Early on in "Let's Get Lost," Bruce Weber's 1988 documentary about Chet Baker, the jazz trumpeter is asked if he would like a glass of wine. "Yeah," he replies in that wispy exhale of a voice that made his singing sound so imperiled -- and irresistible. The way Baker pronounces the word, you hear diffidence, avidity, resignation, possibly even thirst. It may be that no syllable has been more seductively uttered in a movie. It also may be that no documentary has ever been more seductive than ''Let's Get Lost," never before available on DVD.

It's hard to exaggerate just how beautiful Baker was when young: prominent cheekbones, deep-set eyes, square jaw, sensual mouth. Weber's inclusion of extensive archival footage casts into all the greater relief what a wreck Baker became. He was a kind of aural Dorian Gray: The aspen-leaf voice staying ageless, the delivery improving even as the face tightened into decay and corruption.

"Everyone has a Chet Baker story," photographer William Claxton says on camera. Weber lets us hear a lot of them. Sometimes the stories are funny, as when trumpeter Jack Sheldon talks about Baker eating the pie off his plate when the young musicians were starting out (and Sheldon's mother had baked the pie). Usually, they're not, as when we hear from the last of Baker's three wives, three of his four children, his mother, a past girlfriend and a current one.

The miraculous thing about "Let's Get Lost" is that Weber has managed to create something that's both impossibly stylized -- the black-and-white photography is nothing short of ravishing -- and unmistakably moral (not judgmental, moral). Even as he glorifies Baker's persona -- no, worships it -- Weber presides over its self-destruction. He shows us just how dreadful Baker could be as a person ... and, however paradoxically, the extent to which that dreadfulness contributed to his magnetism. The women Weber interviews have hair-raising things to say about Baker. Also, to varying degrees, they still love him. The elements don't cancel each other out but merge to create something larger, richer: a rendering of an artist that is itself a work of art, a moral portrait of a hopelessly amoral man.

Extras: documentary short, director's comment, Weber documentary short ''The Teddy Boys ..." (Metro, $49.98)

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