Drunken angel

It doesn’t entirely do justice to director Ethan Hawke’s poetically incandescent Blaze to simply call it a biopic. This new film does indeed depict the short, casually meteoric life and career of one Blaze Foley, the singer, songwriter and back-porch visionary memorialized in songs by Lucinda Williams and Townes Van Zandt and in a book by his ex-wife, Sybil Rosen.

But Hawke, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Rosen, makes the life story and its details into the core and central reference point of what at times feels like an amiably laid-back experimental film, an unhurried meditation on the moods, visions and ecstasies of Foley and those closest to him (especially Rosen and Van Zandt).

The life story gets told, from beginning to end, but not at all in strict chronological order. It’s a drifting, sideways sort of narrative, moving associatively through a nicely blended assortment of memory fragments and remembered anecdotes. One of Foley’s off-handed visionary preoccupations in the film has to do with a kind of present-tense timelessness, and in Hawke’s film, time sometimes seems to stand still, or almost so, and other times rolls over, or circles around and back.

Two events in particular recur, more or less as narrative “anchors.” One is a marathon bar room performance by Foley that doubles as a live recording session. The other is an extensive postmortem radio interview in which a DJ (Hawke, more heard than seen) talks with Van Zandt (distinctively well-played by Charlie Sexton) and a drummer called Zee (Josh Hamilton) about their time with Foley.

The interview fragments have the additional effect of making Blaze into a double portrait, with Van Zandt (thanks in part to Sexton’s performance) assuming major character status almost as an afterthought. And, given Alia Shawkat’s quietly intense performance as Rosen, Foley’s beloved foil and muse, the picture might even be called a triple portrait.

Benjamin Dickey brings a seemingly effortless conviction to every aspect (including the musical) of his performance as Foley. Three nouveaux riches Texas stooges (played by Steve Zahn, Richard Linklater and Sam Rockwell) bring a jolt of antic satire to a story much immersed in all things Texan. Kris Kristofferson makes a haunting impression, both pathetic and diabolical, in a nearly wordless performance as Foley’s institutionalized father.

Bluesy country music and heavy boozing are integral to nearly every aspect of Blaze. “Drunken Angel,” the Lucinda Williams song about Foley, doesn’t turn up until the tag end of the final credits, which may be a way for the film to indicate agreement with the spirit and sentiment of Williams’ song, but only after having found its own cinematic path to similar conclusions.