In 1994, Townes Van Zandt recorded a muscular, defiant song called “Blaze’s Blues.” It was a lament for his friend, the late folksinger Blaze Foley, who took a bullet to the gut in a driveway in Austin, Texas, in 1989. Van Zandt himself would be dead of heart failure just three years later. His insides had been pickled by a seemingly boundless taste for hard liquor.

Is it wrong to romanticize these sorts of lives? The American songbook is overloaded with bandits, drifters, rascals, gadabouts, thieves, vagrants, philanderers, and degenerates—wounded, brooding men who either refused to bend to cultural expectations or couldn’t quite figure out how to. Certainly, the myth of the sad-eyed outlaw-troubadour is intoxicating. It suggests that no real artist can actually function within a corrupt system, so the only authentic choice is to defy everything in service of the work. This seems terrifically noble and righteous—a principled self-sacrifice—until you get a glimpse of the fallout: all the betrayed and misbegotten lovers, the grieving family, the barback who has to sweep up several dozen shattered Budweiser longnecks at 5 A.M., the nurse who hangs the I.V. bag. Is it harmful or brave to cling so desperately to the margins?

“Blaze,” a new film directed by Ethan Hawke, is clear-eyed in its depiction of a man mired in a kind of spiritual exile, but it leans toward the latter notion—that choosing the hard way is always a virtue. Both Foley and Van Zandt were overlooked commercially in their lifetimes, only to have their work resuscitated decades later, when they became cult heroes—swashbuckling iconoclasts with heavy hearts. Foley, who was born Michael Fuller, in Arkansas, in 1949, is played by the musician Ben Dickey; Townes Van Zandt is played by the musician Charlie Sexton. Kris Kristofferson briefly appears as Foley’s father; and Alynda Lee Segarra, of Hurray for the Riff Raff, plays his sister. (Their casting gives the film’s many performance scenes a merciful veracity; anyone who has ever watched a professional actor slowly and clumsily curl his fingers around a fretboard, brow furrowed, will be grateful for it.)

“Blaze” recounts Foley’s life as a periodically brilliant but eternally struggling musician, trying and mostly failing to make it on the roadhouse circuit. Early on in the film, Foley falls in love with an aspiring actress named Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat), but his wild and itinerant life style isn’t compatible with the basic tenets of marriage, and they split a few years later. (“Blaze” is based on “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley,” Rosen’s memoir of their relationship.) Foley never quite seems to absorb or understand that loss. “Every song I hear about a man and a woman? I think about us and cry,” he writes on a postcard to Rosen.

Hawke, wearing a blazer, bluejeans, and cowboy boots, introduced the film at its New York première, earlier this month. “Blaze” was shot mostly in Louisiana, and, Hawke said, was lashed together with “duct tape and love, in service of Blaze.” (Foley was something of a duct-tape connoisseur, often deploying a roll to repair or decorate his wardrobe.) “Blaze” is unusually savvy about mythmaking. Every folksinger, after all, is also a raconteur of sorts. Did Van Zandt really exhume Foley’s body under cloak of night, peel the duct tape off his coffin, root around in the pockets of his burial coat, extract a crumbled pawn slip, and use it to reclaim Foley’s battered old guitar? Does it matter? The story itself is a beautiful poem.

Foley and Van Zandt both wrote soft and mournful songs predicated on the idea that sorrow is inevitable—that it infects us early and never leaves. If you’re in the midst of heartache yourself—if something has collapsed around you, or perhaps if you were the one to collapse it—a song like Foley’s “Clay Pigeons” which was later covered by John Prine, can proffer real comfort. Foley sounds resigned when he sings it, but his lyrics gesture toward reinvention:

In 1998, the singer Lucinda Williams also wrote a song about Blaze. “Drunken Angel,” from her album “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” is elegiac and frustrated. “Why’d you let go of your guitar?” Williams demands. “Why’d you ever let it go that far?” Foley was killed by a man named Carey January, the son of his buddy Concho. Foley had accused Carey of stealing Concho’s welfare checks each month, and the confrontation escalated. (Carey was later acquitted, for reasons of self-defense.) Foley made only one proper record, in 1984. He is remembered now as sweet but self-annihilating.

If “Blaze” has a moral, it’s that process matters more than results, and that any metric of success that accounts for anything other than creative fulfillment is flawed. Fame is a joke; the making is the thing. “All the way to heaven is heaven itself,” Blaze mumbles at one point. He wants us to remember that we were alive the entire time.