Chet Baker possessed such shimmering star quality that his life and work pours scorn on modern celebrity and it’s loose understanding of ‘talent’. Possessing an effortless mastery of the trumpet, an angelic voice and matinee idol looks, Baker developed a unique style that would make even the most ardent jazz-hater weep: slow, soulful, frail and precise.
Let’s Get Lost is not just about Baker but about the impact of such God-given talent, and the profound self-indulgence that accompanies it, on both the individual and those left in his wake. In Baker’s case, an archetypal jazz musician’s lifestyle led to a lifelong heroin addiction and a catalogue of abuse against friends, family and self.
Bruce Weber made his name photographing adverts for Calvin Klein, and at times his heightened aesthetic seems almost too lush for non-fiction. In the opening scene of the film, as Baker and his beautiful, bohemian companions jazz-scat on a beach, it’s difficult not to expect a voiceover to whisper, ‘Obsession’. But the film is something other than documentary; it’s a photographer’s attempt to capture beauty at its most ugly.
Let’s Get Lost is a poetic counterpoint to the indefinable, fragile beauty of Baker’s music and the contrasts of darkness and light in his personality. Shot on the sort of black-and-white stock on which whites are rendered silver, it is a stunning sensory experience, only marred by the inevitable filmmaker’s reluctance to let the music play without interruption.
While Baker is shown as manipulative, occasionally violent, destructive and self-mythologising, the film remains largely non-judgmental – caught somewhere between the awe and pity that Baker inspired. Whereas that might appear a negation of objectivity, instead it captures something pure and truthful about the allure of brilliance, and the magnetic pull of the void that would lose us.
