Miles Ahead, a biopic about the jazz legend Miles Davis, is directed by its star, Don Cheadle, one of the best actors in these United States. He also cowrote the script and spent almost a decade developing the project with Miles Davis's family. Cheadle was considered to be the best man to play this role. What could go wrong? When I watched Don Cheadle's biopic on Miles Davis, an artist who scored much of my college years, I was deeply disappointed to see Davis characterized as a gangster and not an intellectual, which, as Cornel West once pointed out, is what jazz musicians are. When you hear a jazz track that's done right, you are listening to years of education and a knowledge of music that's encyclopedic. This Miles Davis cannot be found anywhere in Miles Ahead. One instead gets the impression that he came across a trumpet after surviving one of those Shaft-like shoot-outs and, you know, just started playing the damn thing. He did not need no education and any of that dumb shit. What you will not find in the movie is what obviously happened in his life: long and quiet moments of deep reflection.

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