One moving shot depicts a tearful Baker, crumpled in the bathtub with his trumpet, pressing the instrument to his face as blood drains from his mouth. The fact that he does his own trumpet playing is also fitting, since this was the period in Baker's life where he was desperately struggling to regain his talents, and this makes his mediocre blows all the more painful. Hawke gives the musician a rough boyishness that emphasizes both his bottomless charm and his frustrating immaturity. We should be thankful he finally got his chance here. Twenty years ago, Hawke nearly played a younger Baker in a proposed Richard Linklater movie that never got off the ground. (The real Baker, with his handsome features, occasionally dabbled in acting, so the idea that he could play himself isn't too far-fetched.) The result is a unique kind of harmony between the fact and the fiction, occasionally overwrought in the moments where Budreau focuses on petty jealousies between Baker and Jane. The patient, passionate Ejogo reenacts the inner conflict every woman in Baker's life may have gone through, even as she plays that exact conflict in character. Budreau repeats the essential themes of his subject's early career on a different register in the movie-in-a-movie. Like the "cool jazz" style Baker helped popularize, Born to be Blue is really a contrapuntal film. The conceit sounds like one of those "look at me, I'm a movie" gimmicks so beloved by mediocre indie filmmakers, but in practice, it's just clever enough to work. In the present, he attempts to keep playing while deemphasizing the trumpet that made him famous, by blowing only long, simple notes and relying more on his singing voice for entire sets. We see some reenactments of Baker's hard-driving prime as part of the make-believe film, shot in black-and-white and with the frenetic pace of a really jamming hi-hat solo. These two rejected figures of the '60s - the druggie has-been jazz legend and the struggling actress of color - try to support each other as they bounce between New York, Los Angeles, and Baker's prairie hometown of Yale, Oklahoma. All that stuff is more or less from Baker's actual life, but it's mixed in with a bold embellishment: He's approached by a Hollywood producer to play himself in a movie about his life, and promptly falls for Jane (Carmen Ejogo), the actress playing the second wife he divorced. The film begins as Baker, on the mend from the heroin addiction that almost killed him in the mid-1960s, attempts to mount a comeback, despite a savage beating from a drug dealer that destroys his front teeth and his embouchure. It takes a moment to get our footing at the start - writer-director Robert Budreau doesn't make it easy.
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