Blaze

Musician Blaze Foley, or rather David Michael Fuller, died in 1989. He was reportedly buried with everything he owned, and that wasn't very much: he even used duct tape on the tips of his cowboy boots. When If I Could Only Fly, which Foley had written, was sung by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, he kept a piece of newspaper in his shoe for months in which Haggard had called it one of the best country songs of recent years. In Ethan Hawke's film, he finally gets a chance to speak in his own voice, a voice whose sound was sometimes irritating-it wasn't without reason that Lucinda Williams dedicated the song Drunken Angel to him. But with the help of his former partner, Sybil Rosen, and newcomer Ben Dickey, Hawke finds in the musician a huge amount of tenderness. In what is undoubtedly the best film he has directed so far, Hawke makes reference to Foley's last album, recorded live just before his tragic death, with Kris Kristofferson and Richard Linklater in the background. I don't want to be a star, I want to be a legend, says Foley, as played by Dickey. He may just have accomplished that.