More cinema diary: 4/24/19 -- Little Woods and Stockholm

Some weeks, the number of movies challenges even those of us who tend to review as much as possible. This is one of those weeks. As a result, I'm trying something a bit different; i.e., I'm going to write about as much as possible in the most efficient way. If it works, you may see this approach again. I'm calling it a "diary" even though it reflects nothing about my life -- other than the fact that much of it has been measured in movies. Make what you will of that.

Little Woods

With Tessa Thompson in a starring role, Little Woods takes a grim but clear-eyed look at the difficulties of surviving in a small North Dakota town where the oil workers use opioids to stave off pain and just about everyone struggles to make ends meet. Thompson's Ollie is just finishing a stint on probation after being jailed for transporting drugs across the Canadian border. She's committed to building a new life and hopes to move to surroundings that are less conducive to the kind of dead-end living that trapped her in the first place. But Ollie's efforts are thwarted by her half-sister (Lily James), a young mother with a talent for trouble. Threated with losing the house where her late mother lived and worried about her sister's second pregnancy, Ollie does the one thing she pledged to avoid: Sell drugs. Little Woods hardly qualifies as a festival of joy: James's Deb barely scrapes by. She lives in a trailer in a parking lot; we know it's only a matter of time until that situation goes bad. The best reason to see Little Woods stems from Thompson's performance, which finds her branching out from previous work in movies such as Thor: Ragnarok and Sorry to Bother You. Little Woods adds tension to the proceedings by giving Ollie a week to raise enough money to save her mother's house from foreclosure. Some stretches of director Nia DaCosta's feature debut tend to drag. Still, Little Woods stands as a serious attempt to explore lives that seldom find their way to the screen, and Thompson's performance keeps the wheels turning.

Stockholm

Regular readers of my reviews know that I think Ethan Hawke was robbed of an Oscar. The injustice began when Hawke wasn't even nominated for a 2019 Academy Award for his performance as a guilt-ridden pastor in First Reformed. Awards or no, Hawke makes interesting choices about the movies in which he appears. In Stockholm, the story of a real-life bank heist that took place in Sweden in 1973, Hawke plays Lars Nystrom, a jacked-up criminal who invades a bank where he holds a couple of employees hostage. Lars wants $1 million and insists on obtaining the release of his bank-robbing pal Gunnar Sorensson (Mark Strong). The movie is meant to illustrate something about Stockholm syndrome, the way hostages can come to sympathize with their captors. To that end, Stockholm builds a relationship between Lars and Bianca (Noomi Repace), one of his hostages, a vulnerable but savvy bank employee. Director Robert Budreau, who worked with Hawke on Born to Be Blue, treats the robbery as an example of bumbling lunacy on the part of the thieves, Stockholm's stolid chief of police (Christopher Heyerdahl) and the Swedish prime minister (Shanti Roney) who refuses to let Lars leave with the hostages. The supporting cast acquits itself well, but Stockholm belongs to Hawke, who creates a portrait of a self-dramatizing felon with a limited capacity for planning and a tendency to panic. Lars even wears a costume to his criminal outing, entering the bank in a leather suit, cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat. If you've been reading this and thinking about 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, I don't blame you. It's difficult to watch Stockholm without remembering director Sidney Lumet's look at a bank hostage situation in New York. In that movie, Al Pacino played a thief with an agenda. Here, Hawke follows suit, capturing the chaotic pathos in Lars' misguided fever dream of a heist.

Ethan Hawke excels as Chet Baker

A jazzy rendition of a musician's life.

Jazz musician and singer Chet Baker was 58 when he passed away in 1988. He was high, and apparently fell out of the window of his Paris hotel. Baker's tumultuous life helped invent what has become a nearly cliched profile: A hard-living, heroin-addicted musician can't seem to separate self-expression from self-destruction.

Director Robert Budreau's Born to Be Blue tries to freshen the story by mixing scenes of a movie Baker is making about himself (the film never happened) with scenes that reflect Baker's artistically rich but dissolute life.

I don't know enough about Baker's life to tell you how close Budreau has gotten in terms of detail, but he certainly gives us a strong feeling for the kind of person Baker was, a task that receives a mighty boost Ethan Hawke's appropriately elusive performance as Baker.

Hawke plays Baker as a trumpet player of wavering confidence and staggering vulnerabilities, a man who was difficult for others to grasp. Maybe he wanted it that way.

Baker, of course, did plenty of hard living, and his approach to women wasn't exactly monastic. Budreau focuses on one woman.

Baker begins a relationship with Jane (Carmen Ejogo), an actress he meets while shooting the movie about his life. Ejogo, who played Loretta Scott King in Selma, is a wonder as the woman who tolerates Baker's addiction and immaturity -- until she no longer can.

The movie also suggests the tension between black and white musicians that sometimes surfaced in the jazz world. Early on, Miles Davis (Kedar Brown) refuses to acknowledge Baker as anything more than a musician who plays "sweet." Davis didn't mean it as a compliment.

But if Baker's music was sweet, whatever was happening inside his head wasn't quite so placid: Baker founders throughout much of Born to Be Blue.

At one point, he has his front teeth knocked out by a drug dealer to whom he owes money: He then must learn to learn to play his trumpet with false teeth, no easy task.

Hawke hits all the right notes, and he and Ejogo play a tipsy, sometimes fractious duet in a semi-successful movie whose best moments stand out like memorable solos in a long and somewhat scattered set.