I was expecting to see a biopic along the lines of Ray with Jamie Foxx. This movie was mostly about Davis' adventure trying to get his tape back with a Rolling Stone writer. A very small amount was spent on his youth. Then at the end they had no mention of when he died, or how, or anything. So I went home and looked it up on Wikipedia. I thought Cheadle was funny and a good actor, but still wasn't what I expected.
shareOpposite opinion here: I'm really glad I didn't see a biopic along the lines of Ray / Walk the Line / The Doors / Coalminer's Daughter / etc, etc. Some of these movies are good, some are bad, but this template of musician biopics is so very stale and has already been satirized nearly a decade ago with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
After seeing what I thought was an awful trailer full of clichés, I went in expecting the worst, but was happily surprised that Miles Ahead tried to break out of that mold. There's a few musician biopics which try to break the mold -- some fail, but I like that they're trying.
In the end you say this film compelled you to read up on Davis, and that it "wasn't what [you] expected" -- those aren't bad things!
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...it tries to mimic the inspirational style of the music so wholly...
Quite liked the film and the performance and direction of Cheadle - nice use of different film exposures to go back in time, nice cutting from a reverie to a memory or back to the present. Pacing well done, with a nod to jazz improv. The fictional story and characters touch on the issues facing a musician and record labels demand for new "product" and a kind of holy grail ala the film Diva. A straight bio kind of movie about Davis would nearly be impossible. The wild shifts in Davis' life is touched on here effectively. The 50's (the cop-set up was real), 60's, 70's are nicely recalled.
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