Don Cheadle directed, co-wrote, and stars in the new film “Miles Ahead,” a bio-pic about Miles Davis. Photograph by Brian Douglas / Sony Pictures Classics

When I heard that “Miles Ahead,” the bio-pic about Miles Davis starring and directed by Don Cheadle, would be set in the late nineteen-seventies, when Davis had stopped performing in public—and would be centered on the story of Davis’s friendship with a white journalist—I was excited, because I knew of such a real-life story, and it’s a good one. The journalist Eric Nisenson (who died in 2003) was befriended by Davis in that period and wrote about the story of their friendship in his biography of Davis, “ ’Round About Midnight.” It’s the story of an earnest lover of jazz who spent lots of time in the combination apartment and music studio of the bassist Walter Booker. One night, Davis came to Booker’s place, met Nisenson, and, to the journalist’s surprise, became a pal. The resulting portrait of Davis by Nisenson was an unsparingly intimate, complex, and oddly whimsical view of the artist in retreat.

That’s not the story that’s told in the movie “Miles Ahead.” There, the journalist, Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), a Scotsman who writes for Rolling Stone, is looking for a scoop. He knocks on Davis’s door, gets a punch in the face for his troubles, then darts past Davis and locks the jazzman out of his own home. Davis proceeds to pull a gun on him, Braden claims to have been sent by Columbia (the record company with which Davis was under contract), and Davis gets Braden to drive him there in Davis’s Jaguar. When, at the record company, Braden’s ruse is exposed, Davis is ready to dump him and ignore him, until Braden promises to score him some top-quality cocaine. That score proves to be the start of a none-too-beautiful friendship.

Fact checking a movie that’s based on a real and famous person and a true story is only one—and not the most significant—way to criticize it. The truth may often be stranger than fiction, but the point is usually less clear, and a movie director with insight into character and a comprehensive worldview can transform true stories into better ones—albeit not without risk. One of the revelations of interviewing artists about their activities is the discovery that their transformative powers often carry over into their own versions of their lives. A tale told by an accomplished writer or filmmaker is likely to shear off many piquant details and bend some lines to make them meet up in meaningful ways. When the same incident is described by a participant of more modest narrative talents, it’s usually filled with a range of details and a spray of loose ends that may pique the imagination but don’t bear much dramatic shape or make a sharpened intellectual or moral point.

Nonfiction’s profusion of details has an intrinsic fascination that fiction risks emptying out. It takes a high level of creation to redeem the dramatized, tailored version—particularly of an artist’s life, because whoever’s telling the story needs to bring a level of insight and imagination comparable to that of the protagonist. The bio-pic of an artist is a severe test for a filmmaker, because the subject will be reduced and deadened by anything less than great inspiration. Unfortunately, Don Cheadle, a superb actor who invests the role of Davis with a sculptural majesty, doesn’t achieve anything comparable with the movie’s direction—or, in particular, with the script, written by him and Steven Baigelman (based on a story that they, Stephen J. Rivele, and Christopher Wilkinson wrote).

Cheadle and his collaborators give the story a double-flashback framework. The movie starts with a filmed interview that Davis grants Braden, and then it cuts to a chase—a car chase, in which Braden is driving, Davis is the passenger, and pursuers in another car are shooting at them and wound Davis. The MacGuffin is a tape of Davis’s music that he made on his own during his time of quasi-retirement and that he’s keeping from his record label, and the pursuers are revealed to be working on behalf of the record label.

This is supposed to have happened in 1978 or ’79. In fact, Davis was shot in a car—on October 9, 1969. He discussed the incident in his autobiography. It took place in Manhattan, when he was in a parked car with a woman, after he performed a concert at a Brooklyn club called the Blue Coronet (which was on Fulton Street). He explained it in terms of his playing at a white-owned club when a black-owned club in the neighborhood wanted him to perform there instead. Here’s how the owner of the Blue Coronet, Dickie Habersham-Bey, who died in 2013 (and who, in fact, was black), told the story in a 2011 interview aptly titled “Who Shot Miles?”:

The week I had Miles . . . he was working for me regularly. Anytime he had a week off, he would call and say, ‘Hey, Dick, I’ll bring [the band] in. This guy who was monopolizing the business—he’s dead now, he got shot on Flatbush Avenue. . . . The name is not important. I booked Miles that week [the week Miles was shot in an altercation in Manhattan after a gig at the Blue Coronet]. The Village Gate had Gloria Lynne. Now, he made a deal with me to have Gloria Lynne at my place. I told him I couldn’t, so he told Miles, ‘Don’t show up [at the Blue Coronet].’ Certain people tried to bulldoze musicians at that time.

But Davis played there anyway—and, for good measure, Habersham-Bey said, Davis’s attorney insulted the extortionist, who then hired a gunman “to make a point, to show you how bad he was.”

As for the tape in question, the one for which (in “Miles Ahead”) an agent looking to get into Columbia’s good graces was willing to kill, there was one (or, rather, two), from 1978. The songwriter Eleana Steinberg was indirectly responsible for the recording—Davis spent several months as a guest at her home in Connecticut, where the idea of making music suddenly and unexpectedly coalesced. There was a cassette tape that Davis recorded with Larry Coryell and other musicians in Connecticut, and it prompted Davis to bring that impromptu band to Manhattan to make a recording at Columbia’s studio. The company’s executives were in attendance, and the session was widely reported on at the time. Though the music done there—supposedly multiple takes of a single piece—was never released commercially, Davis gave the Connecticut tape to Coryell (who declined to release it). The story of those two sessions, which Steinberg and two other participants, the keyboard player George Pavlis and the bassist T. M. Stevens, have discussed, could be a terrific movie in itself.