Movie Nation

“Superman v. Batman” is falling off a table its second weekend in release. A HUGE falloff Friday, maybe a 65% plunge from its record opening.

Warners isn’t crying over it. Yet. But chances of “Deadpool” cash in the long haul are going going gone. It’ll be at just shy of $270 million by Sunday night. They’re in the black, and it is doing well overseas ($370 or so total). So Zack Snyder still is in on their A-list.

“God’s Not Dead 2,” more Christian cinema of angry victimhood, looks like an $8 million opener. With that cast and those production costs, that’s a safe bet to clean up. Will it do as well as the more upbeat “Miracles from Heaven”? No. That’s still making bank — over $50 by next weekend.

“Eye in the Sky,” the first big budget drone movie (must’ve reviewed three indie ones in the past year or two) and will crack the top ten this weekend. Barely.

“Meet the Blacks” is #8 and won’t hit $5 million.

“Allegiant” is bombing, “Zootopia” is closing in on $300 million, “Cloverfield” is hanging around and may end up in the $70s, when all is said and done. “Greek Wedding 2” is stealing millions and millions from suckers. It’s coming in #3 this weekend.

The unlikely pairing of Amber Heard and Christopher Walken pays comic dividends in “One More Time,” an agreeably predictable famous father/bitter daughter dramedy.

Walken plays Paul Lombard, an aged crooner, “The King of Romance,” contemplating a comeback as only Christopher Walken can. He’ll open for a more hip band and find a new audience.

“The FLAME-ing Lips,” he says, in Walkenspeak.

Heard is his struggling jingle-singing daughter, over 30 “wasting her talent” and determined not to let the old man or his agent (Oliver Platt) help her get a leg up.

Jude Lippman (Heard) was born “Star Shadow,” so-named by her six-times married dad, whose “makeout music” LPs are a go-to move for any unknowing guy about to bed her.

“It was my luck to be named during his ‘hippy’ period,” she grouses. And, knowing that makes no mathematical sense, “Who has a ‘hippy’ period in the ’80s?”

Paul lives with wife number six (Ann Magnuson). His daughters (Kelli Garner is the younger one) call her “The Wicked Witch of the Upper West Side.” He’s still got the ’80s Rolls-Royce, still lives in The Hamptons.

“The SLUMS of The Hamptons,” he complains. Too far from the beach.

Those slums are where Jude retreats to be with Dad, sixth-wife, bitchy sister and sister’s affable husband (Hamish Linklater), to sort out her life. Because her over-30 punk thing is just the facade. There are other mistakes she’s not owning up to.

Father and daughter duet on “Something Stupid,” but Dad upstages her. Agent Allen (Platt) trots out “Hey, Jude” jokes. Old sores open up, old scores might be settled.

Predictable stuff, written and directed by the fellow who talked Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland into “Land of the Blind” (Robert Edwards).

What pays dividends here is the crooning — Heard is passable alt-rockish, Walken (he sang in “Pennies from Heaven”) has a ring-a-ding-ding delivery that suggests older Bobby Darin or Frank Sinatra Jr. — and Heard playing off Walken’s playfulness.

He wrings a laugh out of Jude’s fascination with the great Nina Simone.

“I used to play PING-pong with Nina!”

Paul shares vintage Playboys with his grandson (Henry Keleman), suggesting he could “tell you stories” about the Playmate on the cover. He watches and re-watches a “Behind the Music” about his career, edits his own Wikipedia entry and trots out a new song, one he wrote himself, that he figures will launch his comeback.

You know, the one that has him opening for “The FLAME-ing Lips.”

It’s a pleasure seeing Walken this light and lively and “One More Time” goes down easier than his pal Al Pacino’s “Danny Collins.” He lands his laughs, shies away from the sentimental.

Heard is mostly a collection of props (cigarettes, piercings, a Nina Simone tattoo) and tics (biting her black fingernails). But she plays off Walken well.

It doesn’t surprise, but that’s kind of what you want from a movie like “One More Time” — old reliables, reliably delivering, with or without the “COW bell.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, pot use, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Amber Heard, Christopher Walken, Hamish Linklater, Ann Magnuson, Oliver Platt
Credits: Written and directed by Robert Edwards. StarzMedia release.

Running time: 1:37

First, there was my review, the first widely-published/republished pan of “The Force Awakens,” a review which drew endless comments of abuse and became an Internet Meme. “Glib facsimile.” I own that. Ask anybody.

