Notorious director George Tillman Jr. is hoping to do for Miles Davis what he previously did for Biggie Smalls—namely, cram his colorful life story into the prefabricated mold of a music biopic, which is sort of the film equivalent of segueing from a bebop solo into a George Strait ballad. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Tillman—who even found a way to put some heavy-handed sermonizing in an action movie starring The Rock—will tackle Davis’ life with the help of the late jazz great’s eldest son Gregory, whose book Dark Magus: The Jekyll And Hyde Life Of Miles Davis forms the basis of the script and is also terrible.
Fittingly for Tillman, Davis' belabored book primarily focuses on his father's turbulent home life and battles with drug abuse, which is always music biopic gold—and naturally, producers have cited Walk The Line and Ray as inspirational examples for the way they “were able to open the world's eyes” to their subjects by focusing on their pat addiction subplots and predictable redemption arcs, which finally allowed the world to reduce these complex people to more easily understandable characters in a melodrama. Anyway, Tillman’s Miles Davis soap opera is on track to begin filming its scenes of Davis being a druggie jerk to his kids pretty soon, which suggests that Don Cheadle’s struggling, long-in-development Miles Davis passion project is even further away from ever happening. Or maybe it just needs to hit rock bottom and make a speech before coming back to blow everyone away?