Butler's Cinema Scene

Benjamin Dickey as Blaze Foley

“BLAZE” My rating: B- (Opens Sept. 28 at the Tivoli, Screenland Armour and Glenwood Arts)

128 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Ethan Hawke’s “Blaze” is unlike any other music biz film biography I can think of. Its closest competition in its nontraditional approach would  be 2015’s “Miles Ahead” with Don Cheadle playing the great jazz trumpeter in a narrative-tossed-salad retelling.

The ostensible subject of “Blaze” is Blaze Foley, a Texas musician and songwriter who hung out with country/folk music’s “outlaw” wing until his untimely death by gunshot in 1989 .

Hawke’s film (he  directed and adapted the memoir by Foley’s wife Sybil Rosen) follows no particular chronology. It’s all over the place. As a framing device he has given us a radio interview with fellow folkie Townes Van Zant (Charlie Sexton); scenes from Foley’s life play out as Van Zant provides a running commentary.

Foley (Ben Dickey) is a bearded, burly good ol’ fella.  He can be charming in a down-home way. He can also be a drunken maniac.

A Foley concert might be sublime, or it might be a slog, given the musician’s tendency to rap endlessly when the customers only wanna hear some tunes.  A few of his songs were recorded by the likes of Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Lyle Lovett and John Prine, but he was never a household word or a major player.

Benjamin Dickey, Alia Shawkat

Along the way Foley met and married Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat), an aspiring classical actress.  They lived in for a time in an artist’s commune and then in Eden-like isolation in an off-the-grid shack; later they hit the road to promote Foley’s career.  Eventually the marriage cracked under the pressure of his heavy drinking.

From the evidence here, Foley was an O.K. performer and songwriter (when he had his wits about him), but little more. What attracted Hawke to his life, I think, is how it represents a moment of rare musical and personal liberty,  a time in the ’70s and ’80s when a guy and his guitar could live pretty much by his gut instincts and get as wasted as he had a mind to.

Hawke isn’t naive about his subjects.  Their behavior often borders on the self-destructive. Loving them must have been a chore.

Yet Foley, Van Zant and their cronies enjoyed — at least as far as this film is concerned — a sort of Bukowski-ish freedom unknown in our current age of digital footprints.  Hawke clearly finds that notion liberating.

The acting is fine, with the true standout being Sexton as Van Zant…he’s a charismatic wraith whose musical sense and literary allusions make him terrifically watchable.

| Robert W. Butler