Then there was this, which backed me up.

Takes like this echoed what I’ve been saying since the couple of weeks I was pretty much a lone voice in the wilderness complaining about this corporate compromise “Star Wars” movie.

And now, somebody’s gone to the trouble of turning the above into a video. Here’s where J.J. Abrams repeated the original film. A LONG video, as they were almost exactly the same movie, rendered politically correct for the times. See below. As the not-late, not-great Nikki Finke used to say, “TOLDYA.”

But wait. James Cameron, who knows a thing or two about the subject, has weighed in as well. 

It got even worse after “Rogue One” came out. Yeah, it’s the best of the current crop of “Star Wars” movies. And it prompted more “Force Awakens Sucks” articles.

Kids’ movies are like children’s literature — so deceptively simple anybody thinks he or she can manage one, but devilishly hard to pull off.

“Rescue Dogs” is a “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” knockoff — animals talking in voice-overs that their humans cannot hear. It’s about a rescue mutt who tries to find his owner a mate and save his owner’s business from a rapacious developer.

And while kudos are due for anybody who depends on trained animals to make their movie work, it’s tepid entertainment, even by the supposedly lower standards of kids’ films. You’ll see the worst fake beard since “Gettysburg” on one of the supporting cast members.

Paul Haapaniemi is Tracy, owner of a beachside breakfast burrito joint that his faithful companion Charger helps him run. Charger’s barks help the dog “plan” the menu (in the dog’s eyes), and the food is fab.

But the unseen Mr. Evil of E Vaul Corp. (Get it?), glimpsed in shadows stroking his disapproving hairless cat (Nightmare), wants the burrito shack property so he can build a golf course. His banker-minion (Andrew Ryan Harvey) is on the case, making offers, siccing the health inspector and a restaurant critic on Tracy.

Can this restaurant be saved? Will Tracy’s flaky “treasure hunter” brother (screenwriter Jordan Rawlins) be of any help?

Meanwhile, Charger has gotten Tracy confused for a dance teacher (a gag borrowed from “Friends”) just so he can meet a cute redhead (Courtney Daniels).

Everything from seals to sandpipers pipes up in the story. Dogs have British or Jamaican accents. The cat, of course, is evil.

“All cats aren’t evil. That’s just a stereotype.”

Only the redhead’s hamster, Hambone, a real gym rat, is funny. Hamsters in hamsterballs imitating Mr. T are a guaranteed laugh.

The acting is Disney Channel broad, the writing is about six drafts shy of having enough laughs. And any message about “who rescued who,” the rescued pet owners’ creed, is lost.

At least they follow the cardinal rule of kids’ entertainment — Do no harm. “Rescue Dogs” is as harmless as it is charmless.

MPAA Rating:PG for some rude humor

Cast: Paul Haapaniemi, Jordan Rawlins, Courtney Daniels

Credits: Directed by M.J. Anderson, Haik Katsikian, script by Jordan Rawlins. A Busted Buggy release.

Running time: 1:23

You don’t get a to take a bow or receive a gold star for figuring out the Big Allegory in “High-Rise.” It’s there, front and center and obvious to all, thanks to sci-fi novelist J.G. Ballard’s naming of the characters living in the penthouse of the titular apartment block that the film is about.

They’re “The Royals.” And the missus (Keely Hawes) has a thing for Marie Antoinette and pre-revolutionary French decadence. Their huge flat is decorated like Versailles. Her husband, the designer of the high-rise, rules it like a philosopher king.

And all the folks on the floors below? Let them eat power shortages, garbage that isn’t picked up and elevators that don’t work half the time.

Ben Wheatley (“A Field in England””Sightseers”) brings a horror maven’s eye for the grotesque to Ballard’s ’60s dystopia, setting up this “crucible for change” as a period piece and then letting one man’s idea of utopia fall apart.

Unfortunately, the more things spiral into anarchy, the less interesting the story becomes.

Tom Hiddleston (“Thor,””Crimson Peak”) is our lean, dashing “Mad Men” era narrator and protagonist. He lives in the upper floors of this concrete, suburban Brit-monstrosity. And when we meet him, things have already gone to Hell.

