Lovely Review of 1987 film "Let's Get Lost"

NYT
June 3, 2007
A Jazzman So Cool You Want Him Frozen at His Peak
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

AT the very end of Bruce Weber’s seductive, unsettling “Let’s Get Lost,” the movie’s subject, the semi-legendary cool-jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker, looks back on the shooting of the film and says, in a quavery, almost tearful voice, “It was a dream.” Although in the preceding two hours Mr. Baker has delivered a fair number of dubiously reliable utterances, you’re inclined to believe him on this one because that’s what the movie feels like to the viewer too. It’s nominally a documentary (Oscar-nominated in that category in 1989), but it documents something that only faintly resembles waking reality. And Mr. Baker, who wanders through “Let’s Get Lost” with the eerie deliberateness of a somnambulist, appears to be a man who knows a thing or two about dreams.

Film Forum, which gave the movie its New York premiere 18 years ago, is reviving it for a three-week run (beginning Friday) in a restored 35-millimeter print, and Mr. Weber’s black-and-white hipster fantasia is as beautiful, and as nutty, as ever. Now, as in 1989, the filmmaker seems bent on stopping time in its tracks, preserving the illusion that nothing important has changed since the early 1950s, when Mr. Baker was a handsome young man with a sweet-toned horn, the great white hope of West Coast jazz.

He doesn’t look the same of course; actually he looks like hell. When “Let’s Get Lost” was shot, Mr. Baker was in his late 50s, and after 30-plus years of dedicated substance abuse (he wasn’t picky about the substance, though heroin was generally his first choice) his face is ravaged, cadaverous — groovy in entirely the wrong way. He often appears to be having some difficulty remaining awake, even while he’s performing, whispering standards like “My Funny Valentine” at tempos so languid that the songs kind of swirl and hover in the air like cigarette smoke until they finally just drift away.

The really peculiar thing about “Let’s Get Lost” is that its subject’s physical decrepitude and narcoleptic performance style seem not to bother Mr. Weber at all. This isn’t one of those documentaries that poignantly contrast the beauty and energy of youth with the sad debilities of age. Far from it. The picture cuts almost randomly between archival clips and 1987 footage to create a sort of perverse continuum, a frantic insistence that the essence of Chetness is unvarying, eternal. And you can’t always see much difference between the young Mr. Baker and the old. Even in his prime his cool was so extreme that he often looked oddly spectral, like someone trapped in a block of ice.

Chet Baker’s brand of frosty hipness was, in the ’50s, considered a sexy alternative to that era’s prevailing ethos of earnest, striving respectability (at least until rock ’n’ roll, which was more fun, came along). Maybe you had to have grown up in that nervous decade, as Mr. Weber did, to find Mr. Baker’s ostentatious laid-backness subversive, to imbue it with so much bad-boy allure. Mr. Weber, who is also a fashion photographer, is a glamorizer both by trade and by nature, and when something imprints itself as strongly on his fantasy life as the image of the young Chet Baker clearly did, he holds onto it tightly — cherishes it, embellishes it, uses it to transport himself back to his own hard-dreaming youth. “Let’s Get Lost” is his “Remembrance of Things Past,” with this strung-out trumpeter as his madeleine.

And what Mr. Weber winds up doing in this original, deeply eccentric movie is giving Mr. Baker a luxurious fantasy world to live in, a holiday condo of the imagination, where age and time are utterly irrelevant. The filmmaker supplies his weary but grateful subject with a ready-made entourage of shockingly good-looking young people (Chris Isaak and Lisa Marie among them) who, in shifting combinations, drink with him, ride in snazzy convertibles with him, giggle with him on a bumper-car ride and gaze on him reverently while he croons a breathy tune in the recording studio. Mr. Weber takes him to the Cannes Film Festival, where paparazzi surround him and he sings “Almost Blue” for celebrities at a glittery party. No wonder Mr. Baker gets misty-eyed at the end of the movie. The dream he’s been dreaming, courtesy of his devoted director, is the sweetest one a performer could ask for in his declining years: the dream that he still matters.

Chet Baker hadn’t mattered for a while when Mr. Weber was filming him. The movie’s release rekindled a bit of interest in his music, partly because he was dead by the time it came out: In 1988, at the age of 58, he was found on the street in Amsterdam, having apparently fallen from the window of his hotel. He’s practically forgotten now.

Jazz history hasn’t been kind to him; his talent, though real, was thin. Unlike his rival Miles Davis, he persisted, with a stubbornness that suggests a fairly serious failure of imagination, in playing the cool style long past the point at which it had begun to sound mannered and even a little silly. When you hear Mr. Baker’s stuff, you can’t help picturing his ideal listener as one of those lupine swingers of the Playboy era, decked out in a velvet smoking jacket and loading smooth platters onto the hi-fi to get a hot chick in the mood for love. The ’50s die before your eyes in “Let’s Get Lost.” It feels like the last stand of something that may not have been worth fighting for in the first place.

In a funny way, the movie gives the lie to the nostalgic illusions it seems to want to embody, just because the construction of this fragile, faded jazzman as the epitome of cool is so elaborate and so obviously effortful. It’s killing work to be this cool. When Mr. Weber starts interviewing people who loved the musician not from afar, as he did, but from too close — his bitter wife, a few girlfriends, three of his neglected kids — you see how tough it’s been: how many drugs it took, how much willful indifference, how much hollowing out of whatever self may once have inhabited the pale frame of Chet Baker.

The enduring fascination of “Let’s Get Lost,” the reason it remains powerful even now, when every value it represents is gone, is that it’s among the few movies that deal with the mysterious, complicated emotional transactions involved in the creation of pop culture — and with the ambiguous process by which performers generate desire. Mr. Baker isn’t so much the subject of this picture as its pretext: He’s the front man for Mr. Weber’s meditations on image making and its discontents.

If you want the true story of Chet Baker, you’d do better to look up James Gavin’s superb, harrowing 2002 biography, “Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker,” where you can also find, in the words of a pianist named Hal Galper, perhaps the most perceptive review of Mr. Weber’s slippery movie. “I though it was great,” Mr. Galper says, “because it was so jive. Everybody’s lying, including Chet. You couldn’t have wanted a more honest reflection of him.” That’s “Let’s Get Lost,” to the life: the greatest jive movie, or maybe the jivest great movie, ever made.