One other Aspect of Bob Dylan

The title of the brand new Bob Dylan biopic, A Full Unknown, isn’t just a reference to a well-known line from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” It’s the complete thesis of James Mangold’s movie in three phrases. In A Full Unknown, Mangold’s Dylan arrives in New York Metropolis in early 1961 with the garments on his again, an acoustic guitar, and a reputation that he selected for himself. He shuffles anonymously by way of Greenwich Village’s golf equipment and occasional outlets. Nobody offers this scruffy child a re-evaluation. Not till they hear him play.

Fairly quickly, Dylan turns into a Village favourite. Inside just a few years, he’s a world star, and so huge and influential than when he dares to buck the development towards socially related people music that he helped carry into the mainstream, he’s labeled a Judas by his personal followers. However the motivations behind that call and lots of others he makes all through A Full Unknown are left opaque. As a musician, Dylan is clearly a genius. As a person, he stays a whole unknown.

A biography that reinforces its topic’s mysteries somewhat than illuminates them is a legitimate alternative for a Dylan movie, and one Dylan himself would most likely recognize if he ever will get round to watching A Full Unknown. However I’m not certain it’s a wholly rewarding one to the paying buyer who goes to see this.

Sure, this film is well-made. However what, finally, does it add to our understanding of Dylan, or to nice artists normally? What can we take away from this story, besides that Dylan adopted his muse, wrote unimaginable music, and left the remaining to others to type out for themselves? These are questions I’m nonetheless wrestling with whilst I’m scripting this assessment.

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I do know this a lot: Timothée Chalamet is genuinely spectacular taking part in (and singing!) the younger Bob Dylan. A Full Unknown isn’t a biopic like Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which barely involved itself with the musical legacy of Leonard Bernstein, and targeted as a substitute on his difficult marriage and personal life. A Full Unknown overflows with Dylan music, from “Music For Woody,” strummed by Chalamet’s Dylan in a hospital room for Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), to “Like a Rolling Stone,” blasted by Dylan and his backing band on the shocked throngs gathered at 1965’s Newport Movie Competition.

All of the music is carried out by Chalamet, doing a really credible Dylan croon — and doing an much more spectacular job of inhabiting Dylan away from the microphone. His tics, his stammers, his evasive glances, his limitless obfuscations. Past his wild mop of brown hair, Chalamet doesn’t actually look very like Dylan. And Dylan is vastly totally different from ascendant emperor Paul Atreides in Dune, or from the aspiring chocolatier in Wonka. For a man who  seems principally the identical in each single position he takes on, Chalamet certain has developed a formidable chameleonic high quality.

Mangold surrounds Chalamet with a terrific ensemble. Edward Norton performs an awed, pissed off Pete Seeger who acknowledges the potential in Dylan, and maybe envies it as nicely, and tries to information the younger folkie’s profession within the methods he would have needed if he have been simply coming into his personal as an artist within the early ’60s. Elle Fanning performs Sylvie, a fictionalized model of Dylan’s girlfriend on this interval, maybe the final particular person outdoors the world of present enterprise who would ever be near him. And Monica Barbaro performs Joan Baez, who cast a fiery reference to Dylan each on and off-screen.

A Full Unknown’s screenplay, written by Mangold with frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks and primarily based on a ebook by journalist Elijah Wald referred to as Dylan Goes Electrical!, charts Dylan’s rise to fame after which his rising curiosity in rock and roll and pop, a lot to the consternation of old-school people singers like Seeger and his colleagues on the Newport Folks Competition. Whether or not you’ll get invested within the battle over Dylan’s musical soul might rely upon how a lot or care in regards to the man himself, and the way a lot about how these occasions performed out in actual life.

Past them, there isn’t an unlimited quantity of dramatic rigidity or suspense within the movie. A Full Unknown isn’t a conventional tackle “The Bob Dylan Story.” It’s extra a loving evocation of Nineteen Sixties New York Metropolis, with its smoky bars and chilly dives, and of the broader social and political upheaval that birthed this exceptional expertise — who then determined he was extra all for issues past protest songs and campaigning for civil rights. For Dylan, the occasions have been at all times a’altering.

So does that justify a film that provides so little to our understanding of Dylan? A Full Unknown is gorgeous, it’s received a beautiful texture of authenticity, and it’s received one exceptional track after one other. (The soundtrack shall be unimaginable … offered you wish to hear Timothée Chalamet sing “Lady From the North Nation.”) And when the film was over, I walked out of the theater and thought to myself … “Okay, however, so what?”

I imagine Mangold directed the Dylan film he needed to, and in some methods A Full Unknown is fascinating exactly as a result of it’s a willfully withholding portrait of an enigmatic star. Then once more, it is onerous to make a very satisfying film about a topic that its director appears to imagine can’t be understood.

Extra Ideas:

-The opposite key participant on this biopic is Johnny Money, a colleague and admirer of Dylan’s — and the protagonist of a earlier James Mangold film biopic, Stroll the Line, which starred Joaquin Phoenix as Money. This time, Boyd Holbrook assumes the position, and largely performs the nation singer as a lovable rogue somewhat than a tortured gunslinger. It’s enjoyable to see Mangold current one other facet of Money, even if just for a few scenes.

RATING: 7/10