Complete Unknowns
I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday period. It’s been a quietly special time here in Los Angeles, punctuated yesterday by a trip to the movies to see A Complete Unknown. As a heart on my sleeve lover of all things Dylan, I can do nothing but offer my immediate thoughts after seeing it!
I can’t quite remember when or how I became aware that a movie about Bob’s early days was in the making. Was it an Instagram reel of Timothée Chalamet on set in a freezing Manhattan? Did some scrolling headline meander by or was the culprit some other rogue purveyor of information? Lost in the woods and wilds of social media, who knows.
I do remember exactly when I sat up and took notice however. I was on a solitary escapade to our local movie theater in early August to watch It Ends With Us- a movie which is now lost in a quagmire of its stars making incidentally- and a trailer rolled in. There, on the screen, was a young Bob Dylan walking out in front of a packed concert hall with his guitar and harmonica. But wait a minute, that’s not Bob- it’s Timothée Chalamet, but to all intents and purposes, Bob it most certainly was. A shiver ran down to the bone, here was the essence of some rough magic. I mentally booked my ticket, then and there, to see A Complete Unknown.
With our son home from Oxford town for the Christmas break, we went as a family to see it in the end. We sat, blithely unaware of a facetious R rating tacked, for some inexplicable reason, onto this extraordinary offering which has breadcrumbs of Dylanesque interference everywhere if you know where to look! Our nine year old daughter enjoyed it just as much as anyone else in the packed auditorium and came bouncing out at the end, chattering about that police whistle.
A Complete Unknown covers the period in Dylan’s life between his arrival in New York on January 24, 1961 and the night of his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. It was a momentous period and the film is a tour de force, which tells a four and a half year story in roughly two and a quarter hours. It’s interesting to remember that James Mangold the director and co-scriptwriter, also directed and co-wrote Walk the Line, the great 2005 film about Johnny Cash.
Obviously, there’s only so much I can say about A Complete Unknown without completely spoiling the movie; I noticed today that it’s not on release in the UK until January 17. So here are a few general impressions to whet the appetite rather than ruin the meal!
Each performance is note perfect. Quite literally. From Chalamet’s mesmerizing and, at times, unearthly Dylan, Scott McNairy’s wordless but utterly moving Woody Guthrie, right through Elle Fanning’s beautiful turn as Silvie (Suze) Russo (Rotolo) the cast is stellar. And that’s not even mentioning Ed Norton, Monica Barbaro or Will Harrison as Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bobbie Neuwirth respectively. From the opening moments, I was drawn into the conjuror’s web and not once did his spell falter.
Very early in the movie, Dylan pays a visit to Woody Guthrie in the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. When Chalamet sings Song To Woody during this scene, you feel the air in the room still. There’s always been a timelessness to Bob. It peeks through Chalamet’s eyes at various moments in the movie and this is one of them.
My tears arrived when he sang the lines,
Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.
and they stayed close by to enjoy the whole movie too!
This early episode is of supreme importance to a film whose credibility hinges upon the ability of its stars to perform in the musical arena and perform they do! You can choose from any number of examples, not one falls flat. I loved Ed Norton’s rendering of This Land is Your Land, one of my favourites since I was a little girl. Such beautiful lyrics it sings and the movie has my daughter asking to listen to it; just wonderful! Chalamet and Barbaro deliver their early solo and duet acoustic performances with perfect conviction and Chalamet’s lightning expansion into the Dylan of the early electric era, not forgetting the great ensemble set pieces with the Butterfield Blues Band, doesn’t miss a beat. It’s awe-inspiring really and so much fun to watch. For all ages and all degrees of engagement with Dylan’s oeuvre!
While the credibility of his musical performances is vital, Chalamet’s portrayal of Bob is a joy overall. It is complex and detailed to the finest degree, without ever once appearing studied or rehearsed.There are so many different elements one could choose to explore but if anyone is, like me, a complete sucker for the coolness of Bob in his early electric era, you will find much to delight in here. Watch out for one throwaway piano scene in particular. If you catch it, you’ll see how the movie overlays the 1967 Pennebaker documentary, creating a moment of such beautiful texture that it brought back those tears to the surface. Chalamet nails the world-weariness of this period too. You feel the weight of other people’s expectations that Dylan is carrying as if it were a physical thing.
If I had a piece of advice it would be this: don’t let your attention wander even for a minute. Each frame of this movie is important. Watch for everything, that which the frame contains, that which it excludes and that which it manipulates. Readers of Chronicles Volume I will understand.
The movie itself is loosely based upon a book, Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald. As Bob tweeted to his fans on X- (who doesn’t love this new Bob style of communication by the way)
There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric – a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.
Like a homing device, my eyes are immediately drawn to these words, ‘believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me’
Reader, we have been told.
My thoughts go free. I let the long candle of night burn bright, watching my favourite poet of this lifetime sing Desolation Row, a saved and treasured YouTube recording from Liverpool July 12, 2001. I sit and I smile. The me will always escape definition. That’s been Bob’s point since the very beginning. We’re all at the carnival, all on desolation row and each of us is a complete unknown.
