I’m not counting Renaldo and Clara, Dylan’s own 1978 film featuring his Rolling Thunder Revue (they toured in 1976, after which the concert album Hard Rain was released – I attended the Fort Collins, CO show, where it did indeed rain hard the whole time but was truly great anyway). R&C is semi-documentary, semi-fictional, Dylan making up versions of himself as he’s done lifelong. This 4-hour creation is in a class by itself.
Timothee Chalamet as young good-looking earnest Bobby Dylan arrives in New York with a newspaper clipping about Woody Guthrie, only to learn his idol is at a hospital in New Jersey. He barely blinks at the big city, catching the next cab out. At the hospital he meets not only Guthrie but Pete Seeger, and sings them a song. Seeger, impressed, becomes an early ally. Edward Norton gives a nuanced performance as the banjo-frailing activist – if you think of the folk singer as a hard-line traditionalist, think again – even at Dylan’s notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance, Seeger wants to pull the plug on the young electrified musician, but doesn’t – he lets the moment play out.
Is it intentional that Elle Fanning as Sylvie (a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, who insisted on her privacy and was not named in the film) and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez look so similar? I thought Baez was not given enough of her own fame to stand on – we see early performances where he doesn’t yet register with her audience, but soon he’s the one packing the shows. The script promotes a chemistry I didn’t sense, so I felt she put up with his hot/cold antics too long – in the absence of magnetism, I didn’t quite believe her. But Fanning does hit some of those gorgeous high notes Baez is famous for.
Chalamet plays Dylan as a creature of whims, mercurial, contrarian, sliding out from under the crush of early fame and the demands of Albert Grossman (well played by Dan Fogler), his manager at Columbia Records. At first determined to guide this newbie and build a following by covering others' songs, two years later at Newport, Grossman can see his client is a true original and a star of his own making, and that a manager’s best move is to keep the tape rolling as the young dynamo takes off. Chalamet’s singing is no worse than Dylan’s, though he does sand some of the edges off that nasal delivery.
Boyd Holbrook is a standout as Johnny Cash; before he married June Carter and (kind of) settled down, he was a wild man. He drank hard, took a lot of amphetamines (now we’d call that meth) and trashed hotel rooms, wrecked cars, chased women, got himself arrested. His friendship with Dylan in this movie was a touchstone – someone Dylan admired, who gave him all the approval he needed. “Track mud all over that carpet,” he said, and Dylan did. Though Holbrook – like everyone else – lacks Cash’s gravelly bass, he does his best, bringing that don’t-give-a-damn energy to the role.
For a film approaching Dylan’s life as a series of Acts, I’m Not There has some fine sections: a Black teenager with a guitar, hitching freights and singing folk songs. Mid-sixties Dylan in a black-and-white sequence in which Cate Blanchett plays the insouciant subject of press curiosity who treats interviews as games – what’s the most baffling or outrageous thing she can say? What’s the most shocking thing she can do in this situation or that one? With those black sunglasses, black spiky hair, cigarettes, and amusement at the reporters who can’t tell when she’s bluffing, she’s a perfect Dylan. And in the early 70s era of the Basement Tapes with The Band, he goes all-in with costumes. He’s always been a shape-shifter taking on costumed personae – hippies wearing beads, colorful leather pants and cowboy hats, granny dresses and thin-soled leather boots – he could go hog-wild switching up his identity – Billy the Kid, a troubadour, a bandido, a joker – with The Band ready to play whatever roles he needed.
A Complete Unknown is a fine movie - lively, fun, capturing the spark of a prolific poet as he emerges into the light of public attention: startling, inspiring, resisting all attempts to pin him down - as he does today. Maybe early on he toyed with being a leader, but ever since he's been rebuffing admirers' efforts to elevate him, calculating ways to create offense, the whole time slipping off the microscope slide we're trying to squeeze him onto.
