I saw this at one of the earliest screenings, at the San Francisco Int’l Film Festival, and was immediately smitten with it. The photography is somewhat noirish, as was Chet Baker’s life trajectory. But really, the movie is sui generis.

A caveat, though. I chose this to show to a Friday night film group a number of years ago, and they hated it and subsequently hated me. People who dislike jazz don’t merely dislike it, they excoriate it, something about it seems very wrong to them. My guess is that the combination of high culture (which jazz was eventually absorbed into) and African-American culture overloads their circuits. In any case, to sit there showing a film I loved to a group that was unanimously reacting horribly to it was a most unpleasant experience and one that I wouldn’t care to repeat.