Let’s Get Lost: Chet Baker as Gorgeous ’50s Ghost

Call it The Death of the Cool. Anchoring the Earshot Jazz film series at NWFF, Let’s Get Lost stands as a gorgeous gravestone for the Beat Generation’s legacy of beautiful-loser chic. Bruce Weber’s transfixing 1988 portfolio of the artist—ravaged jazz trumpeter Chet Baker—as a junkie wraith unmoored in time seems doubly poignant almost 20 years later, when the bloom of its own newness is gone. In his 1950s heyday, Baker had epitomized West Coast “cool jazz.” As a vocalist, his high-pitched, low-volume crooning was edgily intimate: If Sinatra was said to be singing from the next bar stool, Baker sang from the adjacent pillow. By the time of filming, smack had turned Baker’s dreamboat face to a drawn, hollow-cheeked death mask. Yet the impermanence of beauty is Weber’s true subject.