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Miles Davis movie short on facts but packed with action

If you want to know Miles Davis’ life story, read a book.

He wrote one: “Miles — The Autobiography.”

But if you want to get a sense of what it was like being around the volatile musician, check out Don Cheadle’s explosive, surreal “Miles Ahead.”

Opening in theaters Friday, “Miles Ahead” focuses on the relationship between the reclusive Davis (director and co-writer Cheadle), who hadn’t been heard from in five years, and reporter Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor), who shows up on Davis’ doorstep in 1979 wanting to tell his comeback story.

Punches are thrown. Cars are chased. Shots are fired.

“Miles Ahead” is closer to a Tarantino-style caper than a traditional biopic.

Last year’s “Straight Outta Compton” was a surprise smash, grossing a massive $161 million in the U.S. alone. But that sort of career-spanning retrospective is no longer as fashionable as it once was, especially when the subject is a creative visionary.

Released that same summer, “Love &Mercy” relied on two actors, Paul Dano and John Cusack, who barely resemble each other, to play the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson during two key periods in his life.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin called his script for 2015’s “Steve Jobs” an “impressionistic portrait.” Of the scenes representing the launches of Jobs’ NeXTcube and iMac, which make up two-thirds of the movie, Sorkin said in the press notes, “I’m sure they played out very differently than how I imagined.”

“Miles Ahead” is even less tethered to reality.

Shambling around his New York home, the man known as “jazz’s Howard Hughes” listens to some of WKCR radio’s Miles Davis Festival.

“That’s one for the time capsule, folks,” disc jockey Phil Schaap says of Davis’ “So What” from 1959’s “Kind of Blue.” “That’s one they’ll be talking about in a thousand years. The one you’d save from a burning building.”

Davis calls in, says he “missed” on that song and requests Schaap play “Solea” from 1960’s “Sketches of Spain” instead. But he prefaces all this with an on-air threat: “You tape this, I’ll kill you.”

Then Brill arrives. The jazz legend begrudgingly accepts his presence, after punching him in the face and pulling a gun on him, and the two set off to strong arm some cash from Columbia Records and score some coke from a student at Columbia University. Along the way, the masters from Davis’ latest recording session are stolen, leading to a wild chase and shootout in the New York streets.

Key moments in Davis’ life — a recording session for 1959’s “Porgy and Bess”; his controversial arrest that same year for “loitering” outside New York’s Birdland Jazz Club; his turbulent relationship with his first wife, Frances — are presented in flashback.

As well as being innovative, the structure is probably for the best, considering the way “Miles Ahead” portrays Brill’s futile attempts to interview the mercurial artist.

“So, you studied piano, too, huh?” the reporter asks.

“Nah,” Davis responds. “Just woke up black, knew how to play.”

Then there’s this classic, when Brill says he wants to tell Davis’ life story using the artist’s own words: “OK. I was born. I moved to New York. Met some cats. Made some music. Did some dope. Made some more music. Then you came to my house.”

With a subject that confrontational, maybe it really is easier to just invent most of the movie.

Including Dave Brill.

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com. On Twitter: @life_onthecouch.

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