Julie River is a Denver transplant originally from Warwick, Rhode...
Every year, in the time between when the Academy Award nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OFM movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for Best Picture that year. In the years since the pandemic, this has become easier, as a lot move of the movies are now available on streaming.
Last year was the first year since they expanded the number of Best Picture nominees from five to 10 that River managed to make it through all 10 nominated films, and as she did so, she wrote reviews of them for OFM. This year, she aims to do it again, watching all 10 nominated films and writing about them for this site. She already saw and reviewed Emilia Pérez and I'm Still Here as part of her coverage of this year's 47th Annual Denver Film Festival. That leaves her with eight films to watch and review. Can she make it through all 10 films again? Find out on OFM's Road to the Oscars!
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My love of Bob Dylan started when I got involved in the poetry slam scene, around 2002, when one of my big role models in the scene described his three favorite artists as being Bad Religion, Public Enemy, and Bob Dylan. I dove headfirst into all three artists and still count myself as a fan of all of them to this day (although I take issue with Public Enemy's long history of queerphobia).
I've never taken to the early Dylan albums very much, but I'm a big fan of the early "Dylan goes electric" period around 1965 when he put out, in my opinion, his three best albums in the span of less than two years: Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, and Blonde on Blonde in 1966. So, obviously, when they announced that the new Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, would be based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, I knew I wanted to see it, but time and money were in short supply for the first month it was out.
Thankfully, the film being nominated for an Oscar gave me an opportunity to see the movie as part of this series, and a fan of my writing on BlueSky was kind enough to buy me a ticket (thanks Carolyn!). And now that I've finally had the opportunity to see James Mangold's brilliant biopic of one of the all-time greatest lyricists, I'm happy to say that it didn't disappoint.
Technically, A Complete Unknown is the second film made about Bob Dylan, the first being Todd Haynes' experimental biopic I'm Not There in 2007 which featured six different actors of various races and genders playing different aspects of Dylan's personality. Say what you will about that very weird film, but the soundtrack produced some of the greatest covers of Bob Dylan ever recorded, including my favorite Dylan cover ever, which is The Hold Steady's brilliant rendition of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"
A Complete Unknown takes a much more traditional approach to telling the story of Dylan's life, following one actor, Timothée Chalamet, portraying the songwriter during his meteoric rise to fame in the early '60s, culminating in his infamous and controversial first electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. The decision to limit the film to just those five years was a great decision because, with a prolific artist like Dylan who has released literally 40 albums to date, you'd need a miniseries to do his entire life justice.
The film starts in 1961 when Dylan travels to New Jersey to visit one of his heroes, Woodie Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who is deteriorating from Huntington's disease in a hospital in New Jersey. There he also meets fellow folk musician Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who discovers Dylan's talent and helps him get his start at an open mic in New York City. It's there that he meets rising folk star Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and artist manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), the latter of whom gets Dylan signed to a record deal.
At first, Dylan is mostly forced to record covers, but after meeting and starting to date Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), Russo encourages Dylan to start recording his own songs more, as well as encouraging him to become more engaged in politics. As Dylan slowly becomes more and more famous, he starts to shy away from the early songs he recorded and begins incorporating electric elements to his music, much to the disappointment of Seeger, leading to the tumultuous 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance when he shocks and angers the crowd by playing an electric guitar.
The real life Bob Dylan had asked the filmmakers not to use the real identity of his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, but by all accounts the only thing the filmmakers changed about Rotolo was her name. They even went so far as to put the character of Sylvie Russo on the cover of Dylan's sophomore album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which featured Rotolo in real life. But if there was any concern about how Rotolo/Russo would be portrayed in the film, she comes out smelling like roses as opposed to Dylan, who comes off as a terrible boyfriend, especially in the fact that he cheats on her with Joan Baez while Sylvie is off in Rome. Fanning does an outstanding job of portraying the wronged girlfriend, especially in her final moments of the film where she heartbreakingly leaves Bob in the middle of the folk festival.
Chalamet, for his part, embodies Dylan's personality perfectly, even if the attempts to make him look like Dylan end up making him look more like Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong than Bob Dylan. From his humble beginnings to his more rockstar mentality, Chalamet sells the evolution of Dylan, but also makes him out to be a complete asshole.That inevitably raises the question of why you would even want to see a movie about Bob Dylan where he's an asshole? Well, as off-putting as the character is, somehow Chalamet still makes you admire him. Naturally, if you give a young white guy some money and fame, he's going to become a bit of a jerk. But through it all, you can clearly see the genius in Dylan. I would even argue that, as harsh as his personality can be in the movie, I still left the theater with the same love for Dylan that I had going in. If anything, I kind of wanted to be his friend in the mid-60s. He just seemed like such a cool guy. Chalamet brings that level of complexity to the character, and that's hard to pull off.
I admit, I didn't know much about Joan Baez before seeing A Complete Unknown, or about her tumultuous relationship with Dylan that, according to the film's epilogue, resulted in her writing the song "Diamonds & Rust." The movie depicts Dylan as being completely unfair to Baez from the get go, starting with his first interaction with her where he calls her singing "too pretty." Barbaro does a great job of making Baez the sympathetic character in their relationship and, by the end of the film, you can't blame her for writing that song about Dylan being an ass.
Director James Mangold has a lot of great credits to his name, including being the only director besides Steven Spielberg to ever direct an Indiana Jones film. He also directed the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which seems appropriate considering that Cash is a prominent figure in this film, as well. Mangold can count A Complete Unknown as yet another feather in his cap. I may not have been alive for the 1960s, but I really felt like this movie captured the spirit of the decade without overly romanticizing it, right down to the sheer panic in New York in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Mangold gives us a glimpse into the complexities of a rockstar while being brutally honest about Dylan's personality.
The Vegas odds for A Complete Unknown don't have it as a favorite to win any of the Academy Awards it's nominated for, but Timothée Chalamet is a close second in the odds to win Best Actor, and the writers over at Covers.com picked him to upset the favorite, which is Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. They argue that the use of AI in Brody's role is going to hurt his chances, and the fact that Chalamet spent years learning the guitar for the role is going to help him. Having not seen The Brutalist yet (I'm dreading that 3 ½ hour slog), I can't comment on Brody's performance quite yet, but I have to say that Chalamet was outstanding in A Complete Unknown and I'd really love to see him pick up the Oscar. For all the jokes that people like to make about Chalamet being a scrawny hipster, he proved his acting chops in this film and deserves all the accolades and praise he's getting for this role.
Rating 97/100
A Complete Unknown is still playing in theaters and you can find showtimes here.
All photos courtesy of Searchlight Pictures