Blaze

Unless you count the brief appearances of an angry young drug addict with a gun and three glad-handing Texas oilmen who offer the rambling, gifted troubadour Blaze Foley a shady deal to record on their new label, Zephyr—aptly named, since the whole venture’s lifespan is that of a hot wind in the desert—there are no bad guys in Blaze, the movie version of Foley’s life directed by Ethan Hawke and co-written by Hawke and Foley’s widow Sybil Rosen. This movie isn’t interested in conflict, protagonists, heroes, dramatics, or any of the other categories that typically fill up the soggy insides of cinema’s worst genre, the biopic.

The immediate reason for this refusal to dramatize stems, simply, from Foley’s songs themselves, most of them ballads, love on the American road and in the roadhouse—miniature studies in pain and regret, but seldom conflict. The songs are forlorn memory boxes, often built from some sad, funny, or dark moment or experience that Foley went through, and the movie is a complex arrangement of recalled incidents filtered through the memories of Blaze, Sybil, and Blaze’s favourite collaborator, his fellow singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. The crucial truth at the centre of is that no person has the monopoly on the truth of someone’s life, that, -like, the closest one comes to that elusive truth is a tossed salad of these memories, jumbled yet coherent, a slipstream that gets the listener from the start of the song to the end. As a re-creation of difficult lives persisting on the margins of American life in the ’70s and ’80s, is remarkably lived in, the kind of cinema that Haskell Wexler would have loved, since Wexler—perhaps better than any other American cinema artist of his generation—understood that tricky balance between the harsh naturalism of the lives of the country’s working poor and the pastorale, the place where Hawke’s and Rosen’s movie resides.