Out of circulation since 1993, Bruce Weber’s “Let’s Get Lost” is a convoluted exercise in various obsessions. The film whirls through plenty of them during a leisurely, opiated couple of hours: Mr. Weber’s dizzying absorption with inky, underexposed black-and-white photography; his subject, the fallen jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker’s lifelong craving to stuff his veins with narcotics; the magnetic allure Baker’s doomed romanticism held for a string of willfully gullible women, and our collective public fascination with pop idols and the iconography of desire.

Baker was 58 when he died in a fall from an Amsterdam hotel window a few months before the film’s 1988 premiere. It wasn’t the ending Mr. Weber had planned on, but after watching his camera trace the lingering arc of the musician’s decay, it seems inevitable. Once the poster boy for West Coast “cool jazz” in early the 1950s, Baker — as we often are reminded — was a kicked-back natural who combined the sensitive rebel charm of James Dean with post-bop chops that wowed Dizzy Gillespie. Though critics have tended to brand him a lightweight on the horn, Baker also established himself as a vocalist of wispy languor, one whose themes of ache and ardor made him a heartthrob.

This, even as his thriving addiction to heroin marked him as yet another successful jazz figure who would be sucked into bohemia’s underbelly. As Baker steadily declined, suffering jail stints, having his teeth knocked out, and fathering numerous children he rarely saw, his no-less-troubled contemporary, Miles Davis, reinvented jazz about four or five times.

Still, it’s within Baker’s prodigious promise, swift collapse, and brief flashes of latter-day inspiration that Mr. Weber finds a perfect focus for his adoring eye. Baker’s immaculate good looks had degenerated into a cracked mask of pain and regret by the time Mr. Weber caught up with him. Yet, like a shattered boxer clinging to the ropes, the performer could not be counted out of the game. The show went on.

It’s the film’s essential hook. And it’s irresistible: the idea that, even as wreckage, Baker could still stir an audience or the affections of a lover with some fragment of profound and sublimated suffering. Against all odds, the filming of “Let’s Get Lost “coincided with a small comeback. Baker had collaborated with Elvis Costello, adopting his song “Almost Blue” as a signature, and lived in Europe as a working exile. But he already looks like a walking ghost. The stark contrast between the two Chets is the film’s driving rhythm, as scenes shot by Mr. Weber are juxtaposed with vintage performance footage, clips from movies Baker starred in or inspired (Robert Wagner played a version of the trumpeter, renamed Chad Bixby, in 1960’s “All the Fine Young Cannibals”), interviews with various ex-wives and associates, and the stunning photography of William Claxton, who discovered Baker before his fame and helped launch his ancillary career as an icon of style.

This strategy, executed without much obvious concern for chronological clarity, seems designed to immerse audiences in the cloudy fugue of memory — perhaps even Baker’s own provisional self-mythology, which is glorified and contradicted in equal measure. The film at once marks an homage to the birth of hipsterism in the Eisenhower era and a wallow in the twilight noir of has-beenism. Mr. Weber strives to redeem his subject as some sort of monument, capturing the ruined majesty of Baker’s face as if it really did belong on Mount Rushmore, and casting him as the bad and beautiful kingpin of Los Angeles wild life. There he is, cruising in the back of a convertible with Mr. Weber’s sylphlike models nuzzling either shoulder, or entertaining the small talk of late-’80s cool kids like Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea and the actress Lisa Marie.

The gorgeous new print that Mr. Weber will personally unveil at tonight’s Film Forum screening is such a visual treat that it’s easy to forgive the film’s indulgences. This is not a documentary for people who are expecting a Ken Burns treatment. It is, at times annoyingly so, akin to a cinematic adaptation of an old Interview magazine feature. But Mr. Weber’s affection for artifice slowly gives way to an unflinching taste for hard truth. Chet Baker did not leave a good-looking corpse, but Mr. Weber has framed one ceaselessly seductive death trip.

Through June 28 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).