Sure, it has every convenience the early ’70s can provide — shag carpeting, a supermarket on one floor, a spa, gym and Olympic pool on another. When he moved in, three months earlier, Dr. Robert Laing (Hiddleston) is greeted with hostility. But even as the snobbery and class consciousness become more evident, Laing is helpless to intervene, even if he sees what’s coming.

Sienna Miller plays the sexy upstairs neighbor whose attentions get Laing involved in the building’s social scene. Luke Evans and Elizabeth Moss are “lower floor” types — unable to afford a higher apartment, with two kids and another on the way.

Wilder (Evans) is a TV personality and veteran class warrior. He’s the first to notice the services seem a little sloppy for the lower floors. Laing suggests as much when he’s summoned to the architect’s penthouse. “The building’s still settling,” Royal purrs, as only Irons can. We don’t believe him any more than Laing does.

Nothing gets fixed. Peons aren’t paid. Resources — starting with the pool — are fought over. Things turn tribal and ugly. There are no cops here. And Laing’s daily commute (all the cars are ’60s era Brit-mobiles) offers no relief. Their society is crumbling.

Ballard was making what now seem obvious points about the inhumanity of science experiment architecture and social planning. As Laing narrates, “They were living in a future that had already taken place.”

The dialogue can be pithy, but comically expositonal.

“I’m an orthodontist and a homosexual,” sneers one snob.

“High-Rise” has not just the look, but the feel of ’60s sci-fi, a certain literary high-mindedness coupled with its vivid recreation of a place out of time and a time out of place.

Moss (“Mad Men”) slings a fair English accent, Hiddleston is properly befuddled and Irons handles the exposition/ethos and imperious noblesse oblige of a one percenter who theorizes about “healthy competition” and other features that his 40 story rat maze will test.

Evans and Miller bring the film to violent, sexual life with their every appearance mirroring the depths the building’s tenants have descended to.

It’s not great, but it’s ambitious, in that “Ex Machina/Her” sort of way. “High-Rise” gives you things 45 minutes of things to chew on in a 115 minute movie.

And if those chewables are not cutting edge or surprising, it’s worth remembering that they were when Ballard wrote this. It’s not his fault his prophecies seem like accepted wisdom, now.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, nudity, substance abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Elizabeth Moss, Luke Evans, Jeremy Irons
Credits: Directed by Ben Wheatley, script by Amy, based on the J.G. Ballard book. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:58

Wow.

Poor to middling reviews didn’t shorten the lines at the multiplex Friday. No no not at all.

Deadline.com says enough tickets were sold that this Warner Brothers franchise-starter will have pocketed $171 million by midnight Sunday. Those are summer numbers. Record summer numbers. And it’s March. Whew.

It’s not going to be to everybody’s taste, and you have to wonder if word of mouth will push that final take down. The public preview I attended had as many people muttering “Didn’t much like that” as it had clapping at the closing credits. So.

Warners’ idea to go ahead and park “Superman,” who has proven to be something of a non-starter with them, in this “Justice League” prelude seems brilliant. Zack Snyder may be nobody’s idea of a Joss Whedon, but Warners’ kept the faith and he delivered a hit — critically dismissed by many (not me, thanks to tone, weight and the performances) but packing in the fanboy faithful.

“Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” shows there’s still strength in that brand, a dozen years after the first film and the flop TV series it inspired. $19 million. Weak picture, low-hanging fruit jokes, but comfort food for older viewers. And Greeks.

“Allegiant” and “Cloverfield Lane” saw their audiences shrink, but not “Miracles from Heaven” or “Zootopia.” The Disney toon is well over $240 million, or will be by Sunday. “Deadpool” is still setting the bar way up there — over $350 by Monday evening — for “Bat v. Super” to try and top. I don’t see this one as having the legs of the ‘Pool. Both films are going to be hard pressed to come up with fresh ideas to sell in a sequel.

The Sally Field drama “Hello, My Name is Doris” expanded into more theaters and cracked the top ten. I guess I need to get around to that one.

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Full disclosure here. I’m over zombies.

The slow zombies, the fast zombies, the zombies who climb on each other like ants to scramble over walls, the zombies who flirt and zombies who suffer.

They’re overexposed and out of ideas, not shocking since they are, after all, The Living Dead.

“Brains.” We get it.

