Review of Blaze (2018) by Philip P — 10 Dec 2018

Ethan Hawke's directorial debut, Blaze, about the life and music of Blaze Foley is a movie of moments more than it is a research paper on its titular subject. That doesn't mean it isn't cohesive and it certainly doesn't mean we don't feel we learn what is essential about the figure being documented, but while there are many of these moments that ring authentic beyond belief and offer an insight into the mind of Mr. Foley there is still this sense of distance between the audience and the subject that's difficult to shake.

The film bounces around from one point of Foley's life to another wanting nothing to do with linear structure, but what comes to be the essence of Blaze is that of this great paradox. The greatest paradox of life, if you will and that is the one so fantastically phrased by newcomer (and Arkansas native) Ben Dickey as Foley when he says, "things that aren't love are pulling at me and I have to let them take me." It's this dilemma of which kind of love you're going to choose for your life: the love of a passion or calling that you feel your life would be incomplete without or the love of another who makes you feel complete.

To that extent, Alia Shawkat is beyond lovely here.

At one point, it seems Hawke might have been more interested in disproving the persona created through the stories that have been passed down through the years (this point conveyed by the always outstanding Josh Hamilton and musician Charlie Sexton looking uncannily like Townes Van Zandt) so as to show the ugliness Foley had to sometimes exude to head in the direction that was calling him, but the film instead comes to rest on a thesis that more comments on how these myths are formed rather than the differences in the man versus that myth. By paying ode to this "vow of poverty" Foley took that became the lens through which he saw everything Blaze eventually settles on the idea that one isn't of value based on their place or lack thereof in the commercial environment, but that the highest value comes from the belief in what one is doing.

Foley may not have even been the greatest unknown singer or songwriter to come out of this time period, but he was a "seller of songs" through and through and this sun-drenched ode to both the man and the storyteller is keen to put as much emphasis on the art being created as it does the artist creating it. The biggest undoing here though, being that Blaze isn't as wholly engaging as it is rapturous in brief flickers of moments; something I presume might have been true of the real Foley as a person and a performer and one of the reasons he was never able to get out of his own way and look past that lens to see through another.

On a side note, can we have a broad comedy about Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn, and Sam Rockwell's three buffoon oil tycoons who decide to start a record label, but...like...within the state of the music industry today? That would be most appreciated.