Tom Dunne: Bob Dylan film is a glorious take on our darling young one
Monica Barbaro and Timothée Chalamet in the Bob Dylan film, A Complete Unknown.
A Complete Unknown is magic from beginning to end. If the object of cinema is a Cinema Paradiso type escape that leaves you untethered from reality and floating on cloud nine then this was a masterclass. I thought I was out of Dylan World, but Chalamet has brought me back in.
This may not chime with other reviews you’ve read, but so be it. There are those who don’t get Dylan and those who think he can’t sing. And then there are those who think the 1960s only started when he released Highway ’61 Revisited.
If you are in the latter camp, then this is a film you must see in the cinema. It is visually and aurally stunning. It is like stepping into a smoky dive on a night when your worries are overwhelming you and seeing a man with a guitar who stops the planet spinning.
Director James Mangold boxes clever with this. He has obviously realised that nothing tells the story of being young in the early 1960s - the fear of nuclear war, the shadow of McCarthyism, the allure of the folk world – better than Bob Dylan’s songs. Dylan’s observations will not be improved upon.
So, he steps out of their way and lets them work their magic. Dylan working out 'Girl from the North Country' in front of Pete Seeger’s family leaves Seeger astonished. Writing bits of 'Blowing in the Wind' as Joan Baez tries to make coffee and abandons her task to join in.These are probably apocryphal scenes, but that does not make them any less believable. Who would not react similarly?
Perhaps it is because we know the songs so well that we react as we did when McCartney started 'Get Back' in Peter Jackson’s documentary series The Beatles: Get Back. Then we shouted at the screen, “OMG! That’s 'Get Back'!” A Complete Unknown has many, many similar moments.
Uppermost amongst these is when Dylan’s faces the Newport Folk Festival audience in 1964. He announces he is going to play a new song, words which these days have come to mean “Go to the bar now". Dylan starts into 'The Times They are A-Changin'. But there is no clamour to the bar. The lyrics are so spot on and so perfect for the times that by the second chorus the audience are singing with him. An era-defining song born perfectly formed and ready for the melee.
The film charts Dylan’s story from arriving in New York, aged 19, visiting Woody Guthrie, meeting a girl, meeting Joan Baez, getting signed as a “new face for folk music”, being made record “covers” and then quickly graduating to his own original material.
It is this material and the speed with which it arrives that quickly separates him from all around him. No one can do what he does and so, no one can possibly relate to him. As his fame gathers momentum a man asks him if he as kids. “I have thousands,” he answers cryptically.
Elle Fanning, who plays Sylvie Russo as a composite mostly based on his then girlfriend Suze Rotolo, compares Dylan at one point to man spinning plates. It’s great to be that man, she tells him, not so much fun to be one of the plates. In Dylan’s world, we are all plates.
Dylan’s rate of development is part of what sets him on a collision course with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. He released Bringing it all Back Home in March and Highway ’61 Revisited in August of that year. By the time he hit that stage, he had long since “gone electric".
Mangold at no point gets Dylan to explain himself. He remains an enigma and a mystery and for this Chalamet is simply superb, probably even Oscar-winning superb. He learnt to sing and play both guitar and harmonica for this part and that is integral to how he carries it all off.
This is never more evident than in the climatic final Newport Festival appearance. There are shades of Remi Malek’s Live Aid scene in the Queen biopic here. Dylan and his band go on stage to a hostile folk loving audience and blow them clean out of the 1950s and slap bang into 1965.
I met a man once who saw Dylan play in Hawaii in 1964. That man, Thom Moore, immediately left the navy and became a folk singer, later forming an Irish band called Midnight Well. Watching this, all of that made complete and utter sense.
