Review: 'Born To Be Blue' Starring Ethan Hawke Is A Good Movie About A Great Artist

The long-standing problem plaguing biopics can be best encapsulated by a single question: How do you tell someone's life story, which likely spans decades, within 120 minutes? To omit vital events in one's life will elicit enraged responses among viewers. On the flipside, to have a film unfurl like a banal scrapbook, cataloguing personal highlights without exploring them, is equally infuriating.

Recent history shows that the best approach to this genre is narrowing the scope. Ava DuVernay's "Selma" was especially effective because it had no interest in presenting audiences with the life and times of Martin Luther King. Instead, DuVernay offered up – in meticulous detail – an intimate account of the march from Selma to Montgomery, circa 1965. In honing in on one of many milestones of the Civil Rights Movement, it elucidated King's virtues as a person and leader, without synthesizing his entire life story into a hackneyed, two-hour affair.

Robert Budreau's "Born to Be...