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The actor stars as a young Bob Dylan, who woos folk followers only to betray them later at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
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‘A Complete Unknown’ | Anatomy of a Scene
James Mangold narrates a sequence from his film, starring Timothée Chalamet.
Hi, This is James Mangold. I’m the co-writer, director, and one of the producers of “A Complete Unknown.” “Mr. Pete Seeger.” This is Gerde’s Folk City, an early scene in the film. Joan Baez has just done a show-stopping tune, and Pete Seeger comes onstage, played by the brilliant Edward Norton, and introduces his protégé, a very young 19-year-old Bob Dylan, who we’ve only heard sing one other time in the film so far, and is coming onstage for his debut. Timothée Chalamet, of course, plays Bob Dylan, and will be playing live in this scene, as he does throughout. We also introduce Dan Fogler playing Albert Grossman in the audience. He will become a sideman and forever presence in this period of Bob’s life. All right. Thanks, folks. Yeah Thanks, Pete. That’s a ... Boy, that’s a lot to live up to. Monica Barbaro is Joan Baez, a kind of very fierce presence in the folk scene and a huge star at that moment in folk music. “How about that Joan Baez, folks? It’s pretty good. And she’s pretty. Sings pretty. Maybe a little too pretty.” I love this moment of Timothy kind of portraying Bob’s slightly foot-in-mouth, inappropriate, provocative nature. “I was young when I left home. I’d been out ramblin’ round. And I never wrote a letter to my home. To my home.” This is an early song of Dylan’s called “I Was Young When I Left Home” that I felt was apropos, mainly because it’s so profoundly autobiographical in the sense that Dylan was young when he left home and restarted his life in New York. “I was bringing home my pay. And I met an old friend I used to know ... ” It’s interesting telling the story of this period. I felt that much of Dylan’s filmography, although it’s mostly documentary, is very handheld, very kind of vibrant, with electric in the sense of chasing the actors around in a documentary style. I felt that Bob’s style itself was so profound that I wanted to lay back and just observe and allow the power of the music, which we perform throughout the movie live. Let that music communicate. “It’s very good, isn’t it?” “Yeah.” “He’s my client.” Folk music is, of course, at its core, simple, unadorned, a human voice and a guitar. And for that reason, I felt that we really couldn’t risk producing these pieces with too much technological intervention. I wanted to just let the actors move from speaking to singing and back to speaking again in a way that feels utterly natural and like you’re there.
By Manohla Dargis
Leer en español
- A Complete Unknown
- Directed by James Mangold
- Biography, Drama, Music
- R
- 2h 21m
Every so often in “A Complete Unknown,” an enjoyably easy-listening and -watching fiction about Bob Dylan’s early road to immortality, Timothée Chalamet lowers his gaze and sends a shiver up your spine. It’s as startling as it is welcome because Chalamet has never seemed especially threatening, even in his more darkly messianic moments in the “Dune” series. He seems too anodyne to play a disruptive trickster like Dylan, yet Chalamet proves an ideal conduit in “A Complete Unknown” because the music and its maker have such power. As with any great cover band, it’s the original material that carries you through the night.
There are so many Dylans — poet, prophet, lost-and-born-again genius — that choosing just one feels futile. True to its title, “A Complete Unknown” shrewdly doesn’t try. Instead, anchored by Chalamet, who like the other principals, does his own (fine) singing, it offers Bob the Enigma, a seer who’s mysteriously delivered from beyond, a.k.a. Minnesota, to a needy world. Awkwardly charming, sometimes cruel and altogether confounding, this Bob writes like an angel, with rhythms that move bodies, choruses that worm into ears and lyrics that seem like urgent questions. He becomes the rasp of a generation, but he isn’t “alright.”
Directed by James Mangold, the movie takes place over an eventful four years, culminating with him shocking the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by going electric, a seismic music event. In Dylan catalog terms, it begins around the time he writes “Song to Woody” (“Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”). It continues amid romances, drama, record deals and youth-quakers like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (“Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden”). Then the plugged-in Bob goes loud and hard at Newport with “Maggie’s Farm,” and that’s a wrap (“Well, I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them”).
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Dylan arrives in New York on a gray, wintry day, and is soon strolling through the bohemian fantasy known as Greenwich Village, that creative Valhalla where artists, dilettantes, tourists and would-be saviors are rubbing elbows. It’s an inauspicious introduction in part because the whole scene looks and feels overly tidy and art-directed. It gets worse when Bob passes a busker hitting a tambourine (hey, mister!), if only because the image evokes Twyla Tharp’s 2006 Broadway fiasco “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which literalized Dylan lyrics with performers rolling, yes, stones. Hagiography can be perilous.
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