[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

"A COMPLETE UNKNOWN" REVIEW – TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET’S BOB DYLAN IS
AN ELECTRIC REVELATION  
[[link removed]]


 

Peter Bradshaw
December 10, 2024
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ James Mangold’s biopic "A Complete Unknown" follows the rise of
the era-defining star Bob Dylan with Chalamet brilliantly embodying
his shapeshifting allure. _

Timothee Chalamet channeling Bob Dylan., Reddit

 

Not Judas – Jesus. Timothée Chalamet’s hilarious and seductive
portrayal of Bob Dylan makes him the smirking, scowling and unwilling
leader of his generation, whose refusal to submit to the crucifixion
of folk-acoustic purity is his own crucifixion. Chalamet gives us a
semi-serious ordeal of someone who is part Steinbeck hero, part
boyband star, part sacrificial deity. On being derisively asked if he
is God, Chalamet’s Dylan replies: “How many more times? _Yes_.”
Chalamet shows us the mysterious burden of celebrity and
zeitgeist-ownership endured by a singer-songwriter who transcends John
the Baptist (in the form of fatherly and sad-eyed folk mentor Pete
Seeger – wonderfully played by Edward Norton) and finally has to
wake up his dozing Apostles in Garden of Gethsemane with electric
guitars played, in his legendary words, “fuckin’ loud”.

James Mangold’s biopic, co-scripted by him and Jay Cocks, is based
on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger,
Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties
[[link removed]];
it’s the story of Dylan’s musical and personal adventures in the
first half of the decade as he electrified the world of folk in every
sense. He was carried onwards and upwards by the folk movement
appreciative of his poetic talent, but dissatisfied with what he saw
as folk’s regressive, museum-oriented placidity (and Dylan is shown
here not engaging explicitly with its socialist traditions); he is
yearning for the new modern energy of rock’n’roll as the musical
form which he has to master if it is not to surpass him. 

Elle Fanning is gentle and sensible as Dylan’s first girlfriend in
New York; she is called Sylvie Russo, but based on Suze Rotolo
[[link removed]],
who appeared with him walking arm-in-arm through New York’s
Greenwich Village on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Monica
Barbaro is an elegant Joan Baez, with whom Dylan ungallantly cheats on
Sylvie and whose lovely if trillingly cultured soprano voice is
described by him as maybe too beautiful; however he semi-graciously
allows her to cover his famous songs including Blowin’ in the Wind
and appear with him on stage, perhaps sensing that her more emollient,
mainstream presence will accelerate his own success. Norton is gentle,
wise Seeger who gives Dylan his big break and is deeply upset by
Dylan’s sullen, mutinous rejection of purist folk at his beloved
Newport folk festival; Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash, whose country
stylings and unselfconscious stage power is a spur to Dylan (Cash, of
course, was played as a far more complex and muted figure by Joaquin
Phoenix in Mangold’s Walk the Line
[[link removed]]); Scoot McNairy
has a recurring, thankless cameo as the totemic Woody Guthrie,
stricken with Huntington’s disease, to whom Dylan sings at his
hospital bedside.

And of course Chalamet is a hypnotic Dylan, performing the tracks
himself and fabricating to a really impressive degree that
stoner-hungover birdsong. He does a very passable version of Don’t
Think Twice, with the distinctive, eccentric intonations, singing as
if he’s not entirely sure of the tune and appearing to run out of
breath at the end of every line.

Chalamet is also good at Dylan’s insolent comedy in art as in life:
puckish, witty, insufferable and yet wounded, someone whose habit of
wearing dark glasses indoors gets him beaten up. How did he get to
sing and talk like that? How did Robert Zimmerman from Minnesota get
to sound more raw and less intelligible than either Seeger or Guthrie?
His claim to have learned guitar chords from cowboys at carnivals
deeply irritates Baez who says he’s full of shit. But Mangold and
Chalamet show his vocation lies in self-invention and reinvention; the
shapeshifting which needs troubadour comedy as a cover, and which
brings him to folk and then, footloose, on to something else.

In real life, the shout of “Judas!”
[[link removed]] from an
audience enraged by his electric guitars was recorded at the Free
Trade Hall, Manchester, but this film transfers it to Newport. In
fact, this film is very wary of acknowledging the importance or even
existence of the British invasion; the Beatles are dismissed with
hardly more emphasis than Donovan and their 1964 meeting with Dylan
[[link removed]],
at which he is supposed to have introduced them to weed, is not shown
here – perhaps because the film only has room for one musical
divinity.

To impersonate Dylan is a near-impossible job, and this movie itself
risks the “Judas!” response from the connoisseur-fanbase. In 2007,
Todd Haynes in I’m Not There
[[link removed]] split it into a
number of enigmatic personae featuring Cate Blanchett’s hilarious
turn; the Coens tackled Dylan in their own indirect way with Inside
Llewyn Davis
[[link removed]] from
2014, with Oscar Isaac as the failing not-Dylan folk musician in the
same period, doomed to obscurity. No fictionalised Dylan is going to
match the real thing from documentarist DA Pennebaker’s Dont Look
Back
[[link removed]].
Chalamet is more approachable and simply more present than the real
thing.

Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that
Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic
rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but
troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I
didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado
in this performance.

 A Complete Unknown
[[link removed]] is released on
25 December in the US.

 

* Film
[[link removed]]
* Film Review
[[link removed]]
* A Complete Unknown
[[link removed]]
* Bob Dylan
[[link removed]]
* Timothee Chalamet
[[link removed]]
* James Mangold
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]