Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
I was dreading this movie, ended up loving it, would like to figure out why. So, some notes to find out.
Todd Haynes' arty Dylan whangdoodle I'm Not There used a variety of different actors to play the songwriter, as though in response to Dylan's celebrated shape-shifting tendencies. I wrote of that film, "I guess Haynes is suggesting that Dylan is all these different people, a shape-shifter who has changed his persona many times over the years. As a Dylan fan, I'm kind of tired of this argument. How about approaching Dylan as a single individual—which, as far as I know, he actually is—in full command of his powers as an artist?"
James Mangold's A Complete Unknown is a much more conventional picture than I'm Not There, and Mangold doesn't have it in him to take delirious flight in the way that Haynes can, because he is, well, James Mangold. (Walk the Line provides the clanking, clunking evidence for this.) And yet A Complete Unknown, which Mangold wrote with Jay Cocks, does something that is unconventional, maybe even radical, in this age of popular art that must explain genius. It does not explain.
There is no childhood trauma revealed, no primal scene, no first love betrayed, no absent father (although the film comes up with a few surrogate fathers, without pushing the motif). There is only the former Robert Zimmerman, fresh from Hibbing, Minnesota, rolling into Greenwich Village at age 19 ready to "catch a spark" and burst into flame. In Timothee Chalamet's scrupulously disciplined performance, Dylan watches, sees (those are two different things), and reacts. We don't actually know the source of the genius, but because Mangold takes the time to let the songs be heard, we hear the art.
This is even less of a biopic than the usual biopic. (Dumb word, but everybody loves it.) It's an anti-biopic. The life that Dylan lives in the early 1960s is colorful and nostalgically rendered, but it illuminates little about the artist, except that he learned something about current affairs from a girlfriend (Elle Fanning) and something about stagecraft from Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). The most compelling storyline is Dylan's apprenticeship with Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, beautifully channeling Seeger's sincerity and squareness), which will eventually lead to Dylan's famous evolution past acoustic folk music to electric rock—and away from protest songs to a more enigmatic kind of personal expression.
People always talk about the career turning point with electric instruments, and the movie dutifully portrays Dylan's raucous set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, with the old-school folkies like Seeger and Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) literally trying to short-circuit the plugs. But it isn't the electricity that matters; it's that Dylan is no longer explaining, no longer making his meanings clear. This is the great offense to the establishment, and Dylan hasn't looked back since. (Perhaps it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that Dylan's early-60s songs, whether plain protest or gnomic phantasmagoria, sound more urgent and penetrating right now than ever.)
I don't think A Complete Unknown wrestles with these issues in a deep way, and it certainly partakes of movie cliches, including the fudging of facts around big events like Newport '65. But its willingness to embrace the mystery is unusual. And then there's the music. Instead of offering psychological sources for the songs, the film lets us hear them—in truncated versions, of course, but you do get to hear the music, not as background noise for the journey of personality, but as the point of everything. (In that sense, this is a true musical, not a drama with music.) Rock critics and op-ed writers and biographers have labored to connect the life to the music, but A Complete Unknown puts its wariness about that in its very title. Bob Dylan's life doesn't exist to unlock his visionary artistry. Only the music matters.
December 27, 2024
