A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man
Here's what I riffed to social media after I got home from the advance screening on December 18th . . .
Caught the sold-out "A Complete Unknown" IMAX screening in Toronto last night — and boy was it GREAT to see it on a giant screen with loud crystal-clear 360º sound! During the concert scenes, the applause was behind you as though you were sitting in the front of the audience at the show.
Everybody's talking about Timothée Chalamet's performance or Bob Dylan being the subject, but my takeaway was James Mangold, the co-screenwriter and director, which I believe the French call an "auteur."
This is *fantastic* cinematic storytelling.
Besides Chalamet and Edward Norton being shoe-in Oscar nominations, does Mangold get a Best Screenplay nod? And Best Director and Picture? And it probably also deserves one for both Production Design and Sound Mixing.
But the main takeaway is how expertly Mangold tells in 2¼ hours a tale that spanned 4½ event-filled years — from "a complete unknown" arriving in New York City ... to becoming the most influential musical artist on the planet.
This could be effectively done devoting an hour to each year — but as it is, it moves at a lightning pace — and not in a bad way, but in a the-story-never-drags way. It's a domino tumble of scenes with a rapidly changing protagonist.
And it's massively fictionalized — in a good way. It's still a helluva lot more factual than any account Dylan ever told of his life — and it's a master class in dramatic cinematic storytelling.
There was a taped Q&A with the main cast afterward and Mangold said 26 Bob songs are played in the movie (!) and as you may have heard they're all done live on camera.
And nobody's talkin about Monica Barbaro who plays Joan Baez. I gotta think she's gonna become more of a household name after this.
And Edward Norton as Pete Seeger — fugetaboutit!
Oh and it's *funny*! Probably a dozen times the entire theater burst out laughing!
And in notoriously reserved Canada, the audience broke into spontaneous applause as soon as it ended! And then again after the credit roll wrapped. (!)
If you love movies and music and cultural history you'll wanna be makin plans to see this in a theater at your earliest.
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This film has now joined a pretty cool subgenre in movie history — biopics of musicians — telling the story of a lot of giants of music . . . made by & starring a lot of giants of film:
Young Man With A Horn, The Glenn Miller Story, The Benny Goodman Story, The Gene Krupa Story, St. Louis Blues, Bound For Glory, Leadbelly, The Buddy Holly Story, The Rose, Amadeus, Sid and Nancy, La Bamba, Bird, The Doors, Great Balls of Fire! Ray, Walk The Line, Control, Miles Ahead, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Elvis, Maestro . . . movies that racked up scores of Oscar wins & nominations over the decades.
I love that right out of the gate the ads for this movie use the phrase "Inspired by the true story of Bob Dylan," and that Timothée Chalamet said in his first interview for the film (with Zane Lowe at Apple Music), "This is interpretive. This is not definitive. This is not fact. This is not how it happened. This is a fable."
Unfortunately these details were overlooked by some Bob 'purists' — the modern-day equivalent of the 'fans' who booed him for going electric in the first place — who have similarly embarrassed themselves by booing this movie without seeing it.
In fact, it was Bob's own management company who optioned the book Dylan Goes Electric, according to its author Elijah Wald, and his longtime manager Jeff Rosen was a producer on the film, just as he was on Masked & Anonymous, No Direction Home, The Other Side of The Mirror (Newport '63-'65), Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue, and the 2021 Odds & Ends. Before they even had a script or director, it was Bob's team who first enlisted Timothée Chamalet, the focus of much of the Bob purists' wrath, even though they'd never seen him in a single film or know that he was Oscar-nominated as a Best Lead Actor at the ripe old age of 22 (for Call Me By Your Name).
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Dylan's team first approached the Coen brothers to adapt it since they'd already made the Oscar-nominated Inside Llewyn Davis about a folk singer in Greenwich Village in the same early-'60s period, but as Chamamet tells it, "Joel Coen, before we had Mangold involved, I asked him 'Why don't you direct the Bob Dylan movie?' And he said, 'It's impossible.' And I said, 'Why is it impossible?' And he goes, 'Because it's not about a singular moment. How do you, in a two-hour movie, encompass the miracle that is the breadth of what he wrote and how much he got out. It's like watching paint dry, cuz how do you make lyric writing interesting, basically.'"
