First Trailer for Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis Biopic Miles Ahead

The first trailer for the Miles Davis biopic titled Miles Ahead from Sony Pictures Classics has debuted online and you can check it out below. Directed by Don Cheadle and also starring Cheadle as Miles himself, this will mark the directorial debut for one of today’s finest actors.

Biopics are, quite frankly, a dime a dozen. While the performance of whoever starring as whichever subject is typically impressive, biopics can be nonetheless uninspired and recycled. They tend to stick to a safe, rise-and-fall good-enough blueprint that’ll turn out a good-enough movie.

With Miles Ahead however, Cheadle looks to have scrapped that blueprint and opted for a narrative that more closely resembles Miles’ music and persona; erratic, loose, and edgy. Sure, we’ll see glimpses of the rise to fame and the subsequent tribulations, but the movie doesn’t appear to follow the typical biopic narrative. It feels and looks abstract, loose, and emotive. At the risk of sounding cheesy, it feels like jazz and a visual depiction of the essence of that music.

Cheadle is a fantastic actor and it’s exciting to see him step into a directing role for the first time. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the actor-turned-director had this to say about Miles Ahead:

“I had seen other films that have done it — because I’ve been a part of several of them, by the way. Biopics, where I guess you could say tropes; I would say they’re also just signposts you have to hit along the way. When you set out to make a biopic, the purpose, whether stated or not, is usually to hit the highlights or lowlights of someone’s life in order to crescendo at the end. It is trope, I guess that’s the word. But I thought, especially with someone like Miles Davis, whose life seemed to very antithetical to that, and whose art was so mercurial and spontaneous and not dedicated to any sort of form that he had done before. He went on to the next thing and he kind of never looked back. I thought it would really be totally anathema to him to do something that felt standard, so to speak.”

Cheadle will be commended for consciously avoiding those biopic tropes and from the look of the trailer, he accomplishes what he set out to do. Miles Ahead hits theaters April 1st and also stars Ewan McGregor, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Emayatzy Corinealdi.