Miles Ahead, Born to Be Blue

Historical apples and oranges sharing a crate, the films find their lifeblood as glimpses, the continually proposed antidote to decade-old weariness with sweeping biopics like Ray and Walk The Line, and cresting in the equally exhaustive and exhausting spoof Walk Hard. Are these briefer vignettes from Baker and Davis in slumping times so oppositional to the decade-spanning form? Not really. Tamely surrealist flashbacks inject bits of glory and demise, showing what was lost and how it slipped away. A three-hour film’s beats are compartmentalized and implied. Like Aaron Sorkin’s three-act Steve Jobs last year, the divergence here is more in rejecting the appearance of fact than actually breaking a narrative mold: no newsreels, no leaving the central figure for scenes of cultural impact. In fact, don’t leave that figure at all. Get so close as to make objectivity feel excitingly impossible: http://www.cutprintfilm.com/features/born-to-be-blue-miles-ahead/