Don Cheadle has been talking about bringing his Miles Davis biopic to life for some time now. After securing financing, the actor was so ingrained in the project that he took a leap of faith — he would make his feature film directorial debut as well with Miles Ahead. Overall, just like Davis’ music itself, it is a celebration of going with the flow and going left when the world thinks you are going right.
There is much that is fact about the life of Miles Davis and Miles Ahead, yet what ground the story and centers it is all fiction. We meet Davis (Cheadle) as a recluse, after having walked away in the late 70s from the music industry he revolutionized. Five years has passed since the world has seen him or heard him play his magical trumpet. Ewan McGregor portrays Dave Brill, a supposed reporter for Rolling Stone who it seems has made it his life mission to seek out and get the official word from the man himself as to why a music icon would walk away and ask the question the world has on the tip of their tongue: When will you be back?
What Brill ends up getting sucked into is not just Davis’ musical brilliance, but all of the eccentricities that made him the legend he was, and as we all know from history, he would continue to be. This entire plot is fiction and director Cheadle handles it with such grace because through flashbacks and things that the characters say to one another on screen, we get a full picture as to the importance, the accomplishments and the power of Davis as a musician and as a cultural trailblazer.
The focus of the plot follows the idea that someone has taken Davis’ tapes, which contain what we’re led to believe are his recordings for his comeback album. Brill and Davis go all over town following clues and searching for these elusive recordings, which are in many ways symbolic of the man himself. Over the course of several days, Brill will get much more than he bargained for and that is all to the benefit of the audience.
Cheadle was born to be Davis. Not only is it uncanny how much he looks like the musical legend, but he has his mannerisms and speaking cadence down to a “T.” It is a powerful performance that gets under the skin of the elusive musician and introduces him to an entirely new generation of music aficionados who will hopefully continue to keep his extraordinary music library beating for decades to come.
The director Cheadle also manages to weave enough history and fact about the musical renaissance man that there is enough of a true life story here to at least partially call Miles Ahead a biopic. We are still waiting for that full length biopic on this icon, but in hindsight, there might just be too much for one two-hour movie to capture. Therefore, the route that Cheadle and his filmmaking team took in crafting this tale is sensible and smart. Too often music biopics can chew off a little too much and the relevance and importance of an artist can get lost. Here, it is just enough. Perhaps, Cheadle — in the future — can produce a long form biopic of Davis for television in a multi-episode format.
But in Miles Ahead, the film scores where other musical cinematic biographies (like the recently released I Saw the Light) fail and fall flat. The Davis story in Cheadle’s picture, instead, soars as high as any note the trumpeter could hit, hold and let fly.
Grade: B+