once known as "the James Dean of Jazz" before heroin, beatings and rough living took their toll.
Baker is an interesting subject for a film: He became famous in the '50s for a style known as West Coast cool, a smoky sound that was more restrained and laid-back — and whiter — than most contemporary jazz. Baker was respected for his trumpet skills, ranked up there with Miles Davis by some, but he was equally loved and hated for his vocals — intimate, hushed and fragile — which added to his sensitive, androgynous air.
"Born To Be Blue" offers up the notion, frequently encountered in musician biopics, that you can't play the blues until you've lived them. The film starts in 1964 with a middle-aged Baker being released from an Italian prison where he served time for drug possession. A comeback is in the works, with Baker playing himself in a movie biopic and a high-profile gig at New York City's Birdland. Yet his past catches up with him when a couple of drug dealers whom he burned beat the living hell out of him, knocking out his teeth and injuring his jaw so badly he can no longer play.