Timothée Chalamet in ‘A Complete Unknown.’
Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures
He’s just a boy from the north country — Hibbing, Minnesota, to be exact, though trust us, you do not want to get caught up in the facts here — in the back of a station wagon, hitchin’ a ride to New York City in search of a hero and a dream and maybe a couch to crash on and a record collection to absorb and a scene to dominate and a world to change. This is how we meet Robert Zimmerman, future bohemian poster-child of 1961. He ambles up to a bar in Greenwich Village, and hears from an unidentified guy (who looks and sounds a lot like Dave Von Ronk) that the person he’s looking for isn’t in town. Go to a hospital in New Jersey. You’ll find him there.
So, Huck Finn black corduroy cap on his head and guitar and notebook in hand, he rambles over to the Garden State. The gent he’s come to see, Woody Guthrie, is indeed there. He’s still six years away from dying, but the man ain’t well. The other person in the room is fellow troubadour and rabble-rouser Pete Seeger. The stranger introduces himself as Bob Dylan, and asks to play them a song he wrote especially for the sick patient in bed. His guitar is unsheathed. And suddenly, this mumbling wisp of a boy sitting before them opens his mouth and out comes “Song to Woody,” in all of its ragged, tributary glory. The older men exchange looks. They’ve just glimpsed the future.
It’s a generic moment that could have been lifted from a million generic music biopics. But there’s a reason to single out this scene in A Complete Unknown, James Mangold‘s do-look-back drama about Dylan’s early days and eventual ascension to reluctant, voice-of-a-generation messiah. It happens to be doing double duty. Watching this kid who will soon eclipse them both in the public imagination and go on to transform popular music several times over, the elder folkie statesmen are immediately won over. And as we, the audience, watch Timothée Chalamet — toussle-haired heartthrob, celebrity-lookalike-contest superstar — pluck out the chords and sing this formative Dylan tune, we can feel ourselves slowly being won over as well. It’s not just that the actor is actually playing the song, or that he can hit the warbly notes well enough to do a better-than-decent cover. It’s more that you can see he’s tapping into something deeper than an impersonation of someone who’s had his share of impersonators, literal and otherwise. Chalamet isn’t becoming Bob Dylan. He’s carefully crafting a performance that’s evocative of him, while channeling some wild, mercurial thing in the ether. The scene immediately makes you want to see where he takes it.
And where Chalamet ends up going with his interpretation of the “It Ain’t Me Babe” bard makes all the difference. There are so many reasons to automatically hate both the idea of a “straightforward” Dylan biopic (read: not something conceptual and experimental) and the notion of casting a movie star who comes with his own media-persona baggage despite still being a shade under 30. A Complete Unknown chips away at those reservations, slowly and steadily, until you find yourself leaning in every time Chalamet pops out one of Bob’s venomous bon mots or does justice to one of Dylan’s dozens of tunes written during those fertile years between 1961 and 1965. The closest comparison to his take isn’t Joaquin Phoenix in Mangold’s Johnny Cash flick Walk the Line or Rami Malek’s toothy Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, another performance of a famous, famously imitable cultural omnipresence that starts off as mannerisms (oh, so we’re doing the voice and the fey gestures, are we?), then quickly mesmerizes you and makes you forget you’re watching a well-known actor.
Oh, there’s still a lot of fodder likely to make the faithful go blind from eye-rolling here — like its subject, A Complete Unknown plays fast and loose with the truth whenever it’s convenient. Working from a screenplay that allegedly was footnoted and possibly even puckishly fucked with by Dylan himself, Mangold compresses events and timelines, mixes and matches musical performances and landmark moments (one mash-up in particular will inspire much gnashing of teeth), and treats the apocryphal as holy writ. The print-the-legend vibe is strong in this one. Whether you love or loathe the genre, the filmmaker helped mint the template for the modern music biopic with his 2005 Cash movie — in conjunction with Taylor Hackford’s Ray from the previous year — and he must now contend with bumping his head against the floors and ceilings of the house he co-built. There are indeed bits and pieces of his greatest-hits recreation that feel as if they’re being molded to fit a model: Here’s the “Eureka!” burst of inspiration, here’s the star-making concert, here’s the moment that fame became a monster, et al. Sometimes it’s sly, as when Dylan quietly picks out the melody for the bitter kiss-off “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” during an argument with his girlfriend. Other times, it’s the cinematic equivalent of 101 Primer.
