Inside Blaze Foley

Ethan Hawke’s Blaze reconsiders an unsung country songwriter.

- Ethan Hawke

ETHAN HAWKE is our most-likable movie-star dilettante. He gives fine, committed performances in films (indie and studio) and still finds time and energy to do Shakespeare, compose and play music, write novels, and direct fiction and nonfiction features. Even when he’s behind the camera, you feel his curiosity and affection: He’s like an actor playing a student, chasing after people he wants to learn from and emulate. Or half- emulate, in the case of Blaze Foley, the subject of his fuzzy but moving biopic, Blaze.

In the annals of outlaw-country singers of the ’70s, Foley (né Michael David Fuller and known, for a time, as Deputy Dawg) comes chest-high at least to John Prine and Townes Van Zandt, though his career was shorter and more tumultuous, and he died unfulfilled—and violently. Writing with Foley’s ex-partner, Sybil Rosen, Hawke views the singer-songwriter’s life as a struggle between two spheres: the nurturing life force symbolized by the tree house in the woods where the couple spent a year and in which Foley found his musical voice, and the road, where Foley fell in with Van Zandt and other reckless, ungrounded artists and left Rosen behind. Van Zandt has a voice in this drama: He’s played by the chiseled, charismatic musician Charlie Sexton and tells stories about Foley to a somewhat clueless radio host (Hawke, seen from behind). It’s Van Zandt who insists that being a musician takes “blowing your family off, job, security, happiness” and finding a sphere wholly apart, to the point of courting chaos.