Ethan Hawke Channels Chet Baker in Born to Be Blue

Ethan Hawke‘s first introduction to Chet Baker was Bruce Weber‘s documentary Let’s Get Lost, which came out right around the time Hawke graduated high school. Then about a dozen years ago, he got involved with director/writer Richard Linklater. The two were hoping to make a film about the life of Baker, but that project fell apart.

So, when he was offered the role of the legendary jazz trumpeter in Born to Be Blue, there was no doubt in his mind that it was a film he wanted to be a part of.

Born to Be Blue doesn’t cover the entire life and times of Baker. Rather it carves out a slice of time in the ’60s when he was trying to rebuild his career after he self-destructed due to his heroin habit.

“He had this amazing God-given talent and he never even knew how to read music,” Hawke tells Parade.com. “He could play the trumpet at an extremely high level, and then he got that gift taken away from him after his own [destructive] behavior. But he fought really hard to be able to play again. That’s a really interesting moment in his life as one of the world’s great trumpeters has to teach himself to play all over again at 40.”

Born to be Blue is a fictionalized account of this slice of Baker’s life because Baker told so many stories about incidents in his life, it is impossible to be 100 percent accurate. But even if he hadn’t spun so many yarns, the truth would be in the telling.

“It’s even hard for documentaries to be factually accurate — how you position stories, how you frame them, how you tell them, what you decide to leave out, informs so much,” Hawke says. “This movie’s job was to be true to his spirit and to tell a good story. Our job is to tell a good story, and I love his music. I used to have this idea about the movie, which was if you sit down, turn off the lights and play a couple of Chet Baker albums, there’s a mood that happens to you and it takes you somewhere, and I wanted this movie to take you to the same place and to dramatize that story.”

Because the movie covers the portion of Baker’s life where he is badly beaten, and his teeth are bashed in, so he has to get false teeth, which is why he has to teach himself how to play again, it wasn’t possible to use original tracks laid down by Baker  the soundtrack. Rather, Kevin Turcotte was hired to play the trumpet, so during the periods when Baker was struggling to regain his sound, the music isn’t perfect, reflecting what Baker acutally went through.

While Turcotte provided the trumpet, Hawke did do his own singing.

“The singing was interesting to me because what’s beautiful about Chet’s singing is not necessarily his voice, but what he communicates,” Hawke says. “He communicates powerful melancholy, sadness, and in a lot of ways that’s actable. It’s not like I was being asked to play Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald with an imitable voice.”

Born to Be Blue is now in theaters.