Don Cheadle launches crowd-funding campaign for Miles Davis movie

Don Cheadle is looking for some green to fund a film about the man who made “Kind of Blue.”

Cheadle intends to star in and make his directorial debut on “Miles Ahead,” a movie about the iconic jazz trumpeter, bandleader and composer Miles Davis, and has launched a campaign on Indiegogo to raise $325,000 to do so.

“Miles Davis was not a typical jazz musician,” Cheadle says in a video pitch. “He preferred that his work be referred to as ‘social music,’ the music of its time. And in keeping with spirit, I think it’s only befitting that the making of this movie be a social experience.”

The film, which has been a passion project of Cheadle’s for years, is to recount a tumultuous few days when Davis returned to recording and performing after a retreat from the public eye in the mid-’70s when he battled drug addiction.

Ewan McGregor will star opposite Cheadle as an unreliable Rolling Stone reporter.

Cheadle has recruited Herbie Hancock (a contemporary of Davis’) and composer Robert Glasper to work on the movie. He also has the blessing of Davis’ family, who floated his name as the right man to play Davis in 2006, during the artist’s posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Cheadle, who is seeking to shoot “Miles Ahead” in Cincinnati this summer, is the latest filmmaker to turn to crowdfunding to support a pet project, following in the footsteps of Rob Thomas (“Veronica Mars”), Spike Lee (a yet untitled movie) and Zach Braff (“Wish I Was Here”).