And that's why I maintain that what James Mangold has achieved is so extraordinary. Even Joel Coen thought it was "impossible."
It's just an observation / theory of mine, but, as we all know, in the main, Dylan goes his own way. However, when it came time to create a public space for his archives, he went to Tulsa because the Woody Guthrie Center had planted the flag there. I think that he (and his team) went to James Mangold because he had written & directed the Johnny Cash / June Carter Oscar-winning biopic Walk The Line — about a musician Bob knew well and respected.
And Dylan didn't just sign off on this — he spent five full days with the director one-on-one, including working on the script together and adding several lines that made it into the finished film.
Bob is a lifelong cinephile, so he has a well-thought-out understanding of what makes a good film, and he has embraced and blessed this particular auteur. According to Mangold, the first thing Bob said upon him meeting was how much he loved his Copland movie (1997). He probably knew that all of the musical performances in Walk The Line were the actors singing live on camera — something the director repeated with all the performances in A Complete Unknown.
Mangold has also said how much he likes making films about artists, and that he considers his other Oscar-winning biopic masterpiece Ford vs Ferrari to be about two artists — a race car designer and driver. This is a filmmaker who has a history of successfully bringing real artists to life on screen.
Something else director Mangold said in a recent interview that I'll never forget and applies to the pacing that I mentioned in my first-viewing riff. You can hear his whole 5-minutes riff here, but he says, "The best advice I can ever give is advice that was given to me which is to write like you're sitting next to a blind person at the movie theater and you're describing the movie, and if you take too long to describe what's happening you'll fall behind because the movie's still moving."
He has made a 2¼ hour movie about events that took place over 4½ event-packed years. The guy understands audiences and how to keep them engaged and the story flowing. Funnily enough, there were lots of scenes that I would have enjoyed going on longer — like he and Joan bantering and bickering about songwriting in a small Greenwich Village apartment circa 1962, or when he finally gets in the recording studio with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper to cut Highway 61 — I coulda watched a whole movie about either of those two scenarios — but Mangold always has the big picture in mind and keeps the bluegrass-pickin-pace rollicking along.
After writing a great script and picking the right director, the most important thing in filmmaking is the casting, and, boy, he nailed this, too.
As I mentioned, apparently Chamamet was the first person Team Bob approached. We know they're smart, but this was brilliant. Timmy (as he's known to those around him) was the same age as Bob was in '64 when this was first set in motion, but then the Covid shutdown and the SAG/writers strike delayed production for five years, during which time he immersed himself in "the church of Bob" (as he calls it).
People wonder why movie stars sometimes get such ridiculously high paydays but it's in part because everything is riding on their ability to pull it off. It doesn't matter how good a supporting actor is or the cinematography or the score . . . if you don't believe and love the lead, the movie ain't gonna work. And this kid, now age 28, delivers the goods.
In tales reminiscent of Daniel Day-Lewis, he would stay in character all day on set, was listed as "Bob Dylan" on the call sheets, and for the first time on any of his 20+ films, he shut off his phone and had no communication with friends or family. As he explained to Rolling Stone for their cover story, "I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him. So, while I was in it, that was my exclusive focus. He deserved that and more."
The smartest foundational choice Mangold made was to pull back the camera from a songwriter writing lyrics and include the other people in the room — namely Pete Seeger (and his wife Toshi), Joan Baez, and his Freewheelin' girlfriend Suze Rotolo (whose memoir was also used as source material, and her name changed in the film at Bob's request because she wasn't a public figure).