Yet Chalamet seems to understand the abundance of charm and divine gift of songwriting chops that allowed Bob to exert a pull on everyone around him, as well as the cipher mask and hipster aloofness that kept everyone at a safe distance, and gives you both in spades. He’s also smart enough to underplay these elements just enough so they don’t slip into caricature, which is even more impressive once a post-fame Dylan enters his prickly “I wear my sunglasses at night” phase. (You wonder how much of Chalamet’s own feelings about overwhelming fame are being stirred into the pot here.)
Plus, the star knows exactly how to play off the supporting cast orbiting around his Bobness, having an instinct for when to act as an antagonist, when to be a blank slate for their projected hopes, and when to simply be their sad-faced pretty-boy of the lowlands. It helps that the film has assembled a surfeit of talent around him. Elle Fanning is Sylvie Russo, a muse who politically activates Dylan at a key moment; the moniker may be different, but a Suze (Rotolo) by any other name smells just as sweet, and Fanning fleshes out a woman who’s too often been relegated to a footnote in Bob’s saga. (In a perfect world, copies of her 2008 memoir My Freewheelin’ Time would be handed out as you exit the theater.) Edward Norton‘s Pete Seeger is equal parts brittle angel and devil on his shoulder, propping Bob up and begging him not to plug in at the expense of “the cause.” Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash, on the other hand, is all devil — imagine Jim Marshall’s famous flipped-bird photo come to life, and that’s Holbrook’s hilariously swaggering Man in Black in brief. Monica Barbaro gives us a Joan Baez that’s swooning over this cute, cantankerous new kid in town yet unafraid to call bullshit. Her graceful songbird is the closest thing to a stand-in for the audience: She gets to witness his genius in action and inform him, “You’re an asshole, Bob.”
Both Chalamet and the ensemble get to really dig into the retro fun-house mojo and a-star-is-born sturm und drang for A Complete Unknown‘s first half, which more or less concludes with Chala-Dylan singing The Times They Are A-Changin’ at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. The crowd goes wild, Seeger beams at the anthem his boy has written for the movement, the other fest mucky-mucks pat themselves on the back. They don’t realize they’ve just heard a swan song. Cue an ominous title card — “1965” — and the rest of the film starts dutifully checking off endgame boxes: a meet-cute with Bob Neuwrith (Will Harrison), the recording of “Highway ’61 Revisited” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s chafing against the jukebox nature of a joint tour with Baez organized by Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), some palace intrigue re: Newport ’65, to go electric or not to go electric? Meanwhile, Mangold keeps filming Dylan’s Triumph motorcycle like it’s a hard-to-shake bad penny.
You know how it ends, in both a declaration of independence, a farewell to baby blue, and a fateful ride off into the sunset. So thank God/Bob — six of one — that Chalamet keeps you invested. The movie is as much a tribute to the actor’s abilities to modulate the mannerisms and gestures — the nasal-sneer sarcasm, the vocal loop-de-loops, and the blend of hard-shell cockiness and soft-underbelly sensitivity — in a way that simultaneously conjures man and myth as it is to Dylan. (Don’t just take our word for it.) He makes so many of the bum notes in A Complete Unknown forgivable. And long after you’ve laughed yourself silly at Johnny Cash telling the conflicted singer to “Make some noise, B.D.!” (?!?); cocked your head at the end disclaimer that sums everything up with “After 1965, Dylan made 55 albums and still tours to this day”; and forgotten all of the false moves purposefully designed to troll historians, critics, and Dylanologists with hands still stained from “Positively 4th St” rubbish, you’ll probably still remember that moment when Chalamet stops strumming “Song to Woody” and raises his head expectantly. It’s not as game-changing as that snare drum that opens “Like a Rolling Stone.” But it still feels damn near electric.
From Rolling Stone US.
