Watch Let's Get Lost For Free

Redundant and unnecessary.

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Fashion photographer Bruce Weber's lush, patchwork portrait of Jazz artist Chet Baker is more than just another show-biz biography of a self-destructive junkie. The romantic myth of Jazz itself is the true subject of the film, which unfolds in a fascinating, leapfrog structure at times even more elusive than Baker's own melancholy music. The musician himself is just out of reach, a vague outline of a man dimly revealed in candid interviews with friends, family, and other ardent admirers. Despite some often transparent idolization the film in no way whitewashes Baker's character, suggesting that he could be his own worst enemy, in particular around the many women in his life. Weber ignores the disparity between the singer's haunting good looks when young and the sad physical decline of his later years (his gentle, melodic voice would remain the same, even after losing all his teeth), choosing instead to capture some of the quiet energy of Jazz by allowing the music and imagery (beautifully photographed in black and white) to speak for themselves.

"What's the problem here?" The voice, querulous and groggy, emerges from the darkness, aborting a smoky run-through of Elvis Costello's 'Almost Blue'. Bruce Weber's Oscar-nominated documentary concerns itself with the same question: what gnaws at Chet Baker, and just how did the feted pretty boy of the West Coast 'cool school' end up such a frail, hollow-cheeked wraith? The most obvious answer is: junk.As fellow jazz trumpeter and addict Miles Davis observed in his autobiography, "musicians were considered hip in some circles if they shot smack"; the logic being that heroin might bestow some of the genius of Charlie Parker or Miles upon the user.Though a fine player, Baker may have privately worried that he would never be taken as seriously as Miles (who predictably accused him of aping his licks). More than likely, he thought he needed a poppy or three to keep up: the serial seducer seduced - out of his looks and his teeth (courtesy of an unprompted assault from drug dealers, so he said), though hardly out of talent or charm. Nor intelligence: those baby blues still burn with roving, wily intensity.A combination of cheekbones and intuitive musicianship (his intimate, androgynene croon being just as potent as his way with a horn) had originally propelled the former Gerry Mulligan Quartet sideman into the pantheon of jazz greats. But arguably it was William Claxton's famous photos of him relaxing between takes in the studio ("he looked like a Greek God") that sealed the deal: a classic example of the fully-packaged star. A white one. A very marketable jazz Elvis. Italian B-movie roles and sell-out concerts were his for the taking. By the time Let's Get Lost first emerged in 1989, he'd accrued a new generation of admirers for whom the legend of Baker's turbulent rise and fall only added to his cult appeal.And there is a circularity here: Weber's studiedly monochromatic profile, all inky shadows and searing white-outs, replete with 'authentic' crackles on a modern soundtrack, was released during a decade in which 'cool', that most chimerical of concepts, had once again become a commodity, a negative onto which advertising execs and filmmakers etched received, homogenised visions of sleek 1950s style.Baker is being sold twice over - first by opportunists, second by grave robbers. Albeit, slightly premature ones: unlike James Dean or Neal Cassady, this 'doomed, beautiful youth', a living Kerouac creation, was still very much alive at the time Weber dug him up, and the prince-turned-skid-row denizen is not an altogether pretty picture.A portrait emerges of an arch manipulator who conned his way out the army, then into the hearts of a string of emotionally and physically abused wives, lovers and friends. Fellow trumpet player Jack Sheldon talks of how Chet screwed his girlfriend, literally under his nose, while he wasn't looking. As in life, in art: here he is again, reducing Natalie Wood to silent orgasms with his playing in 1960's All The Fine Young Cannibals, while her jealous date smoulders beside her."Chet cons people" is the consensus from more than one party. "He has the ability to elicit sympathy - and it's all a big act." The story of what happened to Baker's teeth is similarly dismissed as "Typical Chet, gaining sympathy for himself. Someone kicked his ass for his manipulating ways".It's no surprise to discover that these wounded women, rather than focus on the common enemy, an absent father to children by different mothers, reserve most of their spleen for each other. Ruth Young for instance, Baker's torch-singing girlfriend for 10 years, is "that bitch - his downfall." Interviewed separately, Baker lets it all wash over him. Mainly, because the adoring, highly partisan Weber (for whom Baker's iconic, homoerotic appeal was obviously meat and potatoes) hardly ever gives him a good grilling, happy to let the former jailbird seduce him along with everybody else."Sometimes Chet would tell a story and we would be spellbound, but the next day we'd find out it wasn't even true," says Weber, who would simply prefer to be in love, and fascinated, with his quarry. "It was about being illusioned and disillusioned and illusioned again by a hero". The irony, of course, is that the filmmaker, whose hugely influential black-and-white fashion photography exemplifies a certain 1980s aesthetic, seems so oblivious to the fact he's being taken for a ride: the manipulator manipulated.This is a swooning postcard from one poser to another, woozily segueing as if in an opiate stupor between interviews, verite-style recreations, archive footage and new studio performances (these latter scenes all but nudge us to check out how much Chris Isaak and Red Hot Chilli Peppers bassist Flea resemble Weber's hero). The approach might well echo jazz's free-form schematics, but unkinder descriptions might also include 'rambling and shapeless'.The music, of course, is sublime, and it's as immaculately framed as you'd expect - though the best moments are those apparently caught on the fly; the unstaged and unframed: Baker in a nightclub patiently indulging young, wide-eyed jazz acolytes with warmth and humour; his appearance at a Cannes music festival. Pleads the promoter (after Baker stops playing because people aren't listening), "So many people want to hear you, and may never get the chance again!" Comes the deadpan reply, "I ain't dead yet." That would happen a few months after filming ended, on Friday 13 May 1988. Aged 58, he had fallen out of a second-floor Amsterdam hotel window, hitting the pavement like a bum note. The local press reported that a 30-year-old man had been found with a trumpet. Even in death, he seduced them out of truth.

This film is a must see for any Baker fan and even any Jazz fan. Baker really did redefine the 1950's jazz scene with his combination of mesmerising trumpet playing and angel like vocals. His instantly recognisable style has brought joy to many jazz fans over the years and even now his legend lives on some 16 years after his death in the most mysterious of circumstances.This film tells a very candid story of Chet charting his terrible affliction with drugs as well as honing in on his god given talents. It is very highly recommended and is long overdue for a release on DVD as some fellow reviewers have alluded to. I will certainly be first in the queue to buy this must see title if and when it is re released.

See this film. Amazing to see how destructive genius can be. The film looks great, outstanding sound-track, great editing. I'm not really a jazz fan, but I loved watching and seeing this movie. It's going to be re-released this year.