Ben Dickey fires up the screen as Texas singer in ‘Blaze’

Ben Dickey fires up the screen as Texas singer in ‘Blaze’

Photo of Cary Darling

The film “Blaze” is so steeped in Texas culture that it’s a wonder distributor Sundance Selects isn’t handing out kolaches and migas with every ticket. But the star at the center of actor-director Ethan Hawke’s beautifully rendered biography of the late Austin outlaw-country singer-songwriter Blaze Foley has no Texas roots at all, despite the fact that Foley haunted the honky-tonks and hippie havens of central Texas in the ’80s .

On top of that, Ben Dickey, the Arkansas-born, Louisiana-based musician whose first acting role is that of the brilliant but volatile Foley, never thought of being an actor until New Year’s Eve 2016. That was when he and Hawke — who’ve been friends for 15 years as Hawke’s wife and Dickey’s “sweetheart” are besties — were killing time waiting as others in their party were getting ready to hit the town.

“I was holding a guitar and I started playing (Foley’s) ‘Clay Pigeons’ and singing like Blaze,” Dickey, 41, recalled in an interview during a recent Houston visit, ahead of the film’s Aug. 24 release. “He was looking at me really intensely. I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he was like, ‘You know, you should play Blaze Foley in the movie, that would be cool.’

“That was 8 in the p.m. By 4 in the a.m., we were coming home. We were all crazed and he got this look in his eye and he got real serious and said, ‘I’m going to make this movie.’ I was like, ‘OK’.”

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Dickey didn’t take him seriously at first. Outside of a very brief appearance in Hawke’s 2006 film “The Hottest State,” he had never acted and he had his struggling music career to consider. He had earned acclaim around Little Rock in the band Shake Ray Turbine and then moved to Philadelphia — a friend had taken over a record label there — where he was part of the band Blood Feathers for nine years at night and a chef during the day. Ultimately, through another friend, he relocated back to the South, this time not far from Shreveport, and launched a solo career, releasing the album “Sexy Birds & Salt Water Classics” in 2016.

Still, Hawke, for whom the Foley story was a long-held passion project, asked Dickey to record a couple of Foley songs and send them to him. Finally, Hawke popped the question. “He asked me point blank, ‘Hey, listen, I think I might be able to get the funding for this. You still want to do it?’,” Dickey recalled. “I said, ‘Well, sure, you know,’ again thinking that it might not come together.”

‘Jumping off the side of a cliff’

But he didn’t back away when it was clear that Hawke wasn’t just spit balling. “It was like the feeling of jumping off the side of a cliff,” he said of acting. “I thought ‘What have I done?’ I really trust (Hawke). I love him. He was very encouraging.

“The one thing I had going in was the music and that’s a good life raft, a security blanket of sorts. I was going to take care of Blaze’s music; I was going to make that my mission. Then, once it came to the acting part of it, I was just going to trust the captain. He is good friends with Vincent D’Onofrio and Vincent and I have become friendly over the years. … He did four sessions with me. … He lopped off some misconceptions about what I was going to do and helped me with some principles. … It was nerve-wracking every day.”

Dickey was also encouraged by his co-stars, musician/actor Charlie Sexton who plays musical collaborator Townes Van Zandt and Alia Shawkat who plays his wife, Sybil. “Charlie said, ‘We are about to spelunk into the darkness,’ ” Dickey remembered with a laugh.

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Hawke never had second thoughts about his unorthodox casting decision. “I think it gave Ben a lot of confidence to have Charlie on board. They didn’t have many scenes together. But the fact that Charlie was an inexperienced actor — but he’d done more than Ben — I think maybe Ben thought, ‘If this movie sucks I still get to play guitar with Charlie Sexton’,” Hawke said. “And I had this fallback position where if it didn’t work, well, the music would still be good.

“So the first day of the shoot I gave Ben this script pieced together from all these different Blaze interviews. Stitched together into a long monologue that was almost like a mock documentary. That was two pages he didn’t know he had to memorize. He never had a harder day than that first day. I knew we weren’t going to use it, so I was relaxed. But this worked … . Everybody got to see Ben create this character that was Blaze-ian without being an imitation.”

Putting music to the side

“Blaze” came at an opportune time for Dickey as he’s the first to admit his music career had stalled.

“I made music that I stand by,” he said. “I have friends in the business who (were making it) and I did a good job, a long time ago, of tossing out expectations and only trying to be proud of my friends around me that were making it because it sure felt like, ‘I keep missing the damn ring. What’s going on?’ ”

RELATED: "Blaze" premieres in Texas before California or New York

He was getting ready to tour behind “Sexy Birds” when he heard from Hawke. “I switched gears, gladly,” he said. “I’m learning more and more about challenging myself as an artist and doing things that scare the (expletive) out of me. I can’t not do this and I loved Blaze and I thought if anyone’s going to represent him, I really thought I could do a good job.”

Now, he may get more acclaim as an actor than he ever got in two decades of pursuing music. He has a smaller part in the upcoming D’Onofrio-directed Western “The Kid” starring Hawke and Chris Pratt.

Though Dickey says he’d like to maintain a music career, he’s thrilled to see how acting will unfold. “I like learning, and, so it is all very exciting to me. I quite like it,” Dickey said. “We’ll see where it goes.”

Andrew Dansby contributed to this report.

cary.darling@chron.com