Don Cheadle (Brian Douglas/Sony Pictures Classics)

“If you’re gonna tell a story, come with some attitude, man.” Miles Davis (Don Cheadle) tells this to a television crew as Miles Ahead opens. A monitor behind the gravel-voiced trumpet legend helpfully places this scene in time, a Japanese concert featuring Davis’ great early 70s band with guitarist Pete Cosey placing this moment sometime in the mid-70s.

Cheadle may well be talking to himself. As co-writer and director, he brings plenty of attitude to this entertaining biopic. Miles Ahead colors outside the lines, and not unlike the more effective James Brown biopic Get on Up, its loosely structured script doesn’t offer a conventional arc of triumph over defeat. What it does offer is something of a muddle.

Davis is a problematic figure; unlike the tragically straightforward jazz life of Chet Baker (read my Washington Post review of Born to Be Blue here), Davis’ music took so many different and significant musical turns that it would seem impossible to cover his life in two hours.

The movie doesn’t sum up this complicated life, but it does essentially reduce it to a single driving and unlikely force: lost love. Miles Ahead alternates between two periods of Davis’ life: the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when he was a rising star, and the mid-‘70s, when he was in semi-retirement and tentatively planned a comeback (which sets up a terribly corny closing line). Though he seems to be picking up a different woman at every performance, he’s tortured by the memory of The One, Frances (Emayatzy Corinealdi), who haunts his dreams and seems to inspire his more tender playing.

This shifting timeline is framed in part by a quest: Rolling Stone reporter Dave Brill (Ewan MacGregor) is desperate to interview Davis, and when he learns that Davis has stashed an unreleased session tape in his apartment, there’ s another potential scoop. But when somebody else gets to the tape first, the movie turns into something you would never have expected a movie about Miles Davis to turn into: a heist flick.

That’s not as terrible as it sounds, although like the Rolling Stone reporter, it’s completely fictional. The film’s intro sets its musical tone early, and the thrilling, wildly distorted jazz-rock sound of Davis’ early ‘70s band makes a pretty good score for a rambling heist flick. The power of this music makes the ridiculous seem exciting.

But one part of Davis’ genius was his ability to assemble a great band. Throughout his career, he put together a variety of groups that excelled at completely different sounds: his 50’s band sounds nothing like his 60’s band, which sounds nothing like his 70s band. An ideal Davis biopic might well assemble different bands of character actors to perform as well-tuned units in a variety of dramatic styles, centered around its charismatic leader.

Miles Ahead has a charismatic leader in Cheadle. The film occasionally plays its subject’s violent tendencies for laughs, and gives him corny dialogue that Davis would likely have dismissed with vivid expletives. But Cheadle has the Davis mannerisms down and comes off like a living, volatile being. Unfortunately, few of his bandmates are up to the task. MacGregor is little more than a white sidekick, and Corinealdi is easy on the eye, but the only supporting character who shows any real spirit is the reliable Michael Stuhlbarg as fictional record promoter Harper Hamilton.

Miles Ahead is an occasionally ridiculous film about a man who was far from ridiculous. Still, the movie reflects something of the late trumpet player’s genius, through the means of a biographically inaccurate but somehow appropriate genre exercise.

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Miles Ahead
Directed by Don Cheadle
Written by Steven Baigelman and Don Cheadle
With Don Cheadle, Ewan MacGregor, Micheal Stuhlbarg, Emayatzy Corinealdi
Rated R for strong language, drug use, sexuality/nudity and brief violence.
100 minutes
Opens today at Landmark Atlantic Plumbing and the AFI Silver.