Let's Get Lost

Slowly, surely this composite portrait of Chet then and now (or in 1987, when Weber shot the film) reveals its own depths.

This is simply the finest jazz documentary ever made.

Let's Get Lost is an atmospheric black-and-white portrait of a jazz trumpet player, an exemplar of West Coast 'cool jazz' in the age when rapid-fire bebop was hot, whose life, career and face were ruined by his various addictions.

There are moments in Let's Get Lost when, if you squint just a little, [Chet] Baker is a ghost image of his former self, the 1950s musical equivalent of James Dean.

“Let’s Get Lost” still feels fresh because it avoids the clichés of music documentaries and biopics.

Once a fashion photographer, always a fashion photographer. Or at least, that's the world to which Bruce Weber has returned. Then again, maybe he only had one great film in him. In which case, I'm glad he made it, because Let's Get Lost is a great film.

What I really love about it is that it manages to be somehow both hagiographic about Baker the musician while at the same time being a brutally honest portrait of a man who, for most of his life, was truly awful to those who loved him.

The allure of Chet Baker's stage persona compared to the shambles of his personal life is staggering in Bruce Weber's fitting elegy to a genius who lived hard yet made it all look so easy.