Review: Low Down
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
For a music predicated on improvisation and spontaneity, movies about jazz tend to play a direly predictable tune.
City Paper grade: C
For a music predicated on improvisation and spontaneity, movies about jazz tend to play a direly predictable tune. Jeff Preiss, who shot the documentary Let’s Get Lost about heroin-addicted trumpeter Chet Baker, directs this biopic about heroin-addicted pianist Joe Albany, an undersung bebopper who played with legends like Charlie Parker and Lester Young but whose struggles with addiction left him largely unrecorded during the music’s prime years.
John Hawkes plays masterful variations on the subject as a loving father, virtuoso musician and object of a bitter tug-of-war between those passions and the merciless pull of his drug of choice. The grainy Super 16 mm photography also contributes to establishing the dingy but homey milieu of fleabag crash pads occupied by addicts and musicians, but ultimately this is another tragic tale where Albany’s hands spend more time on a needle than on a keyboard, bolstering cinema’s skewed portrait of a jazz world overcrowded with junkies.
Based on a memoir by Albany’s daughter Amy-Jo (played by Elle Fanning), Low Down depicts the pianist’s life through her eyes, but stumbles heavily whenever it leaves their relationship to peek at other aspects of her coming of age. A friendship with a neighbor (Peter Dinklage), a romance with an epileptic rock drummer (Caleb Landry Jones) or a bitter reunion with her estranged mother (Lena Headey) — all seem uncomfortably crammed into a story that is essentially about a daughter loving her father in between his too-frequent lapses.
