Don Cheadle co-wrote and stars in his directorial debut, a fanciful (Cheadle prefers the term “metaphorical”) tale of an encounter between Ewan McGregor’s Rolling Stone journalist and Cheadle’s reclusive Miles Davis in 1979. Having lost his muse and succumbed to years of medicated silence, Davis is rumoured to be on the brink of a comeback. But an attempted interview soon descends into a caper chase of drug deals, shootouts and stolen tapes, interspersed with flashbacks to Davis’s once-inspirational relationship with Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), amid rasping declarations that “it takes a long time to play like yourself”.

Like Davis’s music, the film’s structure is modal, with Cheadle getting the legend’s changing stance spot on, as we slip on a cymbal splash between his incarnations as the sharp-suited epitome of cool and the coke-addled “Howard Hughes of jazz”. McGregor fares less well, saddled with a dopey Kurt Cobain haircut and a dopier storyline that strives to capture the “original gangsta” aspect of Davis’s career, but instead drags it into the realms of Grand Theft Parsons tomfoolery. Still, there are some nice directorial flourishes (a hallucinatory appearance of musicians in a boxing ring), and a neat conceit in which Davis effectively confronts his younger self in the form of rising star Junior (an impressive Keith Stanfield) strikes less of a bum note than you’d expect.