MILES AHEAD Trailer: Don Cheadle Plays Miles Davis in This Unconventional Biopic

Don Cheadle has been tearing up the small screen on Showtime's House of Lies for the past few years, and his film work has largely been limited to portraying James Rhodey Rhodes (aka War Machine) in Marvel's Iron Man sequels and Avengers movies. But he's returning to the big screen with a passion project that's been brewing for years, a biopic of the great jazz musician Miles Davis called Miles Ahead that marks his directorial debut.

EW has the first trailer, which you can watch below:

While it might appear to be marketed similar to a traditional biopic, apparently Cheadle went out of his way to make sure it doesn't feel like any other music movie we've seen before:

"I had seen other films that have done it — because I’ve been a part of several of them, by the way. Biopics, where I guess you could say tropes; I would say they’re also just signposts you have to hit along the way. When you set out to make a biopic, the purpose, whether stated or not, is usually to hit the highlights or lowlights of someone’s life in order to crescendo at the end. It is trope, I guess that’s the word. But I thought, especially with someone like Miles Davis, whose life seemed to very antithetical to that, and whose art was so mercurial and spontaneous and not dedicated to any sort of form that he had done before. He went on to the next thing and he kind of never looked back. I thought it would really be totally anathema to him to do something that felt standard, so to speak."

Miles Ahead hits theaters on April 1st.