MOVIE REVIEWS : TAKING A SUBLIME LOOK AT A JAZZ MUSICIAN’S LIFE

Movies about jazz have never been very good at telling us why musicians make music. Only one, the doughty little Chicago-made “Stony Island,” made music seem as necessary to those who played it as bread, or perhaps more so. Bertrand Tavernier’s sublime “ ‘Round Midnight” ends all that. (It opens Friday at the Regent, Westwood.)

This is the world of jazz from the very inside, where the impulse and the struggle to play is so much a part of the daily fabric of life that it is unspoken. The screenplay, by David Rayfiel and Tavernier, traces the Paris sojourn of a fictional saxophonist, Dale Turner, an alcoholic and authentic genius of be-bop, played with tragic authority by jazz legend Dexter Gordon.

“ ‘Round Midnight” is the first film about jazzmen to be made in their own rhythms; it’s a ballad, with repeated themes, long sustained passages and a perfect, delicate gravity about it. It’s also the portrait of an unlikely, unfolding friendship. And in it, one can also feel Tavernier’s civilized rage at the waste and neglect that form the bottom line of these musicians’ lives. (The story is loosely based on the Paris days of pianist Bud Powell.)

As we first see the noble ruin that is Dale Turner, he’s in a crummy, claustrophobic New York hotel room where his close musician friend, Hershell, is dying. With affectionate disdain, Hershell asks Turner if he’s still playing that stuff that “drives people wild.” Quietly, Turner says yes. But his melancholy staunchness suggests that it’s not really a matter of choice: The music has claimed him; he can only give it a voice.

Turner has had monumental influence on a whole generation of cooled-out musicians, but his name means nothing on an American supper-club marquee. With one great effort against the inertia that is almost killing him, Turner moves to Paris. There, at the Blue Note, he finds kinship--and success. In contrast to the Americans, bewildered that they can’t follow the tune, young Parisians flock to hear Turner’s elegant intricacies--in the company of Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Billy Higgins, Wayne Shorter, Pierre Michelot and more.

Tavernier shapes the music subtly. He begins with melodic, bluesy arrangements (by Hancock) of “As Time Goes By” or “Autumn in New York.” Only near the end, when we are quite seduced by Dexter Gordon’s ravishing tone, does he venture into the darkly difficult equations that Turner worked out in his head, night after night.

Tavernier is equally roundabout in bringing on Francis (Francois Cluzet), the graphic artist who becomes Turner’s watchdog, acolyte, bullying friend and savior. Beginning at a high angle on the deserted street, the camera follows a panhandler, trying to scare up subway change. One of his last, persistent attempts is with a thin-faced youngish man, crouched in the rain by the Blue Note’s street-level window.

“If I had any cash, I’d be inside!” Francis snarls. The consummate fan, he even leaves his apprehensive 9-year-old daughter, Berangere (Gabrielle Haker) alone in their apartment, to catch what he can of Turner’s numbers there on the street.

Turner is a giant, but a mortally wounded one. Buttercup (Sandra Reaves-Phillips), the substantial blues singer who acts as his agent/nurse/power of attorney and omnipotent dragon, has made sure no one at the Blue Note gives him so much as a vin rouge. Turner responds by cadging drinks with princely elegance.

Just such a cadged beer brings Francis into Turner’s life. Slowly, with a growing, insider’s-eye-view of Turner’s frailty, Francis makes the older man’s life the focal point of his own. Fiercely deposing Buttercup, Francis takes the 6-foot-4 musician into his crackerbox apartment, determined that the “greatest tenor sax player lives decently.”

Tavernier makes both men ruthless in pursuit of their particular passion: Francis borrows the money for a bigger place from his separated wife. Looking for what Tennessee Williams once called “the click” inside his head that turned everything off, Turner bolts at a second’s notice, to turn up hours later in hospitals or police stations.

After one really horrific drunk, Francis, aghast, asks another band member if something happened during Turner’s set. “When you have to explore every night,” the vibes man says gently, “even the most beautiful things you find can be painful.”

With consummate tact, intelligence and passion, Tavernier lets us understand the cost of such exploration. “ ‘Round Midnight’s” distinction is its evenhanded distribution of the beauties and horrors of a musician’s life: the dun-colored characterless hotel rooms, the clubs themselves, grayed by decades of cigarette smoke--and the music that is reached in those settings.

Dexter Gordon, moving serenely to his own inner rhythms, ironic, unexpectedly sweet, utterly aware of both his powers and his demons, is complex and magnificent. If it takes a little acclimatizing to get used to his grave, unrushed speech patterns, hang in; it’ll grow on you. Although every actor-musician in the film is exactly right, down to Martin Scorsese’s Gatling-gun delivery in a bit as a New York club manager, it is Lonette McKee, as a Lena Horne-like part of Turner’s past, who seems to have the same radiance and strength as Gordon.

Among these evocative and essential Paris streets and hotel rooms (by legendary set designer, Alexandre Trauner), filled with great and humbling music, “ ‘Round Midnight” becomes the personification of Dizzy Gillespie’s words on be-bop: “It is the most serious music ever made in America and a lot of people died for it.”