Even George A. Romero has seemed bored with them in recent years. Too many zombie movies. They’re all over TV, where “I, Zombie” anchors down the CW. “The Walking Dead” are the best-mannered zombies, pausing to let the uninfected get through their dialogue before resuming their lurching charge in the zombie soap opera.

After “28 Days Later” and “World War Z,” where else can you go with this general idea?

A quick search for a photo from the movie “Pandemic” to illustrate this review lays out the problem. Scores of zombie photos from movies NOT titled “Pandemic” come up. The title’s as generic as the contagion, the epidemic, the green-skinned, stumbling, flesh-eating villains.

Rachel Nichols of TV’s “Continuum” and “Chicago Fire” stars as Laura — DOCTOR Laura — – a CDC (Centers for Disease Control) survivor hurled into the fight against contagion in Los Angeles. A prologue sketches in her back-story — wife and mother, husband and daughter unaccounted for.

Dr. Laura is drafted into a search and rescue mission, riding in a Dept. of Corrections bus with a nurse (Missi Pyle), a cynical ex-con driver (Alfie Allen) and Gunner (Mekhi Phifer). His family is missing and even though the outbreak is mere weeks old, he’s over this and trigger happy.

Dr. Laura is overmatched, out of her depth, unable to cope in her issued bio-hazard suit.

“No wonder New York fell,” Gunner gripes. “Do us all a favor, fight back like your life depended on it.”

Because it does. Over the course of an afternoon and night, the mission team fights and runs through the zombie-infested city, wary of zombie “traps” (uninfected, or under-infected people used as bait) and false hopes. They’re on their own.

“Pandemic” manages one gripping, helmet-camera point-of -iew death. Otherwise, Gunner’s view of their mission prevails. It’s not exactly brimming with humanity.

“Ever play ‘Whack a Mole?'”

The surprises are mild, the shocks are AWOL and the novelty long gone. Serious movies about possible real epidemics are always better, which is why “World War Z” worked. It had big servings of “Outbreak” and “Contagion.”

Civilization’s collapse will be more thorough than this, which is why “28 Days Later” grabbed us.

The reality in “Pandemic” is weakly set up, the surreality underdeveloped and the performances, for the most part, as cold as a corpse.

The film’s most overt impression is that of genre fatigue. The feeble attempts to mask this by not quite having the dead return to life cannot hide the true intent, or the absolute absence of new ideas for the living/walking/lurching/dining dead to carry out.

MPAA Rating: unrated, zombie violence

Cast: Rachel Nichols, Mekhi Phifer, Missi Pyle, Alfie Allen
Credits: Directed by John Suits, script by Dustin T. Benson  . A release.

Running time: 1:31

Society may, any day now, lose its grasp of the lessons of The Holocaust as those who witnessed it pass from the scene. But those few survivors left continue their mission, to remind us, to pursue justice, to “never forget.”

“Remember” is a “Memento” mystery about the long reach of that crime and tragedy, and old men who insist on playing their parts to the bitter end. And it’s a fine showcase for two of the cinemas Lions in Winter, with touching cameos for their age appropriate peers.

Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) has forgotten much. He wakes up each morning and calls out for his wife, Ruth. A nurse tells him she died a week ago.

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

He doesn’t recall that they lived in a nursing home. He forgot he was sitting shiva, but a star of David around his next is there to remind him of his Jewishness. He didn’t realize her funeral is today, a week after her death.

But his old friend Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau) can provide some reminders. And Max is dead-set on Zev “doing what you promised. What you promised me, and Ruth.”

He’s written a letter, stuffed cash and a train ticket in it. Read the letter, follow the instructions, “cross them of as you complete each step.” Dementia or not, Zev, “It means ‘wolf’ in Hebrew,” has a mission.

And as this engaging, confused old men slips out, charming children and their parents on the train, buses and taxis he takes, no one takes advantage of him. They connect with his sweetness, his confusion. Some read a little of his letter. None see his tattoo, the number marked on his arm.

Max has sent Zev hunting Nazis.

Canadian director Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter,” “Where the Truth Lies”) likes his mysteries and his big, melodramatic twists. Working from a Benjamin August script, he sends Zev on his odyssey, traveling through the West, from dumpy houses to nursing homes, looking for a Rudy Kulander — “the man who killed my family, killed BOTH our families” Max insists.

