A Complete and Brooding Unknown
By Johnny Ball
The wind is calm and the placid summer trees rustle softly. Engineers and technicians arrange wires and cables. Thousands murmur and sway on the grass knoll, framed by columnar trees, whispering and waiting. Waiting to glimpse the future, or to echo the past. The sun is set, the crowd expects. Newport, 1965.
‘Bring The Noise, BD’ – Johnny Cash
What follows is line one, in the beginning, of the music zealot’s bible. There is a before Newport and an after Newport. It remains the synthesis of everything that came before to everything which could ever come after. It is Genesis, Chapter One. Dylan goes electric.
To fully grasp the changing tides of the era and the legacy of that Newport Folk Festival set, we must first understand the man who made glorious rock n roll out of pretty little folky musics. Except to understand Bob Dylan, is to understand Amheric or Wingdings or The Stanley Parable. Writer/Director James Mangold shares this thesis, perhaps wisely, making little attempt to capture the artist-formerly-known-as Robert Zimmerman as he rolls on through to 60s Greenwich Village – just off the Jersey turnpike – carrying all but a knapsack and a battered ol’ ’49 Martin. It’s the stuff of absolute legend. At times captured with a heavy-handed caricature but mostly with the kind of folkloric revery necessary to record the brooding and snarling folk-hero turned rock star. Following his previous exploits curating the gold standard for biopics (Walk the Line, 2005) and character-driven big cinema (Logan, 2017, Le Mans ’66, 2019). James Mangold is thee formula writer for this flavour of cinema and sticks it with a (mostly) taut, if not slightly mimetic execution.
But crucially, as a Dylan fanatic, I absolutely loved this movie. There’s seldom more than 5 minutes of screen time without an incredible musical ode. I’d shared a couple bottles of merlot before catching the screening, so by the time Timothée Chalamet cracked off with a remarkable rendition of Woody’s Song beside Woody Guthrie’s (Scoot McNairy) hospital bed, lingering breathlessly on the soaring final lines, knotting the bottom of my heart and ever so slightly dropping my jaw, I knew I was going to enjoy. Chalamet as Dylan is as irresistible as he is hypnotic, constantly marrying a Tumblr-like mystique to a divine reflection as he rapidly transcends the Greenwich music scene. Equally magnetic picking through an early Girl from the North Country demo around Pete Seeger’s breakfast table as he is amorously wailing through It Ain’t Me Babe alongside the wonderful Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). He recently picked up an Oscar nomination for the role and given I wouldn’t be surprised if he wins, though he’ll likely be let down by some slightly tepid dialogue and a muzzled love triangle.
Alongside Chalamet, Ed Norton and Monica Barbaro are especially fluent as mentor Pete Seeger and side chick/peer Joan Baez respectively, providing more than enough shape and guile to their performances to effectively platform Chalamet’s Dylan. Honourable mentions belong to Elle Fanning as Suze Rotolo composite – Sylvie Russo, and to Boyd Holbrook as a particularly drawling and enigmatic Johnny Cash. Dylan and Cash is perhaps the film’s most annoyingly half-mast relationship. Always teased, seldom seen. Much like the pair’s famous 1969 Girl from the North Country duet.
And perhaps therein lies the frustration for some people. In developing young Bob as a full god, half man composite constantly seeking freedom or self or expression or whatever such abstractions, everyone and everything tethered to reality feels separate and sore in the face of an occasionally gaudy caricature. Poor old Sylvie is hopelessly cast aside, held hostage to whatever whim or Joan Baez hair strand he wishes to play with that day. Whilst poor old Joan Baez is discarded as an industry plant or jealous: “I learnt chords offa cowboys at carnivals”, drawls an insufferable Dylan in one particularly memorable bedside scene as Baez calls bluff. Even the bullshit comes quilted in cadence and lyric.
But to understand Bob Dylan is to understand what makes music so ephemeral and inexplicable in the first place. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t even worth trying. Who cares about the square love triangle or the Johnny Cash fumble or even the dim crescendo at Newport. To watch A Complete Unknown is to watch a romance. And love is so rarely perfect. But it could be if Bob Dylan wrote the soundtrack.
Perhaps only a Dave Van Ronk ditty away from 5 stars:
