Review: ‘Miles Ahead’

“Miles Ahead” is a biopic about music legend Miles Davis, but not a soup to nuts, cradle to grave type of biopic that is so common and has become so boring. Instead “Miles Ahead” is a little more like other recent biopics such as “Steve Jobs” and “Selma,” movies that don’t try to stuff all the facts in to one feature length movie and instead cherry pick certain time periods to really dig into, to use these microcosms of a person’s life as a way to tell the whole story of who they are.

In “Miles Ahead,” co-writer and director Don Cheadle (who also stars) too this approach to the next level. He decided to focus on two specific time periods in the long and storied life and Miles Davis, those being his first marriage to Frances Taylor in the late 1950s and through the 1960s, and his “silent period,” which is pretty much the back half of the 1970s, a time when he lived as a hermit in his NYC apartment, wandering around like a ghost in his own home, haunting himself, and most notably, not making any music. And while the “young Miles” section with Frances contains a number of real life incidents, the “hermit Miles” section of the movie is almost entirely fictional, an outlandish story made up to portray Miles Davis as much more of a bad ass gangster prone to firing off his pistol and making demands of people, which were often met promptly. These scenes are more about showing us his attitude, his way of life, both positive and negative, and what kind of person he was. These aspects of this movie seek to tell the truth of the person, not necessarily the truth of the actual situation.

Because in “Miles Ahead,” a good chunk of the movie is about the reclusive Miles Davis having a spat with Columbia Records, as they felt they were owed a new album from Miles and he felt they owed him money. Meanwhile, he has a tape hidden in his home with some new music he recorded, and he refuses to let anyone listen to it. Through a bit of convolution, this music is stolen and Miles Davis grabs his gun and sets out to steal it back. Along for the ride this whole time is a Rolling Stones journalist (Ewan MacGregor) who manages to ingratiate himself with Davis in an attempt initially to get the story of the century, and then ultimately to help Davis get his music back. This part of the movie is legit filled with shoot outs and car chases, and who is to say that Miles Davis never really got involved in a car chase at some point? For real, that guy lived a full life.

During these scenes, Miles flashes back to about twenty years earlier when he met and married his first wife Frances and here Don Cheadle does some things that many writers and directors of biopics shy away from (I’m looking at you, “Get On Up“), which is to say that he shows us the uglier sides of Miles Davis as well as his good side. We see how he mistreated his wife and cheated on her and how he turned a loving relationship into a toxic one, and it is sad to see Miles Davis, whacked out on pain pills from a nasty hip surgery, accuse his wife of hiding a man in their home and dragging her around while holding a kitchen knife. Everything wasn’t easy street for them, and Miles had a dark side, and “Miles Ahead” shows that to us because it is part of who Miles Davis was, and to deny that would be doing a disservice to him as a fully realized human being.

“Miles Ahead” makes for a fun but also challenging biopic, a movie that refuses to be standard, that decides to break some of the rules because that’s what Miles Davis was interested in. Why can’t the main character reach up and push the camera out of the way? Why can’t we imagine a concert scene of Miles Davis playing to a crowd in 2015? There are scenes with older Miles Davis walking around while young Miles Davis plays with a band in the background. There are things that happen in this movie that are crazy and never really happened but that doesn’t make them not true.