A genius all the same

Ethan Hawke’s new film Blaze is about a great deceased country and western musician Blaze Foley, a love story, and most of all about not selling out. This last point might be evident to an average viewer of the film. But I learned of its seminal quality during a talk I attended by Hawke last week at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. The central character, Blaze Foley, is one of those legendary musicians few if anyone has ever head of. Sort of like Detroit’s Rodriguez, best known for the hit Sugar Man, and who had a renaissance a half decade ago including the film, Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul, 2012). Hawke told the audience that his film Blaze (he directed it), as have recent others he has starred in, including First Reformed (Paul Schrader 2017) and Juliet, Naked (Jesse Peretz 2018), is about the idea of artistic or intellectual integrity that manifests in any number of people, though they never had commercial success and the wider world may never have heard of them. In some cases, like Blaze’s, the artist deliberately decided he would be his own man, or as Hawke put it “I won’t participate in society.” The musician, played by Ben Dickey, is a good old southern boy who really has no ambition beyond playing his guitar day and night and writing the most beautiful songs, like Clay Pigeons and Election Day. When he occasionally plays a club the audience is so distracted by their own conversations they don’t recognize the greatness in front of them. How many times have you walked by a street musician and not paid the time of day yet he could be as great as Lennon or Dylan? According to Hawke if success is just measured by commercialization, as admittedly it also has been for truly great artists like Lennon and Dylan, “we don’t know what success and failure are.” Or, in the film, as friend and fellow musician (played by Charlie Sexton) tells a radio interviewer (played by Hawke himself), “he took a vow of poverty and saw everything through that lens.” As for the film as a film Blaze has a dreamy intimate quality, depicting Blaze’s genius, faults and humor, and the love story between he and his wife Sybil Rosen, who co-wrote the movie with Hawke (Rosen is played by Alia Shawkat)). In the final scene, after his death Rosen visits his grave, festooned with paraphernalia like beer bottles, and half jokes that he must really be a legend now. A legend in obscurity but an artistic legend nonetheless.