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Critics Consensus: Born to Be Blue benefits from a highlight-reel performance from Ethan Hawke and an impressionistic, non-hagiographic approach to Chet Baker's life and times.
Critic Consensus: Born to Be Blue benefits from a highlight-reel performance from Ethan Hawke and an impressionistic, non-hagiographic approach to Chet Baker's life and times.
All Critics (114) | Top Critics (33) | Fresh (101) | Rotten (13)
Hawke portrays Baker as a little boy lost: selfish, sweet, insecure, arrogant, impossible to live with.
A serious, worthwhile film.
Budreau, who stages several breathtaking scenes of Baker playing against the vast open sky during a visit to his parents' farm in Oklahoma, successfully gets to the root of his subject.
Hawke makes this sweeter, gentler Baker believable in a schoolgirl-diary way-this is the Baker we want to believe in when we lie back in the embrace of his trumpet sound.
Born to Be Blue doesn't pretend to have all the answers. What it does have - in addition to an immersive performance from Ethan Hawke as the cool-cat jazz man - is an emotional understanding of who Baker was, or may have been.
The film draws you deeply into Baker's fantasy world, to the point that the entreaty of his famous recording, "Let's Get Lost," almost seems like a good idea.
Hawke is very good here. I'm not his biggest fan, but he gets Baker's distinctive, whispery voice, whether speaking or singing.
Presenting a career-best performance from Ethan Hawke, Born to Be Blue earns its place as one of the best jazz movies to grace the screen.
It all works because of Hawke and Ejogo.
The movie is slight but silly, goofy without being goony.
Robert Budreau's Born to be Blue dares to blur the lines between fact and fiction.
There are moments when Ethan Hawke's performance as Baker strikes just the right note of fragile, demon-haunted vulnerability. But these moments are set in a larger story that takes too long to get going, and too often loses its way
A mature romance/biopic that takes an anguishing look at the life of a self-destructive artist struggling to have his old life back after becoming a heroin addict, with Ethan Hawke conveying an exceptionally nuanced combination of arrogance, vulnerability and determination.
Super Reviewer
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