Max sends Zev to a gun shop, where the sweet old man has to ask the clerk to write out “how to use it” instructions on the Glock pistol he sells him. Whatever is left of Zev’s memory, Max is determined to use it. Max’s life, even in supervised care and confined to a wheelchair (with oxygen tank), is immersed in research, investigations. Several men changed their name to Rudy after World War II and slipped into America. One of them must be Otto, the guard who committed mass murder at Auschwitz. Zev will find him for Max.

Zev travels, wakes up every morning asking for Ruth, and somehow gets back to reading the letter, his “Memento” and memory jogger. And he stays on task.

Plummer is, of course, the perfect blend of sweet dotage and quiet, murderous purpose. He makes every encounter Zev has memorable. And he’s aided by his co-stars, potential Rudys in his search — the great Bruno Ganz (“Downfall”), Dean Norris as the cop son of a dead “Rudy,” the great Jurgen Prochnow (“Das Boot”).

Knowning Egoyan’s penchant for twists, you wonder where this short, quiet but tense movie is taking us. Is Max taking advantage of Zev? Is everyone who they say they are? How will Zev handle finding the real Rudy? Will the old Nazi give Zev the grace of reading the Glock instructions before shooting him?

The mystery, the great cast and the slow simmer of tension that Egoyan builds into “Remember” recommend it. The third act payoff won’t be to every taste. Egoyan is the Canadian Spike Lee in that regard.

But “Remember” packages a fascinating mystery into history’s most important subject, and lets the threat of violence hang over it even as the memory of the violence that set this odyssey in motion linger in our minds as these doddering old men carry out one last reminder and seek one last moment of justice.

 
MPAA Rating:R for a sequence of violence and language

Cast: Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Bruno Ganz, Jurgen Prochnow, Henry Czerny, Dean Norris
Credits: Directed by Atom Egoyan, script by Benjamin August. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:34

It sounded mad, right from the outset. British actor Tom Hiddleston, “Loki” from the “Thor” and “Avengers” movies, as that icon of country music, Hank Williams?

Surely somebody had lost his or her ever-loving mind.

But give it to Hiddleston, who doesn’t lack for that old country music character trait, “chutzpah.” He slimmed down to nothing and took his shot at looking like and sounding like one of the most distinct, keening drawls in music history.

“I Saw the Light” works best if you enter it with those “What were they thinking?” expectations. Because Hiddleston isn’t bad. And if he doesn’t quite nail Hank in his performance of several of the man’s legendary tunes, he puts them over.

And a soulful, “Here’s something I’ve been working on” acapella rendition of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” accompanying himself on guitar, lifts the picture just when you’ve lost hope it ever will be.

“I Saw the Light” takes over two hours to cover the ten years of Hank’s rise and fall, an Alabama singer whose frail health couldn’t take the rigors of the road and the drugs he took just to ease the pain.

See Hank get a reputation as an unreliable boozer, late for shows, missing tour dates. Hear him defend his style of singing to producers who would change him.

“When I find a note I like,” he drawls, “I hang on-ta it!”

Fake black and white “documentary” interviews with music biz folk (Bradley Whitford plays Nashville publisher Fred Rose) who knew Hank pepper the picture, and rather badly mimicked color home movies (and newsreels) chart his rising fame and domestic “bliss.”

That’s the heart of “I Saw the Light,” the womanizing Williams’ combative relationship with his wife and would-be backup singer, Audrey Mae. She battles Hank’s controlling mom (Cherry Jones) for his confidence. And she tries to share the stage with him. Brave as it is of Hiddleston to tackle matching Williams’ unmistakable voice, that’s nothing to what Elizabeth Olsen, as Audrey Mae, has to put over. She has to sing just well enough to have the false confidence of “I could be a star, too,” and just badly enough that she never will be.

Producer turned writer-director Marc Abraham (“Flash of Genius”) struggles to organize this life into a lengthy, neat chronology. And that fails the film. Scene after scene of “red letter dates” in Hank’s story — a “Hank Williams Day” in Montgomery, Alabama, his first night on “The Grand Ole Opry,” an infamous disoriented festival performance in Texas — weigh down the narrative.

Hiddleston can’t pull off the folksiness that was Williams’ public persona. But the better movie this might have been is hinted at in a press interview, later in his life, in New York.

“Ever’body’s got a little darkness in’em,” he allows. “They,” his fans, “hear it. I show it to’em. But THEY don’t have to take it home.”

