‘I’ ON CULTURE
Sometimes movies exceed expectations, and A Complete Unknown did that for me. It is a more or less biographical film about Bob Dylan from 1961 until 1965, a period in which he wrote several songs altering both politics and music, certainly changing the latter and having a major impact on our nation’s soul. Timothée Chalamet gives a superb performance, one of the best I have seen all year. Of course, I also lived through the era, for a tiny part of the time actually in Greenwich Village, although I never met the hero.
The movie begins as Dylan (Chalamet) comes to New York to make his fortune in folk music. One of his first moves is to visit Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), one of the greats of the early movement. That man’s best-known song: Your Land is My Land. Guthrie, who suffered from Huntington’s chorea, was institutionalized, unable to speak or move much. When Dylan dropped in, he met Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), another great, perhaps the most dominant force in folk music at the time. Among his many songs were If I Had a Hammer and Where Have All the Flowers Gone. Seeger takes Dylan under this wing, and during the course of the movie, we seen Dylan writing some of his classic songs.
He takes up with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), soon living with her much of the time. A radical, involved in fighting segregation, she brings him to different rallies, introduces him around as he becomes better known. At the same time, he takes up with golden-voiced Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), whose career was taking off. We get to see him writing Blowing in the Wind, his most influential song, and so many others. And then, caught up in fame, he began to grow weary, and changed folk music forever by creating folk rock, or at least getting it off the ground in a spectacular way.
The film is mostly accurate. It was filmed in some small New Jersey cities because, well, Greenwich Village looks nothing like the old place anymore. And at least one major character, Sylvie Russo, is fictional, replacing the actual person who had a relationship with Dylan. It does clean up some of the story a bit. It overdramatizes more than a bit. But, after all, this is a movie.
Chalamet is brilliant. In the past, I have thought of him as a good-looking kid with a lot of talent that was often wasted. Not in this film. Right from the start, he inhabits the character; he did not seem an actor playing Dylan, but the man himself. He has the voice, the twang down perfectly. It might be the best male performance I saw all year. He even sings the Dylan songs and does them well. Actually, his voice is actually a bit better than Dylan’s, so they flow even more easily. A few of the moments stood out. Sitting on a bed singing Blowin’ in the Wind for the first time for Joan Baez was powerful, as was a scene at the Newport Folk Festival debuting The Times They Are a Changin’.
Norton was also excellent, for a change playing a less complicated role. He sang nicely and kept the dignity of a very important character intact. I met the real Pete Seeger in the mid-1960s down in Greenwich Village as he worked with a program teaching music to disadvantaged kids. He was charming, knowledgeable and a true artist. Fanning, as always, was very good, and I particularly liked Barbaro. If she doesn’t have the incredible voice of Baez, she comes very close, and she brought a great strength to the part.
Most biographical movies glorify the central character. Here we see Dylan as a contradiction in many ways. Yes, we see the genius who turns out brilliant songs, songs that made a real impact on America. But we also see the man struggling to discover who he is, a mixture of elements that eventually led him to leave pure folk and turn to rock and reinvent himself many times over. The brilliance of Chalamet’s performance is that it allows us to see beneath the surface so well, to recognize that Dylan might never find a real home.
One annoyance: Dylan and just about everyone else seemed to spend most of their waking hours smoking. Yes, he did smoke. But in a time now when we almost never see anything like that, it stuck out and created a distraction.
But I thought this was an excellent story and a really good film. 2024 has not been a strong year for movies. This is one of the best.