Ethan Hawke Shines In Jazz Movie
One of the less hyped movies at the Toronto Film Festival is “Born To Be Blue,” starring Ethan Hawke. Variety enthuses: ‘In a cinematic landscape awash with hairsplittingly literal musical biopics, it comes as a pleasant surprise to discover that Robert Budreau’s Chet Baker film, “Born to Be Blue,†is not a Chet Baker biopic at all. It is, instead, a film about a character who happens to share a name and a significant number of biographical similarities with Chet Baker, taking the legendary West Coast jazz musician’s life as though it were merely a chord chart from which to launch an improvised set of new melodies. Upending the conventions of the musical rise-and-fall formula while still offering a relatively straightforward three-act narrative, the film is anchored by an Ethan Hawke performance that ranks among the best of his career.’
