A Complete Unknown (c) Searchlight Pictures
Film: A Complete Unknown
In Cinemas on Christmas Day
Premise: A young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) hitchhikes his way from Minnesota to New York City in 1961 with a backpack and a guitar to visit his ailing hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), but he overshoots and has to backtrack to a New Jersey hospital, where he strikes up a friendship with Guthrie’s pal and folk icon Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). Seeger takes Dylan in after hearing him play his songs, housing him for a bit and taking him to amateur nights around Jersey and Manhattan, where he meets his girlfriend, the political activist Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). They move in together as Dylan is starting his career at Columbia Records (the woman Russo is based on is on the cover of Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan with Dylan) and he starts to write more political songs about inequality and social issues like breakthrough song Blowin’ in the Wind and A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which according to this film, while everyone else was panicking that Manhattan was about to be bombed, Dylan went to a gig in the Village and hooked up with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who was just on the cover of Time magazine. From there, his career takes off with his song The Times They Are a-Changing particularly striking a nerve with the younger generation. But by the time of his recording his fifth album, Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, Dylan was not happy with the “voice of a generation” pigeonhole he has found himself in and had begun experimenting with an electric sound, which leads to the film to its finale: Dylan’s controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival, run by Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) with one rule: only acoustic instruments.
A Complete Unknown (c) Searchlight Pictures
My Take: There has been Oscar buzz surrounding Timothée Chalamet ever since he was announced to play Bob Dylan, before a single scene was shot. After the trailer dropped, the buzz grew because not only does Chalamet look like Dylan, but he also recreates, almost perfectly, his distinctive singing voice. Now, after seeing the film itself, Chalamet is certainly on his way to his second Oscar nomination as he provides a beating heart to the tortured poet beginnings of a young Bob Dylan. Director James Mangold brings an authentic sheen of time and place, the same way he did with another musical biopic, Ring of Fire. Funny enough, Johnny Cash also appears in this film as a sort of devil part of Dylan’s conscience (Pete Seeger being the angel part). While Boyd Holbrook is fine in the role, not having Joaquin Phoenix come back seems like a wasted opportunity. Mangold also shoots the acoustic concert performances similarly to Ring, playing with shadows and light. There’s even a moment analogous to the scene where Johnny Cash forces June to sing a song she doesn’t want to (Time’s a Wasting), with Joan Baez doing the same to Bob during their tour. Except for the fantastic Barbero as Baez, the rest of the cast, stacked with talents overflowing, doesn’t get the chance to make much of an impression. Norton is so good in his opening scenes as Seeger, but sort of vanishes until he’s needed at Newport. Fanning is fine as Sylvie Russo, but it would be nice to see her as more than a glutton for punishment in her revolving door relationship with Dylan. Chalamet is truly remarkable as Dylan, even when the script time-jumps through his career without stopping to show us Dylan’s frustration, he just tells us he is. I kept thinking about Cate Blanchett’s more expressive version of Dylan in her Oscar-nominated performance in I’m Not There during Chalamet’s pouty/bratty Dylan of the latter half of A Complete Unknown. And then there’s the singing. Chalamet gets an “A” for recreating all of Dylan’s songs from this period, and that’s good because there’s a lot of it, almost too much as it seems Mangold is marking time in the film with the songs rather than the events that shaped Bob Dylan’s life. At one point, he introduces a girlfriend at a party and before we even get to know her, they break up. There’s a lot to enjoy in A Complete Unknown (the title comes from his song Like a Rollin’ Stone), but Dylan, sadly, is still an unknown in the end, just less of a complete one.
A Complete Unknown (c) Searchlight Pictures
VIP: Monica Barbaro. Of course, the reason most people will be seeing this is for Timothée Chalamet, and he doesn’t disappoint, but you will come out googling Monica Barbaro (she was in Top Gun: Maverick) and wanting to hear more of Joan Baez’s story. Any time she shows up, there is an extra energy on screen and her Baez is the perfect foil for Dylan, who doesn’t let him off the hook for his behavior. Hopefully, the Oscars remember Barbaro this year.
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