<div><p>Photographer/director Bruce Weber loved Chet Baker. In fact, everyone who met him loved him, usually while hating him. It was easy to do both, judging by the talking heads in this documentary from 1988, all of whom seem to have at least one astounding tale of bad behaviour concerning the veteran jazz trumpeter. They also have tales of how sublime things were when he played - and their word is often all we have on that, as Baker, a philandering dope fiend, was too out of it to record much. To his credit, Weber doesn't hold back on the gory details of Baker's often dismal life; his lens isn't rose-tinted, but it does, despite its 1950s-noir surface, very much offer an 1980s idea of cool as Baker - once so handsome, now ravaged by age and drugs - drifts on and off the screen. He was clearly on the way out (he died just months before the premiere), but, as Weber shows, he was lost right from the start.</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=29508521&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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