With a hip and impressionistic quality similar to director Todd Haynes' fantastic David Bowie (Velvet Goldmine) and Bob Dylan (I'm Not There) "biopics," Born to Be Blue zeroes in on legendary West Coast jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker in the mid-1960s. His career, already in an uncertain place due to drug abuse and an arrest in Europe, is sidelined entirely after a beating leaves his face severely cut and his front teeth smashed, destroying his embouchure. With the assistance of an aspiring actress (Carmen Ejogo) and few others, he tries to play through the pain and also reluctantly begins treatment with methadone. Ethan Hawke is always a charismatic screen presence, but he delivers a particularly fine and soulful performance as Baker, capturing in his eyes the intensity of the troubled instrumentalist, with his triple-pronged, self-sabotaging, and often contradictory devotion to heroin, music, and women. He shares a sensitive and sexy chemistry with Ejogo, who herself finds nuance and warmth in a role which could be clichéd (the Great Man's Put-Upon Love Interest). And the film itself is smartly assembled by Canadian writer and director Robert Budreau, favoring atmosphere, texture, and small observational beats over the type of rote, from-Wikipedia-to-the-screen simplification which felled the recent Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light.

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