Review: Well-Intentioned, Ambitious, But Uneven 'Miles Ahead' Starring Don Cheadle

The volatile, creatively restless, and stormy life of jazz giant Miles Davis is rendered in vibrant, kaleidoscopic, and seemingly unconventional fashion in actor Don Cheadle’s directorial debut, “Miles Ahead.” Attempting to eschew customary cradle-to-grave biopic narrative, Cheadle’s drama, which he co-wrote with Steven Baigelman, takes a collage-y approach to linear form, mixing and matching music from disparate, chronologically anachronistic periods, and hopscotches around in time mercurially. It’s a film that almost dares you to describe it as a straight-up biopic. But for all its confidence in this method, plus surface and stylistic attempts to create a story that feels like it’s filtered through a fractured glass of memory, “Miles Ahead” is actually akin to a traditional jazz played, or disguised even, in a would-be wilder key.

Built around a standard framing device of a (invented) Rolling Stone writer, Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor), trying to score an interview with the...