Photo: Promotional poster for 'A Complete Unknown'.
A Complete Unknown
Directed by James Mangold
I am so glad I saw this film. It brought me joy and it brought a tear to my eye. Some wag will probably call it a jukebox musical for boomers and that’s as maybe, but it’s still the best musical I have ever seen.
It begins with a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arriving in New York in 1961, hitching a ride in the back of station wagon. Bob is looking for his folk-singing hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who is dying from Huntington’s disease, a hereditary condition that is robbing him of speech and mobility. At the hospital he meets the folk singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) who becomes an early mentor. Later on, he finds love with Sylvie, or Suze Russo (Elle Fanning), and our Friend Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).
The performances are breathtaking. Two hours flew past. Somehow the film manages to touch on the themes of love, betrayal, war, mortality, creativity and fame, all set to the soundtrack of Dylan’s music.
Timothée Chalamet is superb. If good acting is when you forget it is acting, Chalamet achieves this in spades. The other actors are just as good. Norton as Seeger is a trusting soul who soon discovers his protégé is a greater songwriter than he (or anyone else) is. Dylan works late into the night hammering out songs. His urge to create often puts a strain on his personal relationships, something that Russo and Baez soon find out to their cost. Eventually he leaves them both, but not before Baez informs him ‘You’re an asshole, Bob’. ‘I guess,’ is his reply.
By 1965, fame has arrived and it makes his life impossible. Dylan cannot go out without being mobbed by fans. He retreats behind heavy sunglasses and becomes more and more the enigmatic poet, the ‘mysterious minstrel’, as Sylvie calls him. It’s easy to see how Dylan came to hate being famous. All he ever wanted to do was to write and play music. He despised the ‘spokesman for a generation’ tag, and maybe it was that which made him so waspish and drove him to re-create himself as a rock musician. All of this is chronicled in the film.
Watching the film, I felt joy to have been alive when these events took place. Back then, the world was a simpler place. People hoped and strived for racial equality and the word ‘woke’ had not been invented. It was still an icy splinter in the heart of neo conservatism.
I shed a tear when he played ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’, a magisterial song of hope. One tear was for those times, when it seemed anything was possible. Another was for our times, when the whole world seems to be slipping into the abyss of right-wing populism.
Dylan remains a mystery. The film’s title is as true now as it was in 1961. But who cares. He has written over 700 songs and sold over 125 million records. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, but didn’t turn up to collect it. He has toured the world playing to live audiences for six decades. Touchingly, he now often closes performances with ‘Every Grain of Sand,’ a hint at his deep spirituality.
Go and see it, whatever your age, its brilliant.
