A Complete Unknown (15, 141 mins)
Verdict: Cracking biopic
Bob Dylan fans will immediately recognize the title of James Mangold’s fantastic biopic. The film portrays the legendary figure excellently enacted by Timothée Chalamet, borrowing its name from a line in Dylan’s famous song, Like A Rolling Stone, released in 1965.
It could be, incidentally, that you don’t think of Dylan as a ‘great man’. Not everyone does.
Described as having ‘a nasal, mumbling whine,’ Dylan’s voice hasn’t aged like fine wine, but at 83 years old, he continues to captivate adoring crowds with his performances. Just last November, he graced cities like Bournemouth, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Nottingham, and Wolverhampton before his three-night sold-out stint at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall.
The devoted followers of Bob Dylan, often referred to as ‘Dylanologists,’ mostly share his age bracket. Interestingly, these longtime fans now find themselves intersecting with a wholly different fanbase – the fervent admirers of Timothée Chalamet, dubbed the ‘Chalamaniacs.’ Comprising mainly young individuals, these Chalamaniacs exhibit intense devotion to Chalamet. Witnessing them in action is a spectacle, with crowds shouting his name and displaying sheer elation, a scene that unfolded once more at the UK premiere in London on Tuesday night.
A Complete Unknown targets both groups but if you fall into neither, don’t let that put you off. Director and co-writer Mangold has crafted an absorbing film, which I first saw last month and anointed with four stars. On second viewing this week, however, I think it deserves the full five.
It focuses on those few pivotal years between Dylan’s arrival in New York City in 1961 as an anonymous teenage troubadour from Minnesota, and the night in 1965 ‘that split the Sixties’ and marked a turning-point in popular music. That was the July evening when, to the horror of his fans, the acoustic folk-music hero took to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island with a Fender Stratocaster guitar (now on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art) and an electric band.
The title is a perfect fit, not just because Dylan is a complete unknown at the beginning of the film but also, in a way, because we don’t know him much better by the end of it.
Mangold, in adapting Elijah Wald’s fascinating 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric, barely even tries to delve into the singer-songwriter’s mercurial personality. He is an enigma throughout. This movie is mainly about the music.
Chalamet, although a fair bit prettier than the young Dylan, captures him wonderfully.
Most impressively he does all his own singing and playing, and so by all accounts do all the others cast as legendary figures of the era: Monica Barbaro as Dylan’s lover Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as his roguish supporter Johnny Cash (‘Your Freewheelin’ album is my most prized possession,’ he tells Dylan), and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, the folk-revival figurehead whose eternal affability is tested almost to snapping point when his former protégé rocks the 1965 festival in more ways than one.
The film begins with Dylan, newly arrived in Greenwich Village clutching only his guitar and a newspaper cutting about his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), taking a cab to New Jersey where the protest-music icon is hospitalised with a degenerative disease.
Within weeks of his hospital room performance for Guthrie and Seeger, Dylan is a fixture on the Village folk scene, hailed by the New York Times as ‘a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik’, sleeping with Baez while living with his girlfriend (Elle Fanning as the thinly disguised and long-suffering Suze Rotolo, here named Sylvie), roaring around dangerously on his motorbike and obsessively writing songs at all hours, with none of the above interrupting his 60-a-day cigarette habit.
Mangold (whose credits include the terrific 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line) expertly sets all this in the context of the convulsive times, because indeed they were a changin’.
The backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK and the tumult over civil rights is reflected in Dylan’s songs but does not define him. If anything he is indefinable, and of course his rebelliousness has never abated. When in 2016 he became the only singer-songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, he skipped the ceremony.
There are some strange omissions in the film: in the chronicling of all those social and political convulsions the Vietnam War is pretty much overlooked, as is Dylan’s much-discussed use of drugs.
But A Complete Unknown is a triumph, all the same; entertainingly reminding us that, love him or hate him, Dylan remains one of the most influential musicians of the past 70 years. And that Chalamet, not yet 30, is much more than a pretty face.
Here (104 mins)
Here strives to tell the entire story of America by focusing on a single venerable house and its residents through the centuries (not to mention the Native Americans who owned the land before it was built). In the process, it winds up being tedious and twee-beyond-belief
A weirdly de-aged Tom Hanks plays one of the characters, with Paul Bettany, who seems to have forgotten everything he ever learned about acting, as his World War Two veteran father. This is not Bettany’s finest hour, nor that of writer-director Robert (Forrest Gump) Zemeckis.
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You can always distinguish between goodies and baddies in silly historical epics: the baddies have the worst haircuts.
This is resoundingly so in the monumentally silly William Tell (15, 133 mins, HH✩✩✩). The pudding-bowls and mullets all belong to the followers of evil King Albert (Ben Kingsley) who, being in charge, doesn’t have a daft barnet but a creepy gold eye-patch.
Nick Hamm’s film is inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 play about the medieval Swiss folk hero (Claes Bang) who led resistance to the bullying Habsburgs and famously was compelled to fire his crossbow at an apple balanced on his son’s head.
That scene is nicely handled but the rest of the movie gave me the pip. Apples loom large throughout. ‘There is but one bad apple and we must rid it from the barrel,’ sneers Albert’s horrid general, Gessler (Connor Swindells, terrific in the TV hit SAS Rogue Heroes but here engaged with Bang in a private tussle: who can declaim his lines more hammily).
The dialogue is cod (or perhaps codpiece) Shakespearean, in which adverbs and conjunctions are shunted around just to make it sound more authentic, and a fine cast (also including Jonathan Pryce, Emily Beecham and Rafe Spall) cannot save the whole misfiring enterprise from Swiss cheesiness.
Most worrying of all, it ends with a strong hint of a sequel. Begad, that prospect pleases me not.
Nor is there anything pleasing about Emmanuelle (18, 107 mins, H✩✩✩✩). Writer-director Audrey Diwan’s ‘feminist’ remake of the soft-core sensation is one giant anti-climax. Sylvia Kristel’s bored, polyamorous housewife from the 1974 film is here reinvented as a sleek hotel-chain executive (Noemie Merlant), sent to Hong Kong where she is meant to sack an icy manager (Naomi Watts) but gets distracted by her own thrashing libido.
The dialogue is terrible (‘only two types of guests frequent luxury hotels: those on the prowl, and those on the run’), the acting lacklustre and the sex unconvincing.
Frankly, Carry On Emmannuelle (1978) was less daft, and that featured Joan Sims as Mrs Dangle.
*All films are in cinemas now.
