'I Felt It in My Bones': Ethan Hawke on His Big Year

In 2006, Ethan Hawke was driving across Canada, where he owns a summer home, with his friend Ben Dickey, a musician. Dickey was carrying a recording by a musician named Blaze Foley, a long-forgotten country singer who was shot to death under murky circumstances in 1989. Hawke stuck it in the CD player and was instantly captivated.

A few years later, Hawke started hunting for Foley’s music online and discovered a concert recording called Live at the Austin Outhouse. “I just listened to it compulsively,” Hawke says. “I became hypnotized by the sound of the bar and the door opening and him chattering endlessly. It’s so beautiful—what little money he had to try to record these songs, almost as if he knew he was gonna die.”

That obsession culminates with Hawke’s wistful new film Blaze, in which  Dickey plays the unsung country hero as he falls in love and slips into alcoholism. (Hawke directed and wrote the screenplay with Foley’s widow, Sybil Rosen, based on her memoir.)

At 47, Hawke is having a moment. His work has evolved well beyond the pretty-boy roles that began with 1989’s —on both sides of the camera (is his fourth film as a director). What could have been a classic leading-man career has become one of Hollywood’s (which gives him a shot at his first Oscar win) and as the scruffy, washed-up rocker in the Nick Hornby adaptation .