James Gavin discusses Baker documentary Let's Get Lost in the NY Times:

IN "Let's Get Lost," his 1989 documentary about Chet Baker, the fashion photographer and filmmaker Bruce Weber shows a photograph so erotic that his camera all but drools over it. There stands Baker, the jazz trumpeter and singer who was one of the first beautiful 1950's rebels, captured at his peak of allure by another photographer, William Claxton. Tanned, athletic and 26, Baker poses shirtless beside his wife, Halema. His cool half-smile seduces the viewer.

No one seemed to notice the rest of the contact sheet from which the 1956 photograph was taken, even though the sheet was scanned in the film. Several images show Baker glaring out demonically. He had just started a heroin habit that would keep growing until 1988, when he landed, dead, on the pavement below an Amsterdam hotel window. That mysterious end — suicide, accident or murder? — added one more romantic touch to the mythology of one of the most unromantic men who ever lived.

....Seeing a rare screening of "Let's Get Lost" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last month was a reminder of just how prophetic it had been about today's pop culture. We live in an age of worshiping glossy surfaces, of pretending that beauty itself signifies some profound human dimension. Interviewers vie for access to the latest movie hunk, desperate to uncover the mystique they find in his handsome face on screen. He offers only rigidly controlled, vapid responses. The less he reveals, the more he convinces us of hidden depths that may not be there at all.

....Chet Baker's playing and singing, flawed as they could be, hadn't a hint of phoniness. They were stark, poetic, as luscious to the ear as he once was to the eye. His life was another matter. Unlike other fabled drug casualties (Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix), Baker didn't give much cause for sympathy. He was known to abuse women, to lie, steal and con, as most addicts do. By his 40's, he had turned into a ravaged scarecrow, unrepentant about the trail of sorrow he had left behind. Still, people flocked to him, determined to find the Chet Baker they wanted him to be.

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