Who is Blaze Foley?
Ethan Hawke’s musical biopic introduces an unsung genius
The great singersongwriter Townes Van Zandt used to say there are two kinds of music: the blues and zipadeedoodah. Both are on full, florid display in “Blaze,” an absorbing, illuminating film about the late musician Blaze Foley.
Foley isn’t a household name; he’s best known as the subject of Van Zandt’s own song “Blaze’s Blues” and Lucinda Williams’s “Drunken Angel.” (Foley also wrote “Clay Pigeons,” most famously covered by John Prine). But Foley comes charmingly, roaringly, maddeningly into his own by way of a masterful title performance by ArkansasPhilly musician Ben Dickey, who doesn’t so much portray as channel the reallife version of his character through equal parts homage and inhabitation.
Inspired by “Living in the Woods in a Tree,” a memoir by Foley’s wife, Sybil Rosen, “Blaze” chronicles the couple’s idyllic love affair, Foley’s promising but often selfsabotaging career as a performer and writer and, finally, his death in 1989, when he was shot in Austin, Texas.
Directed by Ethan Hawke from a script he wrote with Rosen, “Blaze” is structured around a radio interview in which Van Zandt (played to near perfection by Austin guitarist Charlie Sexton) and a composite sideman character named Zee (Josh Hamilton) recall the influence their colleague had on protoAmericana culture. Toggling between the interview and flashbacks to Foley’s final show, which turned into the recording “Live at the Austin Outhouse,” Hawke tells the story in impressionistic, elliptical swoops, revisiting particular episodes in Foley’s life while one of his songs plays over them.
For the most part, the story is one of once-charmed, nowwistful romance, as a younger Foley falls in love with Rosen, acted with downtoearth equanimity by Alia Shawkat. From the selfdescribed treehouse in Geor gia, where the two live in blissful, Edenic isolation, they make the move to Austin, the better for Foley to be discovered.
He is. But he also discovers some things himself, including a penchant for alcohol, cocaine and carousing; the strains of the road and its beckoning temptations; and a lovehate relationship with audiences he’s as likely to alienate as entertain. Hawke, who directed the terrific documentary “Seymour: An Introduction,” about pianist Seymour Bernstein, brings a natural affinity for music to “Blaze,” in which he gracefully integrates Foley’s witty, literate, cosmically inclined songs into the narrative, often following anonymous side characters with his camera as a way of linking past and present.