The list of great jazz musicians with even greater heroin problems is a long one, and towards the top of it you will find Joe Albany. A virtuoso pianist from Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the mid 1940s Albany worked with jazz royalty, a testament to his gift for be-bop—the avant-garde, high-tempo style of the era. In his 20s at the time, Albany was one of the few white pianists to play with be-bop pioneer Charlie Parker, and later with the peerless trumpeter Miles Davis. But once the drugs took hold, his downward slide was long and lasting.

New biopic Low Down catches up with Albany in the 1970s, a sad figure now hustling for live dates to feed his habit in the low-rent jazz bars of Hollywood, where he lives in a seamy hotel with his daughter Amy, whose memoir was the basis for the film. Amy is played by Elle Fanning, the 16-year-old sister of Dakota who starred in Sofia Coppola’s 2010 drama Somewhere and more recently alongside Angelia Jolie in Disney's supernatural fantasy, Maleficent. With John Hawkes as Joe, the film paints an unsparing, russet-brown picture, not just of Albany's own decline, but that of the Central Avenue jazz scene of mid-70s Los Angeles, as the music itself—once the epitome of cool and cutting-edge—drifts into kitsch and insignificance.