Categories
Features Live Action Movies Music

A Complete Unknown

Director – James Mangold – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 141m

*****

A feature narrative recreation of Bob Dylan’s career in New York up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival gig where he switched acoustic guitar for electric – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 17th

1961. Carrying his acoustic guitar, complete unknown Bobby Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in New York trying to find the hospital where legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie is being treated for terminal illness. After some false starts, Bobby finds the place, with Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) sitting by Woody (Scoot McNairy) at his bedside. Pete welcomes him, and Woody, who can barely speak, indicates he would like to have the young man play one of his own compositions. Bobby obliges. Both men are impressed. Sensing the youth has nowhere to stay, Pete invites him to stay at his house with his Japanese-American wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune) and their two daughters. 

Pete, who recognises in Bob a powerful talent and a new, artistic voice, is deeply committed to both political activism and folk music as a vehicle for social change. One of the organisers of the annual Newport Folk Festival, he takes the young Dylan under his wing and helps him get gigs. Also taken with him, after happening to hear him perform a song as she was leaving a paying gig, is folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Young Bob strikes up a romantic relationship with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who has a modest New York apartment, attends afternoon political discussion groups, and paints. 

Bob’s career continues via a contract with Columbia Records, who to start with won’t let him record any of his own songs, insisting he instead record folk standards. Even when he is allowed to record his own material on later albums, he finds his stage appearances dogged by the audience wanting him to play his old tunes like Blowin’ in the Wind, with which they’re familiar. However, he has moved on and wants to play newer material. 

This comes to a head at the Newport Folk Festival 1965 where he is booked as the last act and refuses the organisers’ request to send a set list in advance. In the Studio, he is working on the album which will change popular music forever – Highway 61 Revisited – the first side of which is recorded with a band backing Dylan playing electric guitar. On the night, he turns up with his band to play with an electric, not an acoustic, guitar. Many of the more conservative organisers try to stop him or pull the plug, but he plays electric anyway.

James Mangold, who in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2022) gave a passing nod to the enormity of the cultural transition in New York from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, uses these four years of Dylan’s life as a cultural barometer of the social change in the first half of the 60s. In making the film, he has presented himself and his collaborators with a near impossible challenge. To anyone old enough to have lived through the period as a teenager or older, to make this film is to attempt to recreate cultural history. To anyone who grew up slightly after the sixties – your scribe is a child of the 1970s – discovering the music in retrospect via the recordings and album cover photographs, to watch the movie is to enter an immersive experience of that material.

Girlfriend Sylvie, forever immortalised hanging on to the great man’s arm on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), is suddenly flesh and blood in front of us (in the person of Elle Fanning), as is the folk legend Joan Baez (via actress Monica Barbaro), a contemporary to Dylan in the early, folk music part of his career.

There is an undeniable thrill to watching many of these events play out on the screen. Guitarist Al Kooper (turns up) at one of Dylan’s sessions wanting simply to play, and on being told that they need a keyboard player steps in and plays the waiting organ on Like A Rolling Stone, giving the tune its distinctive aural texture as soon as he steps into the breach. And throughout the film, as your eyes travel over the buildings and the clothes, the transportation back to the time and period portrayed, New York in the first half of the 1960s, is nothing less than magical.

The film handles the subject of overnight celebrity brilliantly. (It was Einstein, and this is not mentioned in the film, who once said, “I woke up famous”.) Bob starts off as the eponymous unknown, but two thirds of the way through, when he sits in a quiet corner of a bar to watch a gig, he finds himself recognised by excited young fans and has to get out of the place. Pete talks about folk music being at a tipping point over into reaching a wider market, and sees Bob as a major catalyst for that process; but as he embraces Rock and Roll (at one point,, he has a recording of The Kinks’ You Really Got Me playing in the background) you can feel folk contemporaries like Pete and Joan being left behind and feeling like he has abandoned them for the burgeoning youth audience.

Equally, musicians such as Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) understand what Dylan is doing as he tries to broaden out from beyond the folk scene, and encourage him to keep pushing in that direction.

The best observations about celebrity are to be found in Elle Fanning’s Sylvie, a girl who finds her boyfriend being taken up to a higher level while she stays where she is. Much like the couple, the film doesn’t quite know how to handle their dilemma: Dylan simply moves on, sleeping briefly with Joan Baez, but then at moments of need or crisis finds himself returning to see Sylvie, and it’s her that he takes along to the Newport Festival at the end of the film, although she doesn’t stay for his set which is scheduled for right at the end of the festival.

Perhaps the oddest thing of all is to take a cultural icon like Dylan and expect an actor to be able to play him. Todd Haynes did it brilliantly with four separate actors, one of them a woman, playing Dylan in I’m Not There (2007). where all of them are, in effect, playing different interpretations of Dylan. Here, place, period and people have been lovingly created so that the character of the early Bob Dylan can be dropped in there, and what Chalamet is being asked to play is the historical Dylan of 1961-5.

Because of all those album sleeves, and much footage that can be easily watched, a considerable volume of reference material exists and is easily accessible in the public domain, this is an incredibly hard brief for any actor to pull off and views will differ as to whether Chalomet succeeds. For myself, some of the time I felt like I was watching Dylan back in the day, and some of the time he reminded me of someone else frolm the 1960s I couldn’t quite remember, which is not down to the actor but to his natural looks. (I eventually worked out that somebody was the late Richard Wright, self-effacing keyboard player of Pink Floyd, to whom the actor bears an even greater likeness than he does to Bob Dylan.)

Still, insofar as the casting of Chalomet works, you do feel like you are watching the real Dylan, feeling his way through the beginnings of his career, making brave decisions as he starts to slowly rise above his contemporaries. Director Mangold’s strong feeling for time, place and cultural significance make it worth seeing, but if you saw his Indiana Jones film where the characters wakes up to the sound of the Beatles record playing in another apartment, you’ll know that already.

A Complete Unknown is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, January 17th.

Trailer:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *