The music biopic is hazardous terrain for any filmmaker to negotiate as it provides so much opportunity for cliché and calamity. Walk the Line did a decent job with Johnny Cash’s story, but for every passable effort there’s plenty more that have fallen by the cinematic wayside. Let’s just mention Oliver Stone’s The Doors and leave it at that.
Thankfully, Born to Be Blue, in which Ethan Hawke plays Chet Baker, a man as famous for his prodigious appetite for hard drugs as for his straightforward and tuneful West Coast jazz, is one of the better music biopics of recent times. It doesn’t possess the haunting rawness of Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary on Baker, Let’s Get Lost, but it deserves credit for providing an entertaining and unvarnished snapshot of the man and his music.
