"Blaze" by Ethan Hawke, 2018
A dusty Texas slice of life music biopic that captures a fascinating story.
Criterion Collection
Recommendation: Worth Watching.
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Austin Texas is a dusty hot college town sitting far from the rest of the world. It is the kind of place wanderers are swept into like tumbleweeds, finding themselves hopeless and drunk on a barstool with a guitar. They're wearing dusty wrangler jeans and faded work jackets, filled with a sadness and remorse that you can see in the creases of sunburned foreheads and cheeks. Years of pain or regret or simple wandering followed them until that moment - sitting on that old wooden stool release those emotions through rusty strings and smoky tunes. Ethan Hawke, a native from Austin, has captured all of these legends in the harrowing story of a true unsung hero of Texas - a country singer that went by the stage name Blaze Foley who was thankfully captured for the world in a few magical albums of remarkable songs.
"Blaze" is the story of one of those true lost souls, a musician who grows into greatness after dying too soon and getting rediscovered by the world years later. It is a story of a life misunderstood, and a love that is as strong a relationship as I have ever seen captured in a film.
I heard about this film "Blaze" in an interview with Ethan Hawke on Roger Deakin's podcast called "Team Deakins". Hawke is more famous as an actor, from movies like "Gattaca", "Training Day", "Dead Poets Society", and Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy. But once I heard he had directed and personally financed a film about an unknown Texas Country musician from Austin, I immediately knew I needed to see this movie.
I lived in Austin during a difficult time in my life where I didn't know what I was doing, ending up there because I pointed my finger at a map and followed someone's advice to try it out. I had never stepped foot in Texas before that point, and only knew Austin as a "cool music city". I had been told by college friends years before that I would probably take to it given my personality, but it was not something I gave much thought to at the time until that moment. But I found myself there, and in between all the hype and the talk of "Keep Austin Weird" and tech companies moving to town, the only thing I think back to fondly were these hot dry nights out walking my dog and hearing a group of old-timers sitting on a front porch with guitars playing music and drinking beer. To me, those men with those guitars are the true Austin Texas.
But this film "Blaze" isn't about that — it's a film for all these creative types who sit around lost who never get the recognition for what they create alone in their bedrooms, who envision this world of the rich and famous who hit it so big that their lives turn into fantasy. "Blaze" shows a different side of that story, the story of two people scratching through life with the hope of someday breaking through to something greater. It reminded me a lot of Joel and Ethan Coen's "Inside Llewyn Davis", a fictionalized story of a folk singer/songwriter who also fails to break through that wall and only suffers through life. Both leave you as a viewer melancholy and crushed at the end, but forced to reflect upon honesty and life as it is. Reality doesn't always lead to the Hollywood ending with the Penthouse Suite in Las Vegas or the custom pink Cadillac limousine.
Hawke as a director does an admirable job of being true and honest to the subject, giving his actors space to be intuitive and captures scenes with a natural camera that moves with the action. Actors-turned-Directors often work in more collaborative fashion, giving the cinematographer and the actors freedom to create their own visions and showcase their own ideas in a film. Hawke was successful in picking the right people, a human story with plenty of opportunities to interpret the events of Blaze Foley's life, and capturing the spirit of Texas music in a really beautiful film.
And once you hear the songs this man created, you too will never forget them.
Happy viewing!