“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.Continue Reading …