‘Completely Unknown’ review: Chalamet plays Bob Dylan and composes music

Folk music is mostly heard in the graceful first part of the often beautiful “A Complete Unknown.” That’s what’s happening in the next room across the hallway, in another club, past the crazy tambourine guy on the way. You lean in to hear the voice, and the characters gather as if responding to the call. Do they form a community? That’s too emotional. This is a scene.

Banjo chords drift like ghosts through the hallways of a New Jersey psychiatric hospital, where ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) examines visitors. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is striding through Greenwich Village when she hears a new sound and slows down to take a peek into the basement. And one morning, in the breakfast corner of a cabin in the woods, a strange man his father had brought home, a kid named Bobby, is trudging through the changes of a new song as the sun’s rays soften the air. Sometimes children notice this. The room is magical.

Bobby, of course, is Bob Dylan, played here by Timothée Chalamet in a near-magical performance that sparks all the right kinds of newness, genius, and an aloofness that is perhaps easier for Dylan to fake than humility. I am. At its root is a kind of aggressive, combative hunger. Chalamet has already taken a boy savior to a dangerous, dark place in the movie Dune. His Dylan is cut from the same cloth, uncomfortable with the cloak thrust upon him. Director James Mangold directs the actor in long takes during which you forget Chalamet is there, just a master poker player waiting for the right hand to go all in.

Superfans won’t necessarily like this. This film is made with love, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can sometimes be assholes. Once again, their heroes perform brilliantly with songs (classic after classic, all sung live by the cast) while keeping events neatly chronologically over the course of four years or so. It doesn’t get much more fair than “Complete Unknown.” A biopic interested in Dylan’s artistic arrival would have to cover the period from his penniless arrival in New York in 1961 to his rebellion at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Todd Haynes did all that and more in the dazzlingly experimental “I’m Not There,” a 2007 film that even gave a beleaguered Cate Blanchett a chance to embody the singer. , Mangold’s straightforward approach can be called a valid introductory level. course.

In shaping the material for the screenplay (based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric!”), Mangold and Jay Cox worked with Martin Scorsese’s longer-length adaptation (“The Age of Electric!”・He is the co-producer of “Innocence” and “Silence.” ) – It’s counterintuitive, but I’ve come up with a great organizational principle. In my opinion, this is something that no biopic of a great man has ever tried before. For this dream to come true, for Dylan to be Dylan, many people’s dreams had to die. We already know about the Minnesotan’s penchant for self-correction and self-destruction, and the film includes a bar mitzvah photo in a secret scrapbook.

But even here there is a surprising amount of collateral damage. This can be seen in the film’s clash of genres like folk, blues, and rock, as well as its delicate sensibilities of shifting pop art. Edward Norton plays the gentle Pete Seeger in this movie. Pete Seeger, accustomed to leading audiences with peaceful, utopian songs, is increasingly perplexed by this newcomer who has honed the folk movement into a spear and takes the fight in an entirely different direction.

Dylan’s women are suffering terribly. They are the heart of this movie. Barbaro’s Baez can be seen struggling with distance. Their secret meeting begins explosively. After their first night together, they stand up and learn that the Cuban Missile Crisis is thankfully over. (“Well, that’s what it is,” mutters a bedridden Chalamet.) Then they sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the sheets. However, it didn’t take long for Baez to tire of his elimination. As a duo, their sold-out tours turn into nightmares of onstage sniping.

Elle Fanning, already one of the most spectacular victims in American cinema, steals the movie with her version of Suze Rotolo (here renamed Dylan’s girlfriend at the time, Sylvie). An attractive, confident Manhattanite who works full-time in activism, classes, and volunteer work, she radicalizes Bob by taking him to civil rights speeches. But notice how the film shows him gratefully turning away from the ever-growing crowd. She’s already losing him, and Fanning’s character, devastated-eyed, can’t do anything about it. When she sees Dylan and Baez sing “It Ain’t Me Babe,” she panics and runs away, leaving Fanning to uncork the close-up of the year.

“You gave her the song,” Sylvie had quietly accused him moments earlier, a line that was crushed and cut into something deeper. He gave us all the songs. And even though, 60 years later, we still wonder what we actually got, he became ours.