Folk music is something that’s mainly overheard in the elegant first stretch of the often lovely “A Complete Unknown” — it’s something happening the next room over, down the hallway, in a different club farther along the way, past the crazy tambourine man. You lean in to hear it, as do the characters, who come together as if responding to a call. Are they forming a community? That would be putting it too sentimentally. This is a scene.
Banjo chords float down the corridor of a ghostly, near-deserted New Jersey psychiatric hospital, where an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) sees visitors. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), striding her way through Greenwich Village, hears something new and slows down, dropping into a basement for a peek. And some children notice it, too, one morning in their woodsy cabin’s breakfast nook, when a stranger whom their dad brought home — some kid named Bobby — roughs his way through the changes of a new song as sunlight softens the air. The room is spellbound.
Bobthrough is, of course, Bob Dylan, played here through Timothée Chalamet in an almost magical functionality that ignites all the right sparks: novelty, genius, a touch of distance that was probably less difficult to simulate than modesty for Dylan and, deep down, a kind of competitive, combative hunger. Chalamet has already taken his little messiah from the “Dune” movies to a dangerously dark place; his Dylan is made of the same fabric, uncomfortable with the coat they impose on him. Director James Manpassld favors the actor with distant shots, during which we know Chalamet is there, just a poker master waiting for the right hand to go all-in.
Superfans will necessarily love this. It’s a film made with love, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can rarely be idiots. Once again, his hero couldn’t possibly be more accurate than on “A Complete Unknown,” which presents the songs vividly (classic after classic, all sung live through the actors) keeping things nicely chronological throughout approximately 4 years. that any biopic interested in Dylan’s artistic arrival deserves to cover, from his penniless arrival in New York in 1961 to his 1965 uprising at the Newport Folk Festival. Todd Haynes did all that and more in his dazzling, experimental “I’m Not There,” a 2007 film that even gives a wig-wearing Cate Blanchett the chance to play the singer, but it’s safe to say that the undeniable technique Mangold basic is worth it. . course.
To shape the script (based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric!”), Mangold and Jay Cocks — Martin Scorsese’s collaborator on some of his most enduring adaptations (“The Age of Innocence,” “The Silence”) — landed on a contradictory but brilliant organizing precept that, in my opinion, no biopic about a wonderful boy has ever attempted. To make this dream come true, that is, for Dylan to Dylan, a. Many other people’s dreams had to die. We already know Minnesotans’ penchant for self-review and self-destruction, and the film includes a bar mitzvah photo in a secret album.
But there’s a surprising amount of collateral damage here, too. You see it in the movie’s collision of genres — folk, blues, rock — and its fine sense of popular art in flux. Edward Norton supplies the film with a gentle Pete Seeger, someone used to leading audiences in peaceful, utopian song but increasingly mystified by this newcomer who sharpens the folk movement into a spear and then takes the battle in a completely different direction.
Dylan’s women suffer mightily; they’re the heart of the film. We watch Barbaro’s Baez grapple with his distance. Their tryst starts off explosively: After their first night together, they rise to learn the Cuban missile crisis has thankfully ended. (“Well, that’s that,” a bed-headed Chalamet mumbles.) Then they sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the sheets. It’s not long before Baez grows tired of his remove, though. Their sold-out tour as a duo becomes a nightmare of onstage sniping.
Elle Fanning, already one of the most exquisite sufferers in American movies, steals the film with her version of Suze Rotolo, here renamed Sylvie, Dylan’s girlfriend from the time. An attractive, confident Manhattanite with a full schedule of activism, classes and volunteering, she radicalizes Bob, taking him to civil rights speeches. But watch how the movie captures him turning away, appreciating the growing crowds. Already she’s losing him and Fanning’s character, with her devastated eyes, can’t do a thing about it. Watching Dylan and Baez sing “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” she flees in a panic, Fanning uncorking the closeup of the year.
“You gave her the song,” Sylvie quietly accuses him a little earlier, crushed, a line that cuts to something deeper. He gave us all the songs. And then he became ours, even as we still wonder, 60 years later, what it is we actually got.
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