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Born to be Blue: Is it Chet Baker Horn-player or is it the Heroin?
by Sandra Olmsted
Writer/director Robert Budreau’s Bio-Pic Born to be Blue about the creative life of Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke), a pioneer of West Coast cool-and-quite jazz movement, certainly sends messages that could be misinterpreted by some in the audience. While the story of a great talent being destroyed or hampered by drug addiction is all too commonplace, Budreau’s take on Baker’s struggle with chaos of creative genius complicated by heroin addiction might lead some to see heroin as a tool for creativity. Others will see the destruction that heroin had on Baker’s life and mourn with him in some scene such as when Baker first attempts to play his trumpet after his front teeth were knocked out by angry drug dealers.
Although the loss of his teeth should have silenced his talent because a trumpeter’s teeth are part of his instrument, Baker overcomes the terrible setback with the help of a loving woman, Jane (Carmen Ejogo), strict parole officer Reid (Tony Nappo), and an old friend Dick Bock (Callum Keith Rennie), Baker’s former manager. For Baker, everyday is a choice between staying on methadone, working towards a comeback, and maintaining his relationship with Jane, or succumbing to readily-available heroin.
The end of the film is not uplifting nor particularly affirming of an anti-drug message; however, the moment when Baker realizes that his ability to play the trumpet has been as shattered as his front teeth should make those with an ounce of creativity cry. Budreau takes the cliché of a great artist making bad choices and provides moments of real sympathy for Baker.
Hawke’s performance as Baker is marvelous, and the role is well-written; unfortunately, the rest of the characters are made of cardboard despite the cast’s hard work trying to breathe life into these cutouts. Jane, who stands in for all of the women in Baker’s life, including his three wives, leads the cheering section of Reid and Dick as Baker relearns how to play the trumpet with poorly-fitting false teeth. Dick and Reid show some humanity, but are not developed as real people. Jane, an aspiring actress, never makes more than a passing reference to her own dreams of stardom, until one time, and Baker shows his childish, selfish side.
One interesting thing that Budreau does do is use a movie-within-a-film structure, and he use black-and-white flashbacks to out takes from that fictitious movie as Baker’s somewhat hallucinatory delusions about his past. In the late 1960s, at the beginning of the Born To Be Born, Baker is in prison in a foreign country when a Hollywood film director comes to offer him a role in a film set in famed New York jazz venue Birdland. Having bailed Baker out, the director begins filming his movie.
Then Baker’s teeth are broken out, and the studio shelves the project because of the drug connection. Unfortunately, the end of the director’s movie also means that Jane looses her big-break job playing Baker’s wife. Although his film cannot be called historically accurate, Budreau seems to get the emotion right as related to Baker. Hawke runs with the role and makes the viewer feel with and for Baker and perhaps even be angry at him for his final choice.
Hawke provides the unique, breathy, richly toned vocals for Baker while Kevin Turcotte provides the horn solos for the character. Some of the songs featured are “My Funny Valentine” and “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” and there is plenty of other jazz played. Kevin Hanchard appears as Dizzy Gillespie and Kedar Brown plays Miles Davis in the brief scenes.
Released by IFC Films, Born To Be Blue is rated R for drug use, language, some sexuality and brief violence. Born To Be Blue is in theaters now and runs a fairly fast-paced 97 minutes.
