Ethan Hawke puts in a career- best turn as jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in this imaginatively structured biopic. In common with Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead – and, indeed, the soundtrack – Robert Budreau’s film riffs on its subject.

It’s 1966 and the drug-addled, already- washed-up Baker is retrieved from jail to shoot a movie about his wife. He’s lucky enough to meet Jane, a composite of several of Baker’s erstwhile wives and girlfriends, played by Carmen Ejogo: her every gesture simultaneously conveys concern, admiration and exasperation.

He’s unlucky, too: not too far into Born to be Blue, Baker is pummelled in a drug-related fight, the contretemps that would cost him his embouchure. With a “good woman” by his side, he slowly re-learns his trade. His probation officer hovers, demanding gainful employment and a regime of methadone. Can a man stay clean when he believes he plays better on heroin? “Time stretches when I’m high,” he says. “I can get in every note.”

Hawke’s furrowed brow and whispery, nervous singing (he performed his own vocals) harks back to the likeable deadbeat dad in the earlier sections of Boyhood. This tempers Baker’s narcissism as he recounts tales of being the “white cat” that Miles Davis once feared. Then again, long before he plays for Dizzy Gillespie (Kevin Hanchard) and Davis (Kedar Brown) – an occasion that makes him vomit in fear – Hawke has flagged how fragile he is.

Hawke may be too old to be the pretty Baker of the 1950s and too pretty to be the hobo Baker of the 1960s and beyond, but he is, we feel, playing the younger version of the Baker who features in Bruce Weber’s seminal documentary portrait, Let’s Get Lost (1988).

The chronological skips between the pin-up years when girls screamed his name, and later, harder times are handled gracefully and coherently. A tightly focused screenplay and Steve Cosens’ elegant cinematography ensure that Born to be Blue is never as wacky as Miles Ahead, nor as plodding as I Saw the Light. [/4STARS][7DAYSBYLINE]TARA BRADY