I missed Robert Budreau‘s Born To Be Blue during the Toronto Film Festival, and now I’ll be missing a special screening at downtown L.A.’s Regent theatre in a few days. Sorry. All you have to do is blink your eyes and you’re missing something these days. (A special New York screening is also planned.) The critically respected non-biopic (93% on Rotten Tomatoes, 66% on Metacritic) opens on Friday, 3.25.

Posted a month ago: Andrew Barker’s 9.13.15 Variety review reads in part: “In a cinematic landscape awash with hairsplittingly literal musical biopics, it comes as a pleasant surprise to discover that Robert Budreau’s Chet Baker film, Born to Be Blue (IFC Films, 3.25), is not a Chet Baker biopic at all.

“It is, instead, a film about a character who happens to share a name and a significant number of biographical similarities with Chet Baker, taking the legendary West Coast jazz musician’s life as though it were merely a chord chart from which to launch an improvised set of new melodies.

“Upending the conventions of the musical rise-and-fall formula while still offering a relatively straightforward three-act narrative, the film is anchored by an Ethan Hawke performance that ranks among the best of his career. It’s hard to say how much of a draw it will be commercially: Jazz purists will likely be confused, and viewers expecting anything resembling a primer on Baker’s music will be frustrated. But Budreau isn’t out to make a live-action dramatization of Baker’s Wikipedia page here; he’s trying to make a real film.”