'Round Midnight (1986)

Round Midnight is a 1986 film directed by Bertrand Tavernier and written by David Rayfiel and Bertrand Tavernier. It tells the story of an African American tenor saxophone player in Paris in the 1950s who is befriended by an unsuccessful French graphic designer who idolizes the musician and who tries desperately to help him to escape alcohol abuse. The protagonist jazzman, "Dale Turner," was based on a composite of real-life jazz legends Lester Young (tenor sax) and the tortured and enigmatic Bud Powell (piano). While the film is fictionalized, it is drawn directly from the memoir/biography Dance of the Infidels written by Francis Paudras, who had befriended Powell during his Paris expatriate days and on whom the character "Francis" is based. The film is a wistful and tragic portrait that captures the Paris jazz scene of the 1950s.