I am not an artist. Don Cheadle is a magnificent actor and clearly knows more about filmmaking than I ever will no matter how long I live. I am probably too prosaic and untalented to appreciate Miles Ahead. Miles Ahead is a fictional depiction of the imagined missing years of Miles Davis’ career and is treated like a 70s caper movie instead of rooted in reality. Don Cheadle directed Miles Ahead and plays Miles Davis. I hated it.
Miles Ahead uses two narrative tricks that I despise. First, I hate the “how we got here” framing device. Miles Ahead starts as if the Rolling Stone reporter is shooting a documentary then flashes back to when Miles Davis met the reporter. There are flashbacks within the flashback as Davis recalls the reason behind his disappearance from the music scene: his turbulent relationship with his muse and wife, dancer Frances Taylor. Occasionally there is a flashforward within the original flashback to show what will happen to the reporter and Miles Davis as their relationship develops. There is an Oculus moment when the flashbacks collide and first flashback Miles Davis encounters a performing second level flashback Miles Davis.
There are two reasons why others may praise this narrative technique. First, Davis is a jazz musician, and I do not know much about jazz other than the complexity of the music. Cheadle could be trying to reflex the complexity of jazz in the way that he tells Miles Davis’ story in Miles Ahead. Second, Davis did take drugs and many of these second level flashbacks bleed into the first level flashbacks and can be interpreted as Davis tripping.
Second, I hate it when filmmakers take an interesting and talented person’s life, but instead of elaborating and expanding on something that actually happened, the filmmaker decides to create a completely fictional account. The Young Messiah needed to do that because we know very little about Jesus’ childhood so creative license is necessary, but Miles Davis lived a full and exciting life. Did we need to make him the star of a 70s NYC heist film? I’m not asking for a dull biopic, and I understand that no one would finance the film without Ewan McGregor, but I do not need a bunch of action sequences. There were fistfights, car chases, shoot outs, etc. Is the music industry so violent? I have no problem with violence, but the dissonance between the glorified violence of the caper nature of the film and the devastating physical abuse inflicted by Davis on Frances makes Miles Ahead feel schizophrenic tonally. Either glorify violence or root it in reality. There is a time and place for Ocean’s Eleven, and Miles Ahead was not it.
I love the cast. Only Cheadle can play Miles Davis. I am glad to see the captivating and devastatingly talented Emayatzy Corinealdi, whom I loved in Ava Duvernay’s Middle of Nowhere. I always love seeing Michael Stuhlbarg from Boardwalk Empire as Arnold Rothstein and Steve Jobs as Andy Hertzfeld.
I will own the label of utter philistine, but I hated Miles Ahead and would only recommend it to McGregor or Cheadle fans.