Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle stars, co-writes and makes his feature directorial debut with the Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, portraying the jazz legend during his fallow period in the late 1970s. Cheadle does fine work as the desiccated and unstable Davis, but as a director, his visual attempts to match the fiery cool of Davis’ music mostly feel amateurish and flat. On the plus side, Miles Ahead doesn’t go for the greatest-hits treatment of other musical biopics like I Saw the Light—the entire film takes place over the course of a couple of days, with frequent flashbacks to Davis’ more productive days. However, Miles Ahead falls into an even more pernicious trap, in that it makes a tangentially related white guy (Ewan McGregor as fictional journalist Dave Brill) the main character in a black man’s life. Who goes to a see a film about Miles Davis to watch Ewan McGregor? D.B.