Review: Miles Ahead (2015)

Miles Ahead follows a few days in the life of legendary jazz musician, Miles Davis (Don Cheadle), as he races about New York City to recover a stolen session tape at the tail end of his temporary retirement in the late 1970s. Interwoven with this quest are glimpses of Davis’s life with his first wife, Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), in the late 50s and early 1960s, when his romance with Frances quickly transformed into an emotionally-manipulative and physically-abusive relationship.

Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead (which Cheadle stars in, co-wrote, and directed) is not your typical biopic. Instead of portraying the significant personal and professional beats of Miles Davis’s entire life and career, the film focuses on two specific time periods in that life—and it’s not even very faithful to those time periods. It embellishes and exaggerates, especially in its depiction of his retirement which has him racing about town with Ewan McGregor’s fictitious reporter, Dave Braden, and getting into gunfights with rival music producers and their thugs. The defining characteristic of Miles Ahead is that it tries to capture Miles Davis’s spirit, both musically and personally, not his literal biographical history. Playing so loose with historical fact is often a gambit in a film about a real life figure, but here, that gambit mostly pays off.

It helps that the fictional elements of Miles Ahead are uproariously entertaining. The scenes with Davis and Braden tracking down his stolen session tape, racing around New York in Davis’s oversized Cadillac and intimidating individuals with Davis’s fame and a loaded sidearm, play like a buddy comedy from the early eighties. These scenes also showcase how good Cheadle is as Davis. He captures the physicality of Davis—his raspy whisper of a voice and aggressive way of moving. He also shows that Davis’s talents and personal failings stem from the same part of his personality: his obsessiveness.

For instance, in the scenes with Frances, Cheadle never compartmentalizes Davis’s character traits, allowing one scene to only demonstrate one aspect of his personality. When he slaps Frances across the face and then proceeds to tell her how much he loves her, he’s playing Davis much the same as he does during the performance scenes or the chase scenes with McGregor. Cheadle allows us to see the many facets of Davis as contained within one talented, flawed individual. It’s a great performance. As well, unlike so many musical biopics, Miles Ahead actually pays attention to Davis’s process of composing music. We see him in the studio, working over a composition, or performing in a club before he was a legend. It should go without saying that musical biopics should be interested in the music of the people they explore, but that’s not always the case. Thus, the fact that Miles Ahead has a clear love for Davis’s music—and loves to showcase his music at every turn—is worth celebrating.

Even if Miles Ahead is tenuous as biography, it’s aces as entertainment. It captures the essence of Miles Davis’s attitude, both as an artist and a human being.

7 out of 10

Miles Ahead (2015, USA)

Directed by Don Cheadle; written by Steven Baigelman and Don Cheadle, based on a story by Baigelman, Cheade, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson; starring Don Cheadle, Ewan McGregor, Emayatzy Corinealdi, Lakeith Stanfield, Michael Stuhlbarg.

This article was originally published at the now-defunct Toronto Film Scene.