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There is a basic problem with biopics. Even the great one’s cherry pick and
reshape the highlights of a person’s whole life, so they can cram them into
roughly two hours of film. To do this, the film makers have to move events
around, distort things and make nonexistent connections to things that did not
exist and combine or invent characters and events. A Complete Unknown does all
these things, but about 90 percent of it works very well, and like me audience
members may end up loving its subject even more than they did before.
This film is infinitely superior to the overrated and inaccurate
Bohemian Rhapsody. The biggest reason is that Dylan’s story is so much more interesting
than Freddie Mercury’s and Dylan’s songs are so clearly superior to Queen’s. who
always struck me as minor artists.
Dylan’s albums from the 60’s might be the best of his era, and he was competing
against The Beatles, Motown, Jimi Hendrix, and the Rolling Stones. The man was
simply in love with language and the sophistication of his lyrics elevated pop
music as a whole. It is difficult to come up with any singer/songwriter during
the last 50 years who is even in his league as a lyricist, although Joni
Mitchell and Leonard Coen came closest.
There have already been many worthwhile biopics and docs about Bob Dylan. Martin
Scorsese’s docs about Dylan: No Direction Home (2005) and
Rolling Thunder Review-A Bob
Dylan Story were quite enjoyable and informative. Perhaps the most interesting
Dylan film was I’m Not Here (2007) in which a bunch of different actors including Cate
Blanchett play Dylan at different stages of his career, and it suggests that
maybe there is no one true Bob Dylan. A Complete Unknown is never as creative or
edgy as that film. Perhaps there is no one definitive Dylan film, because the
man was so mercurial and he had so many great periods, but A Complete Unknown is
certainly one of the best films about him.
A Complete Unknown has garnered significant critical acclaim. It was on the top
ten lists films list from the National Board of Review; it got multiple Golden
Globe nominations, and it earned eight Oscar nominations including Best Actor,
Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best
Supporting Actress.
A Complete Unknown was directed by James Mangold who also did the Johnny Cash
biopic, I Walk the Line (2005). Both films’ main strengths are the strong performances,
but there is a problem with the female leads. Even though Reese Witherspoon won
an Oscar for playing June Carter Cash, I was never convinced for a second that I
was seeing the real June Carter, and I have seen the real thing in concert. In
this film Chalamet and Norton make a great Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger in fact it
is hard to imagine anyone playing them better. But although Monica Barbaro, the
actress who plays Joan Baez is good, she never quite rises to their level. She
is more than fine in the dramatic scenes but comes up short when she performs
songs as Baez. There is something missing from her delivery and her voice never
soars like the real Baez.
But Timothy Chalamet (also great in
Dune Part 2) who walks and moves exactly
like a young Dylan is remarkable. He is aided by authentic period dress which
makes him look like he stepped right off of the album covers of either Another
Side of Bob Dylan or The Times they are a Changing. At times he seemed more like
Dylan than Dylan himself. This is surely one of the best dramatic performances
of last year.
The film starts out with Dylan seeking out his greatest idol, the great folk
performer Woody Guthrie who is dying in the hospital and is in the last stages
of Parkinson’s disease. He meets Pete Seeger at Guthrie’s bedside and plays them
his great tribute song “Song for Woody.” This impresses Seeger who gives the
homeless Dylan shelter, which is a good thing because Dylan’s only possessions
were his guitar and clothes on his back. Seeger also takes him under his wing,
feeds him and becomes a surrogate father to him.
Through Seeger, he meets many of the stars, players and controlling figures of
the then peaking 60s folk movement. Some of them see Dylan as the new face of
folk or as a messiah that would save and elevate the form in popularity which he
did. But the only problem was that Dylan would not stay in their little box, and
when he jumped ship, it turned out that folk movement needed him more than he
needed folk.
The biggest superstar of the folk movement at the time was the talented and
strikingly attractive, Joan Baez. She helps him immensely by recording one of
his songs, and since smooth vocal delivery and trained voice originally went
over with a mass audience much better than Dylan’s, it can be argued that he
might not have made it without her. But he is not always grateful or polite. The
first time he plays with her; he tells an audience that “she sings pretty almost
too pretty.” Also later, she plays him one of her original songs; he says that
her lyrics create images like the ones you would see in a painting at the
dentist’s office. To say she is not flattered is an understatement.
Dylan’s love life is in a word complicated. His early girlfriend, Suze Rotello
(well played here by Elle Fanning who is a dead ringer for the real woman) is
the economically well-off progressive girl who gets him involved in social
causes. But his eyes start to wander when he meets the slightly older Joan Baez
who was instrumental in elevating his early career. In real life Dylan also
dated Joan Baez’s sister before he got involved romantically with her, but she
was eliminated from the story.
He famously spurned Baez after he achieved a certain level of popularity, and
she wrote a stunningly powerful song about him called Diamonds and Rust ten
years later which ended up being considered one of her best (it might be
interesting to see them tell her side of the story in a film). He comes and goes
as he pleases jumping from women to woman and uses them when he needs to. But if
this film is true, Dylan’s only true loves were songwriting and playing live.
This all leads up to one of the most momentous events in the history of Rock.
Dylan premiered his electric sound at the almost all acoustic Newport Folk
Festival and famously got booed for performing with members of the Paul
Butterfield rock band who were playing electric instruments. This mostly irked
folk purists. It all may seem trivial now, but this was important, and it even
inspired whole poems and books. The whole sequence reminds us of a time when
music was so important that any small genre shift could cause a huge debate or
explosion of protest. A little bit later Miles Davis faced similar opposition
when he added rock and funk to his jazz.
Spoiler alert: The ending at the Newport Folk Festival takes some liberties with
the facts. It shows Dylan getting called Judas there when this actually happened
in England. Also, it shows Suze and Johnny Cash there when neither one attended.
But putting all these people together at the event does help give the film a
memorable and dramatically compelling resolution.
This was not my favorite film of last year, although if I had seen it in time,
it might have made my 2024 top ten list. But it is much better and more
insightful than your average biopic. It is a marvelous celebration of a talented
artist that gets most things right. This is a terrific, life affirming
celebration of music and art that captures almost everything that is great,
joyous, and marvelous about Dylan.
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