Before directing "Low Down", American Jeff Preiss worked as director of photography on some documentaries, including the award-winning Let's Get Lost, about musician Chet Baker, as well as directing videos for Mariah Carey, R. E. M. And B-52's. Familiar with the musical universe, he opted for the biopic of jazz pianist Joe Albany. The story is told from the point of view of Amy-Jo (Elle Fanning), daughter of the musician and author of the book, who together with Topper Lilien also wrote the script. Joe, played with intensity by John Hawkes, is a talented, tormented musical genius who has sunk into drugs. Preiss does not victimize him. And it couldn't, since everything is filtered through Amy-Jo's loving gaze. "Low Down" does not follow the pattern of biopics that seek to cover the entire life of the character portrayed. The director is economical in the moments that are shown and emphasizes the waste of a career that could have gone much further.
Preiss spends most of the first half of the film introducing us to Joe's world - the bars and strip clubs where he gets a few gigs, the back rooms where he gets high, and his network of equally addicted friends and associates (including a fellow musician very well played by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea). And if the film sometimes lacks dramatic drive, it is rich in Bukowski's atmosphere, helped immensely by the work of art director Elliott Hostetter and the Super 16mm cinematography of the talented Christopher Blauvelt ("The Bling Ring"), who has the blurry, amber light of old instamatic photographs.
What you see at the beginning of the film is pretty much what you get for the next two hours - the long, slow, steady decline of an addict, punctuated by the usual moments of intervention, false hope, and relapse. But within this well-known plot ("Bird", "'Round Midnight"), Preiss smartly avoids many of the usual clichés. Just as the Coen brothers did with "Llewyn Davis," he doesn't go out of his way to make Joe Albany an exceptional case: his talent is evident but never inflated to levels of genius, and we see that his dependence is also shared by many around him. . He is, in short, a flawed, human, wounded man, and Hawkes brings a humility to the role that says no one understands this better than Joe himself. Joe likes to get high, he admits at the end of the film, and when we see the peaceful calm that envelops him after getting high - the way his body goes slightly limp, as if he were a child back in the womb - we understand exactly what why.
About halfway through the film, Joe decides to skip parole and seek better fortune in Europe, leaving Amy in the care of her maternal grandmother (Close, made up to look a bit like Edith Bunker), who represents the only constant, stabilizing influence in the film. Girl's life. Two years later, when Joe returns, deported and sentenced to five years' probation (the judge was a jazz fan), the family settles into an uncomfortable trio. Amy is now a young woman, with a musician boyfriend of her own (the excellent newcomer Caleb Landry Jones) and Joe tries for a while to stay clean, to become the father he wants to be. You don't need to know the outcome of Albany's real-life narrative to see where this is going, and some of the best scenes in "Low Down" are those devoted to Amy's own dawning realization that she is lost to saving her father - even putting herself in danger to get the drugs she knows he wants.
Preiss has carefully created a very evocative look here, working in Super 16 with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt (The Bling Ring), a grungy look favoring an extensive palette of brown and beige tones in which blown-out windows and lights leave faces and other objects in the foreground in darkness and shadows. Specifically, the camera style strongly echoes Conrad Hall's extraordinary work on John Huston's "Fat City," with a shot of daylight flooding an abandoned bar almost precisely duplicating one from the 1972 film. Topper Lilien and Albany is frustratingly amorphous, with little sense of dramatic shaping or rhythm. It often feels like you're just passing time with the characters as they face yet another purposeless day, and in Joe Albany's case, to see if he can get through it without wandering off for yet another fix. Played sympathetically by Hawkes, Joe is a nice guy with a kind heart, especially when it comes to his daughter. Unfortunately, he's not always there for her, and her support system is precarious at best; the mother (Lena Headey, powerful) is a hopeless and moody drunk, so in a pinch, Amy-Jo has to stay with Joe's mother, Gram (Glenn Close, frighteningly good), a tough woman who, one might think, could take care of the teenager more responsibly than she does.
Amy-Jo goes to school sometimes, loves listening to her father play, which he does beautifully, and can spot suspicious characters and drug dealers from miles away. Her hopes for life and goodwill toward her father seem infinite, which only makes his neglect of her well-being all the more heartbreaking. He breaks parole and is thrown back into prison for a while, must undergo a period of review, and complains that, "Here, no one seems to care about music," which raises the question of why they don't look for pastures. Greener somewhere else. In fact, at one point, Joe leaves his daughter behind and disappears to Europe for two years, only to be deported for drugs and have his passport revoked, yet another careless move in a life seemingly full of them. Unfortunately, the film never begins to reveal what's really going on inside Joe Albany; Sure, it's told from his daughter's perspective, but over the course of two hours we're never told what the song really means to him or even how he feels about what he's done with his life. Most of the time, it seems like he's avoiding any genuine responsibility, whether for his daughter, from whom he tries to shield the worst of her behavior, or for himself. The priorities are drugs, first, music, and then everything else. The fabric of his life is evocatively represented, but very little of the man, whose drug addiction dominates him most of the time. At one point, Amy-Jo finds her first boyfriend, Cole (Caleb Landry Jones), an epileptic drummer with his own problems.
"Low Down" doesn't skimp on equally touching moments. Close, who is as competent as Hawkes and Fanning here, has the anguished look of a mother who feels she has somehow failed, at one point even cradling her adult son in her arms and whispering, "My poor lost son." And Heady has a great bittersweet scene at the end - an attempted mother-daughter reunion interrupted by drunken self-hatred. However, the film as a whole has a strangely formless feel; it doesn't flow from one scene to the next, but rather jerks spasmodically, and lacks a clear point of view. (The film begins with Amy's voice-over narration and is strongest when it appears to unfold through her eyes, but it often veers into scenes that don't involve her.) It's also about 10 to 15 minutes longer than it should be. . Preiss may have tried to infuse "Low Down" with the feel of jazz - with unpredictable, ever-changing rhythms - but he is only partially successful. He made a good movie with a better one trapped somewhere inside. In addition to multiple tracks from the real Albany, the film's excellent jazz soundtrack, produced by Swiss-Israeli composer/arranger Ohad Talmor, features classic performances by Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk and Max Roach alongside new recordings with trumpeter Russ Johnson and pianist Jacob Sacks.
The weakness of "Low Down" is that it loses the ironic tone and funny parts of the eccentric, disheveled Albany of the memoir. In the film, Amy-Jo befriends - and develops a small crush on - a lonely dwarf (Peter Dinklage) who lives in her hole-in-the-wall apartment building. In the book, she is fascinated and sometimes delighted when he reveals himself as a porn star, but on screen, it is presented as a crushing blow to her innocence. Fanning is among cinema's most expressive young actresses, and she's a vivid presence here-her observation makes it clear that Amy-Jo will grow up to write her story. But the character is a bit prissy, and, in the end, when she herself approaches the heroine, there is absolutely no preparation for it.
The production emphasizes the idea that what you experienced as a child is "normal" for you, even if you grew up seeing things children shouldn't see and enduring things they shouldn't have to endure. One of the film's most quietly unsettling scenes shows Amy watching a man knock on a neighbor's door, then continuing to watch as the woman opens the door, lets the man in, and tells her young son to wait in the hallway. A subsequent shot of Amy and the boy watching TV in the building's lobby captures the instant rapport that children of addicts feel. Fanning's performance in this mostly reactive role could hardly be bettered; we understand every tremor of feeling in Amy as we watch her move, listen, and be heartbroken. Preiss's film does a consistently excellent job of explaining the allure of jazz and the psychology of addicts, their enablers, and their children without explaining anything. We just watch and understand.
