'Round Midnight

With its hackneyed story of the self-tortured artist, further romanticized by the liberal white European deification of a black American jazz musician, this shouldn't be a good movie. But director Bertrand Tavernier finesses the rote goo for the most part, having wisely decided that real-life, hardbitten musicians would be more credible thespians than actors pretending to blow their horns and cadge their drinks. Tavernier's casting of saxophonist Dexter Gordon in the starring role of Dale Turner is a particular coup. A popular, influential stylist and bona fide bebop luminary, Gordon bookended the Fifties with drug-related prison stints and subsequently spent 14 years in Europe, lending an autobiographical authenticity to his portrayal of Turner, a genius gone lush who flees to Paris on his last legs in 1959. At once vulnerable and cunning in the service of his addiction, Turner moves through the movie in a lugubrious fog, his face as puffy and misshapen as a burnt marshmallow. During the frequent, extended musical sequences that anchor the film, Gordon's beautifully bittersweet saxophone lines (framed in Herbie Hancock's Oscar-winning score and abetted onstage by such ringers as Hancock, Ron Carter, and Billy Higgins) further conflate the fictional plot with the actual troubles he has seen. (Britt Robson)