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This is no longer a loner iconoclast's story but one that's experienced by the audience as a series of relatable conflicts — where "everybody wants you to be just like them," when a person's torn between two lovers ... and directions ... and loyalties. The real story is historic (and well known) but the drama is made personal. And this idea of having to pare down the story to just a few key characters is why historic figures like Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsberg — both very much in Bob's life during this time — got left on the screenwriting floor. As Mangold said, "If you have all these people, you end up with a parade. Let's say 40 percent of the movie is music, right? Now you only have 75 minutes left to tell the story. It's incredible how fast you have to pick and choose what you investigate."
The casting of these elevated characters was essential to the film's success — and number one was going to be Seeger who has the second most screen time in the film. Originally is was going to be the appropriately tall & lanky master thespian Benedict Cumberbatch, but with all the rescheduling he wasn't available when the time came, and with just three months notice Edward Norton jumped in. He so moves, sounds & looks like Seeger this viewer forgot it wasn't really him.
And all these actors had to learn to sing live on the reels like the real people they were playing, and obviously no one was going to have a higher mountain to climb than to reach Joan Baez's soprano vibrato. Their casting of Monica Barbaro, who only had four film credits to her name before this, was the boldest casting leap Mangold made, and, boy, did he get it right. Sure, she's got the acting chops to bring the character to life, but wait'll you hear her sing!
Boyd Holbrook has the unenviable task of playing Johnny Cash in a movie by the same guy who directed Joaquin Phoenix to his Oscar-nominated performance in Walk The Line (who didn't win only because Philip Seymour Hoffman played Capote the same year). Holbrook does indeed 'become' Cash and succeeds in not breaking the spell the film has cast.
Two other supporting roles worth noting are Dan Folger as Dylan's manager Albert Grossman, who Mangold has written as comic relief, which, I'm sure in The Screenwriter's Handbook it doesn't suggest turning a famously tough & gruff manager into a lovable Oliver Hardy. The other is an actor who speaks zero lines but has lots of screen time, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie, who was deeply addled with Huntington's disease by the time Dylan showed up in 1961. Actors spend their lives learning how to deliver lines and move around a stage, and this person brings to life the tortured soul of a singer unable to speak or "walk that ribbon of highway" any longer.
P.J. Byrne, who played great frazzled frantic characters in both Babylon and The Wolf of Wall Street is wonderfully similarly cast as panicky promoter Harold Leventhal. And I was happy to see a guy I did a number of Kerouac shows with back in the day, Peter Gerety, as the eye-patched judge in the opening scene.
Just as Walk The Line builds to Cash's career-changing performance at Folsom prison, Complete Unknown builds to Dylan's career-changing performance at Newport. But whereas Walk The Line ends with a conventional resolution scene, Complete Unknown simply ends with an evocative image that foreshadows another major event to shortly occur in Dylan's life.
And besides all the cinematic triumphs — this is just FUN.
It doesn't have the flashy pizazz of Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, or the creative cinematography of Bradley Cooper's Maestro, but what it has is good old-fashioned storytelling. And that's something I'm sure its subject and his fans will appreciate.
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Here's the first time Timothée Chalamet talked on camera about playing Dylan (a month ago). It's super insightful for anyone wanting to know how this creation happened. And this 20-something is an intelligent, articulate, self-aware, honest, dedicated, focused artist. (51:06)
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Here's a fascinating conversation between director Mangood and his Oscar-winning & nominated sound team talking about how they recorded & mixed the music and sounds in the movie. (1:11:10)
Here's director Mangold talking not believing 'writer's block' exists and how he writes screenplays. (5:31)
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Here's my Master Movie list with mini reviews of nearly 900 films conveniently broken down into genres . . . like the best Music Movies . . . the best Biopics . . . the best filmmakers by Auteur and other categories.
Another cinematic masterpiece interpretation of Dylan — I'm Not There — in an article I titled "Tarantula meets Chronicles in a Masked & Anonymous Prequel".
Here's something I wrote in preparation for seeing A Complete Unknown — "The Benefits of Biopics"
Since the Beat writers were largely creating literary biopics — here's the best guide on the internet to all the Beat dramatizations.
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by Brian Hassett
karmacoupon@gmail.com — BrianHassett.com
Or here's my Facebook page if you wanna join in there —
https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada
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