In one of the many glowing, delicately layered scenes that make up Completely Anonymous, James Mangold’s offbeat drama about Bob Dylan’s early years, we watch Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who were musically and romantically involved, performing as a duet at the Newport Festival folk song in 1964. They sing Dylan’s song “It Ain’t Me”, “slinky,” and the way their voices blend (and their smiles, too) creates A vocal so pure that it seems sunlit, Mangold allows the song to play out in its entirety, as he does with many of the songs in “A Complete Unknown,” so that it literally becomes the story the film is telling.
This number is like a shimmering dream, but part of it is the drama unfolding underneath. Baez, at this point, had a relationship with Dylan. He’s a moody, self-absorbed folk-lover poet, always putting himself at the center of things (and yet somehow always seeming too cool to be there). And since Joan herself, with that quivering soprano, is a fierce agent, a celebrity in her own right, I’m done treating her like Dylan’s appendage. The song they sing expresses how they feel about each other (“It’s not me, baby/It’s not me you’re looking for, baby”). However, they invest it with great passion Votes Like romance. (Bob’s other friend, played by Elle Fanning, gets so caught up in the singers’ relationship that she walks off stage in tears.) Folk music is rooted in devotion to the world, but in that moment what Dylan and Baez’s singing represents is devotion to the self: the new world to come. This scene makes your heart explode and your head spin at the same time.
“Totally Anonymous” is a drab, naturalistic drama, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as resonate with its mythical, curly-haired, sunglasses-wearing hero in a café. However, the feeling – the effect – is a musical feeling. You might assume that would be true in any classic rock biopic, but in this case, the film, with its beautifully random lyrical structure, is really about Dylan. and His music, and how music changed everything. Every new song is a dramatic episode, whether it’s Dylan performing “Masters of War” at the Gaslight Café right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, experiencing “Blowin’ in the Wind” with Baez in his living room, or singing “The Times They Are.” “A-Changin'” in Newport, with the crowd singing along at the end as if it were a song they’ve always known.
Dylan, played by Chalamet with a frog in his throat and a sly, decorative calm so authentic that it disarms you and then crushes you, wanders from cramped bohemian apartments to recording studios to concert stages to elegant parties, always returning to the colorful squalor of Greenwich Village. (played by the not-so-convincing Jersey City cast), and he hooks up with whoever suits him. It slides into mutual relations, and then slides out of them just as quickly. But that’s because music is his only true lover. The songs that Dylan composes, the lyrics of which he scribbles down on notebooks, often in the wee hours of the night, consume him and define him. A Complete Unknown explores the essential power of what Dylan created during this period, laying out songs for the ages as if he had pulled them. outside From the ages. The fact that the Dylan we see is a bit of a scoundrel becomes part of the film’s strength. She’s mercilessly honest about what an obsessed artist is really like.
We met him in 1961, when he was a 19-year-old hitchhiker from Minnesota. He is delivered to New York City on a cold winter day, wearing his hat, coat, scarf, and backpack, and carrying a guitar case that looks like a part of him, and immediately heads to the hospital in New Jersey where Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) lies in bed, unable to speak. Due to the ravages of Huntington’s disease, Guthrie’s friend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) is visiting, and Bob enters the room looking questioning but in awe Guthrie, the cheerful, everyone-attractive model, modeled what he does.
When Dylan took out his guitar and played “Song to Woody,” something happened that I wouldn’t hesitate to describe as magical. Chalamet, singing in a nasally, slightly constricted voice, his tone as steady as his gaze, singing the words as if they were a mantra… and in that moment, becomes Bob Dylan. The voice, the clear frankness, the spiritual rawness that melts into something lyrical – it’s all there.
Bob Chalamet doesn’t say much. Tends to speak in cognitive sentences of five words. But this is because, in his opinion, the path of human communication has already been cut off. He doesn’t have much use for it. It was connected to something more timeless. And Chalamet rises to the challenge of capturing the prickly charisma of Dylan’s inchoate, anti-material, reading-between-the-lines character. It’s a stunning performance that’s consistent with Dylan and, just as importantly, with movie logic. We stare at this mysterious young man, who lights up the room when he sings, and like everyone around him we want to know what makes him special.
The script, by Mangold and Jay Cocks, is meticulously crafted so that all the points covered by a traditional biography are there: the way Dylan, in Folk City, captivated the Village audiences of the early 1960s as well as the New York Times; his push-pull relationship with Baez and the tender rapport he forms with Fanning’s politically minded Sylvie (the film version of Suze Rotolo’s same-in-all-but-name); the deal he makes with the cunning manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler); And the camaraderie he forges with Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), a country swagger who fuels Dylan’s evil impulses, and with the banjo-wielding Seger, played awkwardly by Norton as a twinkle-eyed figure, really… com. folksy Blessed saint activist.
Dylan himself is steeped in folk music, but he’s not a fan of folk music. He sees what’s coming that Seeger can’t: the startling self-infatuation of the new pop audience. (Seeger does not realize that this narcissism will kill his proletarian dream.) The story “Completely Anonymous” tells how Dylan turns away from the “purity” of popular music as his music begins to open up to richer, bolder music. A more luxurious purity: the need to reflect the world he sees around him.
That’s why he became an electrician. This will upset true believers, like Newport Folk Festival organizer Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), but Dylan’s destiny as an artist is to move into uncharted territory, and do so by writing some of rock’s most exciting music. ‘n’ roll song ever recorded (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) and some of the most amazing songs ever recorded (“Like a Rolling Stone”).
This transformation was brilliantly covered in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant 2005 documentary No Direction Home. But “Completely Anonymous,” tied to Chalamet’s haunting performance — now hooded, now open, now desperate, now buoyed by feelings of rebellion — captures something the documentary didn’t capture: the pain in Dylan’s heart, and the toll it took on him personally. . To bring about this change in his music, and in the world, he needed to do more than just confront an audience of screaming, betrayed fans in Newport. He had to stare down the cosmic forces that were telling him no and replace doubt with faith. This is what Dylan’s music has always been: the voice of faith that illuminates the darkness. When watching The Completely Unknown, his journey into the light becomes our journey.