Movie review: A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan

My wife and I went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany to see A Complete Unknown at a Saturday matinee in late December. I asked the cashier whether people approached them and sang the title. They said a few did because they were trying to remember the film’s name; rather than saying, “Oh, the Dylan film,” they dug up the line from Like a Rolling Stone. The theater was quite full, with most patrons appearing to be eligible for Social Security.

It isn’t easy to analyze the film without the big caveats that many have already shared about the chronology and veracity of what happened to Bob Dylan between 1961 and 1965.  Characters are combined, and events happen in different order. What DID Pete Seeger feel about Dylan “going electric”? (Pete has long suggested that the distorted sound, not the volume, bothered him.)

All I can do is evaluate the film I saw. I liked it quite a bit, and my wife, who is a bit younger than me and not as immersed in early 1960s folk/pop music culture, also enjoyed it.

Timothée Chalamet did a credible job as Dylan or an element of Dylan. The movie’s Dylan seems to have been consistently oblique about his upbringing. His first girlfriend in New York City, Sylvie (Elle Fanning), complained that he’d never discussed it. Dylan pointed out that we’re all reinventing ourselves. 

So it was with the real Bob, from his white face paint in the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 to his religious era in the late 1970s and beyond.

Edward Norton did a wonderful job as Pete Seeger. Boyd Harrison was an adequate Johnny Cash, more with the swagger than the voice. Monica Barbaro was a pretty good Joan Baez; I think, in some ways, she had the hardest job of all since, to my ear, Joan’s is wonderfully specific.

A fan

I’m a big fan of these artists. I have a lot of Dylan, as well as several albums of Dylan covers, including this one. To be honest, seeing him in 2008 was rather unsatisfying.

Joan’s Best of Joan Baez album on Vanguard in the early ’60s was pivotal in my understanding of folk music. My father, sister Leslie, and I sag So Soon In The Morning from that album.  I saw her sing at the 1998 Newport Folk Festival. Recommend: the documentary I Am A Noise. About A Complete Unknown, she said that she didn’t have to see the film: “I lived it.”

My father owned the Pete Seeger album We Shall Overcome, Live from Carnegie Hall (1963). It got played a lot and had a huge effect on my father. I saw Pete sing in person probably three dozen times, mostly in the Mid-Hudson. One day, he performed at anti-war rallies in New Paltz and Kingston, NY.  I even spoke to him once at an anti-Springboks demonstration in September 1981 in Albany.

While I watched his ABC TV shows in the 1960s and 1970s, I rediscovered Johnny Cash in the mid-1990s through his American Recordings.

Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

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