TWO VIEWS OF ‘LET’S GET LOST’ : Documentary Ignores Baker’s Music--It’s Not Photogenic

“There’s a lot of (deleted) attitude’s goin’ on here,” Chet Baker growls, annoyed, during a late-night, late-in-his-life recording session. Amen. “Let’s Get Lost” (at the Nuart through June 3) runs on attitude, on surface, on an adoration of beauty and a horrified fascination with the loss of that beauty. It’s a phony Valentine, an exploitation of the ruined old junkie that Baker had become, done with the complete complicity of Baker himself.

Why wouldn’t Baker be an accomplice? Here was Bruce Weber, heavyweight fashion photographer and fledgling film maker, Mr. Calvin Klein Ads himself, clearly a worshipful fan. He was able to pour almost unlimited amounts of money--reportedly $1 million--into a documentary portrait whose focus was entirely Baker. Since’s Weber’s entourage apparently includes the young boxers from his first film, “Broken Noses,” as well as nymphet actress-models, there would be a constant, adoring audience to listen to all the old stories all over again. Why hesitate?

Baker didn’t. And so we have this gorgeous-looking, creepy portrait: Baker nodding in and out of consciousness, answering these dim interviewers (“Do you find life boring?”) or smothered happily between two beautiful women in a 1950s convertible, driving up the Pacific Coast Highway as Weber makes his delirious homage to the cool ‘50s.

The film is gorgeous; cameraman Jeff Preiss’s rich, contrasty black-and-white turns the thick palm trees silver as the wind hits them; you think you’ve never seen them so beautiful before and you’re right. Beauty and banality, arm in arm.

We are spared nothing. Baker on the bumper cars. Santa Monica beach at twilight, where the boxers, would-be Baker look-alikes, bop, somersault and preen in white socks and pompadours, yearning for a scintilla of Baker’s aura. The long-haired model whirls round and round, as instructed by someone off-camera. It’s as vapid and as pointless as it sounds and probably only someone in Baker’s state could stand much of it.

And his music? There is that, of course. But in a world centered around image, music takes a back seat to cutting-edge cheekbones. Weber has such little respect for Baker’s music that he muscles in on the end of a phrase to have one of Baker’s ex-old-ladies rag on another one, a wife or another ex-girl friend. Or Weber overrides the music so we can hear his precious questioner prod: “Maybe you can tell me about your unfortunate encounter and how you got your teeth knocked out. . . . “

A few of the old gang elude this stultifying approach: musician Jack Sheldon, as drily hilarious as he ever was, tells outrageous stories from the bad old days, and tall, sandy-haired photographer Bill Claxton describes the camera’s affinity for Baker: “He had charisma. This was a new word in the mid-’50s.”

Claxton was almost Baker’s own age when he took the photographs that cemented Baker into everybody’s memory book as the icon of jazz, at 22. The Claxton eye is extraordinary; a riffle through his contact sheets makes it clear that the young man with the camera was as arresting a talent as the young man with a horn. (And, shot for shot, a more dynamic artist than Weber, at least in Weber’s Greek-god ad work.)

Weber’s chloroformed presentation seems to regard the loss of his crazy good looks as the real tragedy of Baker’s life. Over and over Weber cuts from footage of Baker at 57 in the most merciless light possible, looking like a seamy con man or a raddled Oklahoma cowboy who’s been out in the weather too long, to the blank, undeniable beauty of Baker in his early 20s. He’s the perfect idol, whispy, whispery, enigmatic, someone you could project everything onto because there was so little there there.

“Let’s Get Lost” is a three-layer exercise in betrayal: Baker’s casual lifetime habit of letting down anyone near him. As ex-love Diane Vavra says, “You can’t really rely on Chet. Once you know that you’re OK.”

There is Weber and his crew, in Stillwater, Okla., softly coaxing damning admissions out of Baker’s mother, Vera, his wife and the kids, having first gotten their trust. Elsewhere, without a touch of empathy, Weber eggs on Baker’s other women to bad-mouth one another. He gets Vavra to pose--again in harsh outdoor light--with a huge picture of her loveless love.

Finally in Europe, after the Cannes Film Festival, and a notable performance of “Almost Blue” for the festival goers--”the worst possible crowd”--Baker is at his frailest, his very joints seem to grate. In their hotel room, Weber purrs on camera, “I know you’re without your methadone, Chet, you’re feeling sick and desperate . . . it’s been so painful to see you like this.” Even the unflappable Baker seems stunned. “This is a big drag and completely unnecessary,” he says softly.

Audiences may agree.