In the UK we have to wait until mid-Jan for the film's release. My site salutlive.com is UK/France-based. But Bill Taylor, an old friend of mine long resident in Toronto - but old enough to have been at one of the 1966 'Judas' concerts - posted this review, I reserve judgement on the film but think Bill's piece is superb .... here it is in full:



With the world newly clamouring to hear from him, Dylan/Chalamet grouses: “200 people in that room and each one wants me to be somebody else. They should just let me be.”

A voice from the shadows asks, “Let you be what?”
A wryly knowing smile. “Whatever it is they don’t want me to be.”

The man himself may never have said it in so many words, but that could have and quite possibly has been Dylan’s mantra throughout his whole, Nobel Prize-winning career.

Mangold co-wrote the script with Jay Cocks, basing it on the 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric! Dylan, Seeger, Newport, and the Night that Split the Sixties, by the journalist, cultural historian and blues musician Elijah Wald.

The director apparently thought of using the title Going Electric. I’m glad he didn’t. A Complete Unknown (a recurring line, of course, from the epochal Like a Rolling Stone) is perfect.

Because, no matter how well you think you’ve come to know Bob Dylan, you haven’t really. Now you see him, now you don’t.

Mangold also refuses to call it a biopic and I think he’s right there. It’s more a series of sketches (the artistic, not comedy kind) building up to a convincing picture of a man intent on bringing his musical vision – though he probably wouldn’t have called it that – to the world and then having to deal with the pressure of public adulation and the constant demand that he keep on playing The Times They Are a-Changin' for evermore.

Asked by a street vendor, “Do you have kids?” Dylan replies, Yeah… thousands of ’em.”

I found myself rapidly adopting the perception that Chalamet really was Dylan; that Monica Barbaro really was Joan Baez; that Edward Norton (and I never would’ve believed this, going in) really was Pete Seeger.

That’s how good they are. Not as impersonators or caricaturists, but utterly convincing actors, owning their characters and, it must be stressed, doing their own singing and instrumental work. This is going to be a soundtrack album worth having. Nor would I be surprised to see two “best supporting” nominations in the upcoming Oscars list, too.

Chalamet could barely play guitar or harmonica when he was first signed to portray Dylan. It being an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good, the project was delayed for several years by the pandemic and that gave him time not only to learn and learn very well, but also to master Dylan's distinctive style.

Talk about dedication. But that’s part of what makes him so excellent. Norton reported that for three months of filming, Chalamet was so immersed in his characterisation that he refused to allow friends or visitors on set. Mangold customarily called him Bob.

Here he is with Norton, playing banjo, doing When the Ship Comes In:

Dylan loomed very large in my life when I was young. His later work does less for me, but I still love his earlier stuff, especially the first seven albums, which I almost wore out on my plum-and-grey (with a padded top) Dansette mono record-player.

I’ve seen him in performance three times, the first being at the Odeon, Newcastle, in 1966, towards the end of the tour that introduced the electric side of his music to a sometimes-outraged world.

Some people in the theatre went down to the front so he could see them walking out on him. There was TV footage of weeping fans. Me? I loved it from the get-go.

You can read here what I wrote about it three years ago when Dylan was turning 80:


https://www.salutlive.com/2021/05/bob-dylan-at-80.html

The movie takes us from Dylan’s arrival in New York in January, 1961, as a scruffy kid with a guitar, the beginnings of an attitude and very little else, up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where he first went electric on stage—starting with a barn-burning version of Maggie’s Farm:

The audience, by and large, was not amused. I guess it’s difficult to realise, except in hindsight, that you’re a part of history in the making. Mangold doesn’t always stick to complete accuracy or timelines. But, even when this is noticeable, it doesn’t detract.

For instance, Pete Seeger wasn’t really outraged enough to want to take an axe to the soundboard and cut off the amplification. He said later that he didn’t like the “terrible” distortion the audio technicians were overlooking in Dylan’s voice and that the audience needed to hear the lyrics properly.

And the part where people in the crowd are yelling, “Judas,” with Dylan replying, “I don’t believe you…” happened at the Manchester concert a few days before I saw him in Newcastle.

But Al Kooper (played by Charlie Tahan), who was not known as a keyboard player, really did sit down at the organ uninvited during the recording of Like a Rolling Stone and improvise one of the most recognisable riffs in rock music.

Curiously, in the scene where Dylan, just arrived in New York, goes to visit Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital (again, the film version isn’t exactly how it’s said to have happened) and sings Song to Woody for him, Chalamet omits the last verse:

                  I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today

                  Somewhere down the road someday

                  The very last thing that I’d want to do

                  Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too.


I thought I knew all of Dylan’s early stuff but there’s also a song I’d never heard before: I Was Young When I Left Home. I still haven’t heard the original!

A Complete Unknown is not a sanitised version of Dylan’s rise to stardom. It shows him, warts and all. A lot of warts. Charismatic, certainly, but also ambitious, ruthless, never hesitant to use people to further his own ends, and casually cruel and cutting.

There’s a scene in a club where Baez, already an established recording artist, is finishing a set and Dylan is a first-timer in the open-mic segment. As he takes her place on stage, he comments: “She’s pretty. Sings pretty. Maybe a little too pretty.”

And in her apartment when their relationship has advanced somewhat, he describes her songs as “like an oil painting in a dentist’s office.”

Ouch.

She’s besotted all the same, his lover for a while and always happy to perform his music, either with him or solo. Even a song about one of his other, earlier, girlfriends:

I saw them together at Madison Square Garden in December,1975, on the Rolling Thunder Review tour. The second half opened with Dylan coming on in whiteface and starting to sing. If his voice sounded a little – just a little – off, it’s because it wasn’t Dylan. It was Baez. Dylan followed her out, dressed identically, and they went into a duet. The place erupted. All the same, it was a curious moment of androgyny. Once again, we were thrown off balance.

This isn’t the song they sang then but for me it’s one of the musical high points of A Complete Unknown, not least for the chemistry between Dylan/Chalamet and Baez/Barbaro:

Its colours slightly washed out, Mangold’s movie catches the feel of the period perfectly. With an estimated 5,000 extras on hand, the costumes and sets are faultless. The designers don't seem to have missed a single detail.

I lived in New York in the early ’70s and this absolutely brings back the Greenwich Village I remember.

It hadn’t changed much since Dylan prowled the streets, building his legend and writing songs hitherto undreamed of. Focused on himself and his music to the exclusion of pretty much all else.

A Complete Unknown doesn’t try to portray him as a particularly likeable or sympathetic figure. All the same, Dylan – not noted for his presence on social media – has acted once again uncharacteristically in speaking warmly of the movie, praising Chalamet as brilliant, and urging audiences after they’ve seen the film to read Elijah Wald’s book.

There again, the chameleon’s chameleon never did much care what anyone thought about him. Give the people what they least expect… “whatever it is they don’t want me to be.”


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