It’s a fair-minded movie that doesn’t sensationalize Williams’ life or demons. But it lacks heart. There’s no single scene that burns into the memory the way a couple of ones in the corny 1964 George Hamilton bio-pic, “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” do — the wrenching death of the black man that taught Hank to play and gave his sound its earthy, working class soul, for instance.

But Hiddleston comes closer than we ever would have guessed. And when he gets around to “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” you find yourself wishing he’d had a smarter, shorter and brisker film leading up to that moment, a movie worthy of the legend whose story “I Saw the Light” tells.

MPAA Rating:R for some language and brief sexuality/nudity

Cast: Tim Hiddleston, Elizabeth Olsen, Bradley Whitford, Cherry Jones
Credits: Written and directed by Marc Abraham. A Sony Pictures Classic release.

Running time: 2:03

Ethan Hawke talked about his “Chet Baker” movie for so long it seemed he might age out of ever getting to play the troubled jazz giant on the screen.

But “Boyhood” and the Oscar nomination that followed allowed Hawke and filmmaker Robert Budreau to get their vision on the screen. And “Born to be Blue” was worth the wait.

It’s a lyrical, self-aware and breezy drama that feels like jazz itself — dated but fresh, a tale of smokey clubs and burning memories, captured in black and white, with an art form just hitting its peak just as its audience faded away. And Hawke makes a perfectly content, laid-back Baker, a matinee idol junkie who owns his addictions, takes his lumps and refuses to truly change his style, musically or personally, even as circumstances force him to.

The self-mocking framing device of this story is Baker’s shot at screen stardom. He’s fresh out of prison and in front of the cameras, making a “Chet Baker Story.” Carmen Ejogo is his co-star, an African American actress portraying “Chet’s women.” She understands his attraction to Black women, but she’s having trouble figuring out what they see in him. He sees that as an invitation to put the moves on her.

“Let’s go out, have some laughs.”

“You don’t strike me as funny.”

When she is witness to the beat-down that ends production on that bio-film, she inexplicably sticks around. The smart, sexy and earthy “Jane” has fallen under Baker’s spell. She just can’t tell us why.

But we do get a sense of his offhanded, thoughtful charm, characteristics of many a Hawke performance. Baker found fame early as a sort of “great white hope” of jazz. He tells her and us the story of his “discovery” by Charlie “Bird” Parker. We see, in flashbacks, the shrieking female fans, the on-stage quintessence of 1950s and ’60s jazz cool — suit, horn, sunglasses. Yeah, he was “The James Dean of jazz.”

Another flashback (all in black and white) sets up his nagging doubt — being dismissed by jazz icon Miles Davis (Kedar Brown, ferocious) upon their first meeting. Baker idolized Miles. Miles sneered at Baker.

And we see that first encounter with heroin , through a woman who isn’t his wife.

“Born to be Blue” tracks through the long struggle to regain his sound that followed Baker’s beating, when he lost his teeth and his embouchure, the mouth muscle and upper jaw bone development born of decades of playing the trumpet. That sanitizes him, somewhat, with much of his junky philanderer edge rubbed off.

Hawke nicely captures Baker’s half-whispered, sexy-slow singing style made most famous in a cover of “My Funny Valentine.” Other jazzmen (Dizzy Gillespie, ably played by Kevin Hanchard) try to get him to stop singing. He won’t.

Even when his disapproving dad, played by Stephen McHattie, who played Baker in writer-director Budreau’s 2009 short film, “The Deaths of Chet Baker,” asks Chet “Why’d you have to sing like a girl?”, Chet won’t change.

His producer/mentor (Callum Keith Rennie) tries to get Chet to stay clean and repeatedly gives up on him when he doesn’t.

But Chet, even while living in a VW Microbus, practicing his playing through rivers of blood, endures.

It’s a conventionally unconventional film, its surprise twists coming from Baker himself. The supporting cast is short on star power and the charisma that accompanies that. But Hawke and Ejogo, who played civil rights icon Coretta Scott King in “Selma,” have enough soul and charisma and chemistry to hold the screen and make us feel “Born to be Blue,” even if we, like Jane in the movie, never quite “get” Chet Baker.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use, language, some sexuality and brief violence

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Carmen Ejogo, Callum Keith Rennie, Kevin Hanchard, Kedar Brown, Tony Nappo, Sophia Walker
Credits: Written and directed by Robert Budreau. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:37