Let's Get Lost Review

Reviews

Jun 6th 2008 By Total Film

You, the night and the music are the themes of photographer Bruce Weber’s ’88 documentary about Chet Baker, ’50s West Coast cool-jazz icon-turned-junkie waster. To paraphrase a contributor, the young Baker was bad and beautiful, a James Dean of the Beats-jazz scene and inveterate seducer with whom Weber seems smitten. By contrast, the ’80s Baker is smack-deathly and barely there, wafting questions aside like cigarette smoke. Between these extremes, Weber juxtaposes romantically noir-ish visions of an aged Baker slumped in a car in the Cali night, like a man heading to his doom, with tempering truths from Baker’s friends, lovers and family. The result plays like an elegy for the demise of the cool, thick with the small-hours allure of addiction and infatuation but smart enough to see clearly.