Blaze

Blaze (2018) is a nonlinear music biography you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Ethan Hawke. The subject is Blaze Foley — a Texas outlaw country songwriter whose songs fed the sets of Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson while his own name stayed in the margins.

Hawke braids three strands of Foley's life: his love affair with Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat), his last violent night alive, and the accounts of those who remembered him afterward. The lead is Ben Dickey — not an actor but a working musician Hawke spotted in a magazine photo. That gamble pays off. Dickey's Foley carries the weight of someone who could only process the world through songs and couldn't manage anything else. Charlie Sexton, Wyatt Russell, Sam Rockwell, Steve Zahn, Chris Kristofferson and Richard Linklater orbit in smaller roles.

Hawke, who spent years around Austin's music scene, films it without romanticism — the debt, the bad rooms, the slow drift toward being forgotten. No glory myth. Just the cost. Stream Blaze (2018) online on iFILM.