Hawke as Chet Baker in Born to Be Blue.
There was a time in Ethan Hawke’s acting career when the public adored him as a fresh young face who made it look easy. Then there were times when the public resented him for how easy he made it look. During that first blush of acting fame, Hawke insisted on having a writing career—he’s written four novels, bookended by The Hottest State in 1996 and the upcoming Indeh (out in June)—and he was excoriated for stepping out of his lane. Later, he was praised for being undeterred, both as a writer and as a director.
Hawke understands the tug of war between what’s going on inside and outside an artist, between reception and perception, between personal struggle with your own creative vision and giving the public what they want. He has been working since he was 14, living the artist’s life at least since then. And today he continues to work, bringing his unique sympathy to his portrayal of the LA jazz musician Chet Baker in Born to Be Blue.
“When people talk of Chet Baker, they often use the word cool, you know?” Hawke says when I reach him by phone on his way to Newark Liberty International Airport outside of New York City. “And I kind of think, ‘What the hell does that mean—that word?’ In Chet’s case, I really think there’s something detached and uncaring—in both the positive and negative sense of that word. He’s removed. There’s something so lonely and effortless about his songs; he doesn’t even seem to be trying. As genius as Charlie Parker was, you certainly feel the effort. He has a great passion and feel to his work. Chet, everything with him is just easy. He didn’t seem to care about any of it, anything, including himself.”
Born to Be Blue focuses on a period in Baker’s life that took place after he got his teeth knocked out by a drug dealer in 1968 and before he was chased out of the United States by police and a press corps that relentlessly hounded him over his drug habit. The movie portrays Baker’s love affair with an actress (played by Carmen Ejogo) as he struggled to stay clean, both on and off of methadone, while painfully relearning how to play the trumpet.
To play and to play great again was Baker’s biggest struggle, but there’s a refusal at the heart of Hawke’s portrayal, a refusal to commit to being either a hero or a failure. “It’s definitely trying to not let Chet be one thing,” he says. “Some biographies paint him as this angelic-type figure, some have these deep-in-a-drain drug themes, and some paint him as a criminal. Everything about the guy, even his death, was mysterious. We’re just trying to humanize him. I feel like in the period that I was portraying, he wasn’t the ghost you see in [Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary] Let’s Get Lost yet. In this period, it’s just really tragic and human to see him go through the effort to learn to play again, to make it back to that high level and still make the same mistakes. The second he could play at a high level again, he just committed right back to heroin again. It’s just so sad.”
Hawke captures the Okie stubbornness in Baker, the fact that he was addicted to the “jazz life” as much as he was to heroin. “He never really saw the problem as heroin,” Hawke says. “He saw the problem as the world’s response to heroin.” Baker was a trumpet player who insisted on singing, a white guy who wanted so badly to be “part of the club” with his heroes Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, even while Davis repeatedly rejected him.
“Some great musicians really admired his trumpet playing,” Hawke says. “DownBeat Magazine listed him as the best trumpeter of the year one year and Chet told Miles that he wanted to write him an apology letter when he saw that. And Miles said, ‘Why would you stop with me? There are 10 brothers that you should write to before you even get to me: Louis Armstrong, Cliff Brown.’ Miles was brutal with him. But Chet faced a lot of the same situations that Elvis faced or Eminem faces.”
And while Baker’s trumpet playing was great enough to ultimately gain him respect inside the jazz world (save Miles Davis’), his singing was roundly mocked throughout his career. “Yeah, that’s me [singing] in the movie,” says Hawke. “I’m not a singer. But you know, Chet really wasn’t a singer, either. What was beautiful about his singing is that it seems personal and that he continued to do it. He talked really openly about how he loved to sing. How much Billie Holiday was really his hero, even more than Miles. And that he really did see singing and trumpet playing as kind of the same thing. And when you listen to him sing and you listen to him playing the trumpet, he does it the exact same way.
“It takes a tremendous amount of courage and confidence in yourself to keep making your art when everyone mocks you for it,” Hawke says. He’s speaking from experience. “It did remind me of being in my late 20s, trying to write and do different things—the sh*t you catch. You catch a hailstorm from people whenever you step outside the box that society has given you. And yet, if you don’t step outside of it, it’s the only way you’re guaranteed not to grow. As I get older, I feel like you’ve got to have a little stability or sense of humor about it all and you’ve got to keep marching.”
For Hawke, the creative struggle is ongoing, and as with most human endeavors, it can be as sad as it is profound. “I lost two of my most favorite actors in my generation to heroin, River Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman. One was in his early 20s and the other in his mid-40s, which I kind of feel are these two crisis points,” he says. “In your early 20s, everybody goes through a hard time figuring out who you are—that’s the obvious one. In the middle of your life, there’s another crisis point where it’s what I call the ‘Is that all there is to a fire?’ moment. And I think a lot of drug addiction stems from a deep, deep insecurity, matched with a deep arrogance and belief in yourself.”