Movie Review: A Complete Unknown

Christmas is a holiday that hasn’t really meant that much to me, as I was never Christian. For most of my life I would spend time with family and eat dinner at someone’s house, but it wouldn’t be really that Christmas-y. Other times we’d travel. And sometimes we did the stereotypical Jewish thing of go to the movies. I’m sure some gentiles like going to the movies too on Christmas, which is why there are some movies that come out on Christmas Day. This year, the Bob Dylan biopic came out in cinemas on Christmas Day. Could it be a nod to Bob Dylan’s Jewish roots? Maybe it’s a coincidence, I don’t know. I mean Nosferatu and Babygirl also came out on Christmas Day in the US.

On this blog I have reviewed a lot of books about Bob Dylan from a book about decoding his song lyrics to an in depth biography to books dedicated to his time in London, New York, and Minnesota to a book about Bob Dylan and spirituality to a book talking about his connections to Dylan Thomas to a book by a millennial Bob Dylan fan documenting going to his concerts. Because of all of this reading, I have some knowledge of Bob Dylan lore. Earlier this year I saw Bob Dylan live in Nottingham and I’m glad I checked it off my bucket list!

When I first heard about this biopic coming out starring Timothée Chalamet, I was sceptical, like many other Bob Dylan fans. I saw the behind the scenes pictures and I shook my head. Timothée Chalamet is talented no doubt, but playing Bob Dylan is tough, just like playing any iconic musician is tough. It’s big shoes to fill and he’s a distinct looking actor. I was like there’s no way I’m gonna see this in the cinema (although I probably would so I could write a review for the blog because I’m a total sucker for musician biopics, and biopics in general). My mind changed slightly when I saw the trailers and I thought, okay, this isn’t going to be terrible. I judged too soon and I judged just based on behind the scenes photos and screenshots of frames. But after some time, the idea of Timothée Chalamet playing Bob Dylan had grown on me. Much like Bob Dylan had grown on me. Getting into classic rock, The Beatles were my gateway band, like so many other people. My main focus was the British Invasion and I didn’t really care so much about what was coming out of America, except for The Doors, The Beach Boys, R&B/soul music, and some psychedelic rock bands. I was hyperfixated on one facet of the 60s and I wasn’t into folk music when I was younger. I liked some of the electric Dylan stuff because it was rock music, but the more folky stuff intimidated me. In general I considered Bob Dylan a musician who intimidated me because of how prolific he is and I didn’t get as much exposure to it. Where to begin? I remember when I was on Tumblr I asked people how can I get into Bob Dylan, and people suggested the Nashville Skyline album, particularly the song “Lay Lady Lay”.

I’m visiting my family for Christmas and my dad saw that this movie was coming out on Christmas Day he suggested as a family outing that we could go to the cinema to see A Complete Unknown. I said yes because this was a movie I wanted to see with others. Afterwards we got some falafel, so not the stereotypical Chinese food for Christmas, but just as great in my opinion! We sat quite low down in the cinema so my grandmother could be accommodated since she uses a wheelchair, but luckily the seats reclined and they were super comfortable.

Because of the massive success of Bohemian Rhapsody, there’s understandably been a string of musician biopics. Thankfully this movie wasn’t much like that and I’m glad. As much as I loved the movie at the time, it was one that became overexposed and in hindsight I don’t think it deserved all the accolades. I think Rocketman was a lot better – flashy, but even better acting as Taron Egerton actually sang in the film, that’s more Oscar-worthy than Rami Malek’s performance, sorry not sorry. Like Taron Egerton, Timothée Chalamet put the work in and he actually did his own singing in the film and he did a good job. The director of this film is James Mangold, who directed Walk The Line, the Johnny Cash biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix – great movie! So that put my worries at ease. I really appreciated that the movie’s editing wasn’t flashy and there weren’t these glitzy over the top special effects. Just a well-edited 2 hour long biopic hyperfocused on one era that has a lot of material.

Because Bob Dylan has such a long career, it’s hard to cover it all in a biopic without it being rushed. That would be more appropriate for a TV series. Of all the eras to cover in a biopic, the best one that would attract the audiences and probably the most iconic would be the 60s, that’s what people think of when they think Bob Dylan – particularly the Greenwich Village days and the Electric Dylan controversy, when he did punk rock before punk rock by making folk music electric. Purists and the old guard hated him for it, but rock fans welcomed it and the changes made him stay relevant and made him the legend we know him as today. That electric folk era is what inspired The Byrds and The Turtles, who started their careers doing Dylan covers. Yes, the guy who said “I want a dog that’s gonna collect and clean my bath, return my cigarette, and, and give tobacco to my animals, and give my birds a commission” while probably very stoned won a Nobel Prize. Just goes to show you that the best artists aren’t complacent and stagnant, they don’t rest on their laurels, and they always move forward and try to innovate. Makes sense why this film was originally going to be called Going Electric. Kinda like this original title better than A Complete Unknown, but I get why they called it that because it comes from the iconic song “Like A Rolling Stone”, the song Bob Dylan played after a heckler in the audience at a concert in Manchester shouted “Judas!”. In the film, they show someone shouting “Judas!” at him at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which didn’t happen, but I can forgive a bit of dramatisation. It was mind blowing stuff at the time! Personally the electric Dylan moment that really blew my mind, and this was pointed out to me by my friend David, was his performance of “Tell Me, Momma” backed by The Band at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966. Very heavy for that year!

