The country wisdom that fills Ethan Hawke’s likable “Blaze” is often a bit simplistic, such as Whatever I’m going, it’s the same place I’ve been, and Rain doesn’t try and fall, it just falls. You can tell they put a lot of his work into the underrated Born To Be Blue. The Oscar-nominee actor Hawke has written, directed, and acted in a film that tries to capture the essence of its character not through an ABC order of events of his life, but through a reflection of his art and the ways he created it. “Blaze” is at its finest when makes you feel not just the life of the subject, but the music they make, and all this is brought to life thanks to two remarkably familiar and deeply impressive performances. Sometimes it can be the worst of it, particularly in the second half, when the shapelessness of the film becomes striking, but it’s a great compliment when the film has more than a few reasons to make you want to listen to the genius particular subject the film showcases.
Not knowing the name Blaze Foley, who was played by Ben Dickey in the film, means you are not alone. He was an American singer-songwriter, who is considered the father of “Outlaw Country”, alongside contemporaries such as Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson (who recorded one of his songs), and the brilliant Townes van Zandt. He had a handful of minor hits to his name which alt-country artists have sadly been inspired by, like “Clay Pigeons” and “If I Could Only Fly. But his words in Hawke’s film, I don’t want to be a star, I want to be a legend, expressed how he truly felt. A legend to those who loved him, but starved of the renown he deserved.
Hawke does not fall into the many traps that a biopic apart from a country singer’s story would post ‘Walk Hard.’ One of the major framing devices of Blaze is a radio interview being done when Van Zandt (Charlie Sexton) is accompanied by Foley’s best friend and collaborator Zee (Josh Hamilton, having a hell of an indie movie summer with this and Eighth Grade). This enables the gentlemen to indulge in the memories of Foley while an interviewer, voiced by Hawke, occasionally interjects with questions. The film also has is interspersed with flashbacks to Foley’s last night when he was recording a live album in a notorious Austin bar. This idea of Foley, who is described as fatter, drunker, and sadder, is juxtaposed with what he had with Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat) whom he met in an artist’s community long ago. Sybil was Blaze’s muse, the one who turned so much of his music into poetry and made him shift to Austin to pursue his dream of becoming a singer.
Needless to say, Foley is bound to lose everything in the process of touring and drinking, but the essence of “Blaze” is still that single female individual who aids in unleashing the artistic side of him.
There are many great insights to appreciate in “Blaze” but the most impressive for me are Shawkat and Dickey’s scenes, those where love is in between the drives of creative inspiration. I feel that’s very intimate for Hawke because it looks like he has had a couple of someone who romantically motivated him to do his best at his craft, and you can see his heart in it, both in how wonderfully great it is and how it collapses. I suppose it makes it easier to appreciate both the characters Dickey and Shawkat who not only have incredible chemistry but literally become these people, understand how they drove each other and how their mutual inspiration turned into anger. They’re two of the most brilliant and unsettling performances of the year.
In the second half of “Blaze” Ethan Hawke’s film with a runtime of over two hours, there’s a part where the film seems to lag, mostly because the repetition of montages begins to grate. At first, the inclusion of montages is more than acceptable, but when we reach the climax of the film and begin to hear Foley’s music while watching snippets of better days gone by, it starts to feel too far removed from reality too much like a music video, which is sad for a movie that is brimming with emotion.
The narration drones on and on during that last sequence which is painful to watch, especially considering the emotions and themes handpicked for this movie. This is overly simplistic feedback to an overwhelmingly complicated piece of art. Understanding the Austin creative scene and the performers that populate it seems to be the easy part for Ethan Hawke. There’s still a lot to learn, and judging from the visuals, I suspect, will be the lasting impression from “Blaze.” There is quite a lot of stunning imagery in this film, from the tragic image of a father slowly dying as he hears his children sing to him, to a striking moment when Blaze Foley sits on stage during his last concert and has a flag projected on him. To listen to the music of Foley, and then watch the movie have to be two entirely different experiences, one in which you feel a sense of wonderful and cinematic emotions, but without falling into the traps of genre stereotypes. For a biopic, what else do you expect?
To watch more movies visit Fmovies
Also Watch for more movies like:
