Dickey looks like a big, shaggy dog with a wounded paw who's been left out in the rain overnight. And he's a real revelation.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 26, 2018

A songwriter making his major acting debut, Dickey captures the burly, vulnerable quality of Foley's lyrics and vocal delivery, creating a palpable sense that the songs were excavated from the darkest corners of his soul.

| Dec 26, 2018

Hawke is more fascinated with passion than profile. And here, that's more than enough.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 14, 2018

Dickey would have made a strong impression regardless. But it turns out he can act, and sing, and has a genuine magnetism that combines with an endearing quality to create a highly appealing screen presence.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 10, 2018

Hawke argues movingly that creative success has nothing to do with fame and everything to do with how an artist grows as a person and impacts the people around him.

| Oct 4, 2018

Hawke tells Foley's story with heart and style, and that's going to make Blaze Foley even more of a legend, and deservedly so.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 28, 2018

Hawke's fascinated by the tug of war between artistic freedom and domestic responsibility, and he's found clever ways to deal with that theme while zigzagging through Foley's life of music, alcohol, cocaine and women.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 27, 2018

Ethan Hawke continues scratching his artisty itch by directing and co-writing a biopic of Blaze Foley that feels as raggedy-shambling, jumbled, and sad (but secretly thoughtful and impressive) as the country music oddball himself.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 21, 2018

The movie is Hawke's fourth and best feature as a director; it's immensely touching, and only deceptively shapeless.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 20, 2018

The great singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt used to say there are two kinds of music: the blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Both are on full, florid display in Blaze, an absorbing, illuminating film about the late musician Blaze Foley.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 18, 2018

It's the kind of movie that, if you give yourself to it, you'll love.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 18, 2018

Every one of the relationships depicted crackles with history, tension and love. This a film about how we tell stories about the dead, and who gets to craft these legends.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 14, 2018

..unconventional in its use of Foley's music to form the film's structure, and in the fascinating detours it takes focusing on peripheral characters.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 13, 2018

A valiant if studied effort, one that occasionally calls to mind Terrence Malick's 2017 freeform music drama, "Song to Song."

| Sep 13, 2018

Blaze feels like a true passion project, an engine running on Hawke's endless supply of enthusiasm for his subject.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 7, 2018

Blaze's first hour is a free-floating, refreshingly exposition-free exploration of an aloof talent who's never quite there.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 6, 2018

Mr. Hawke is clearly motivated by nothing but affection for Blaze, Townes, Sybil and the state of Texas. He doesn't so much scramble biopic conventions as allow himself and the audience to be distracted from them.

| Sep 6, 2018

Director Ethan Hawke turns the story of hard-livin' troubadour Blaze Foley into a tribute to artistic integrity - and the best music biopic of the year

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 5, 2018

What Hawke has provided here, with plenty of grace and a minimum of fuss, is an elegy for a life that went missing, more smolder than blaze, and a chance to hear the songs of the unsung.

| Aug 31, 2018

At its best, Blaze feels like a cinematic translation of not just Blaze Foley's life but his music, anchored by two incredibly likable, lived-in performances.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 17, 2018