The movie starts with Bob Dylan making his way to Greenwich Village, looking for Woody Guthrie. He wants to visit him in hospital because he’s his idol. Through that visit, he becomes acquainted with Guthrie and fellow folkie Pete Seeger (the truth is that he didn’t meet Pete Seeger in hospital when visiting Guthrie). To contextualise what’s going on, we see Pete Seeger on trial for contempt of Congress and he asks the judge if he can play “This Land is Your Land” live. This was a time when the left were under attack and anyone who even was any bit sympathetic towards communism was blacklisted, an example of right wing cancel culture. This hostility towards socialism continued throughout the 60s with the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Fred Hampton. And it continues today with the mainstream media ignoring the issues with the rotten, predatory, for-profit healthcare system in its reporting of the killing of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The police are often violent towards anti-capitalist and anti-war protestors to this day. Remember how they would hose Civil Rights activists? Well, the pepper spraying and brandishing assault rifles at peaceful, unarmed protesters is not that different. Also in 60s history, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez playing at the March on Washington was depicted in this film, but the economic part of the demonstration was downplayed – it was just as much of a socialist demonstration as a civil rights demonstration.

In this film, we see Bob Dylan’s rise to fame and people that he would come into contact with being portrayed or talked about like Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Barbara Dane, Johnny Cash (he did not actually attend the Newport Folk Festival in 1965), Albert Grossman, Bob Neuwirth, Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, and Odetta. While not mentioned or portrayed, Joan Baez performs the Phil Ochs composition “There But For Fortune” in the film and I really liked seeing that because he was a really underrated political singer-songwriter. One important person in the film had their name changed and that is Bob Dylan’s girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, who was photographed with him on the album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Her name was replaced by the soundalike Sylvie (my brain heard it at times as “Susie”). This name wasn’t changed at Rotolo’s family’s request, but rather the request of Bob Dylan. We see his career trajectory with his self-titled debut being mostly covers because record labels wanted to play it safe with folk music and stick to covers rather than original material, his rise to fame with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a-Changin’, Another Side of Bob Dylan, and his crossover breakthroughs with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. As he gets more famous, you see the hysteria of the fans and how he can’t get a moment of peace when he’s out in public. Purist folkies see him as a sellout when they see him with his more polished, dandified look (tbh this is the best Bob Dylan look, he was really cute in this era) rather than his more humble casual jeans and flannel. As time goes by he wants to experiment and try new things. His change to rock and roll shouldn’t be a surprise because of his influences. Besides his love of Guthrie and Seeger, he clearly likes Little Richard and Buddy Holly with him enjoying “Slippin’ and Slidin'” when it plays on the radio and his scrapbook containing a clipping from a poster of the 1959 Winter Dance Party Tour with Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Dion and the Belmonts. He’s also someone who is into the blues, which you can see when he’s making a TV appearance on Pete Seeger’s show playing with fictional blues singer Jesse Moffette (played by the son of Muddy Waters), as well this was something that was fictionalised.

As a huge fan of The Kinks I really got a kick out of the Electric Dylan controversy being kicked off by Bob Dylan being in his hotel room listening to the fuzz guitar heavy Kinks hit “All Day And All Of The Night” and the elitist folkie festival organisers yelling at him comparing his music to that, as if it’s an insult! I’m guessing there was some bitterness and resentment amongst them because of Beatlemania and the British Invasion that followed and how it essentially ended a lot of American musicians’ careers. Maybe it’s just me, but I can hear a little Kinks “You Really Got Me” influence in the “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” performance from The Last Waltz.

As you can expect, there are some anachronisms with the songs, with some of them being performed sooner in the film’s timeline than the actual timeline, but this is to be expected. Same thing happened in Rocketman, but I didn’t mind it. I can really see the film’s vision with the evolution of folk music going from the old guard and the purists and this debate over if it should evolve and fuse with other genres, like going electric and fusing it with rock and roll or should it stick to its political, acoustic roots. Which is more progressive? Which is more sticking it to the man? At what point do you go from groundbreaking and revolutionary to becoming establishment and “the man”, like you live long enough to see yourself become the villain, something you claimed to hate? This movie really made me think about that. Overall, I’d give it an 8/10. Liked it a lot. I’d recommend you see it. Definitely worth my time and a great way to spend Christmas. Glad I saw it on opening day.

What did you think? Are you planning to see it in the cinema? Gonna wait for it to be on streaming services? Have your say in the comments section below. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all my readers!

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