You know those bleary, late-night conversations in which a friend tries to convince you that the musician you’ve never heard of is an unheralded genius? Watching Blaze is a lot like that. And you know who probably, in real life, is like that friend? Ethan Hawke. And so it makes sense that Hawke would co-write and direct this biopic about country singer-songwriter Blaze Foley. Hawke makes some interesting, unconventional structural choices—I like when impressionistic images of Blaze occasionally interrupt the narrative at hand—and the performance scenes give plenty of space to Foley’s sad, lonely music. Yet as a piece of evangelism in the name of Blaze Foley, the film didn’t convince me. A framing device in which Foley contemporary Townes Van Zandt (Charlie Sexton) spends a radio interview posthumously lauding Foley’s talent is far too much tell, as opposed to show. Meanwhile, it may have been too much to ask musician and novice actor Ben Dickey to embody the mystery of what made Foley, for some, an unsung hero. I’m convinced more of Hawke’s passion for the man than his place in music history. With Alia Shawkat as Sybil Rosen, Foley’’s longtime lover and also co-writer of the script, which is based on her memoir.
