Brianland

 

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 & club 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 director and co-screenwriter, 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 Timothée plays 26 different Bob songs in the movie (!) and as you may have heard they’re all performed 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.

 

This film has now joined a pretty cool sub-genre in movie history — biopics of musicians — telling the story of giants of music … made by giants of film . . . 

Rhapsody in Blue, Young Man With A Horn, The Glenn Miller Story, The Benny Goodman Story, The Gene Krupa Story, St. Louis Blues, Lady Sings The Blues, Bound For Glory, Leadbelly, The Buddy Holly Story, The Rose, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Amadeus, Sid and Nancy, La Bamba, Bird, The Doors, Great Balls of Fire! What’s Love Got To Do With It, Selena, The Pianist, Ray, Walk The Line, Control, Nowhere Boy, Miles Ahead, Love & Mercy, Born To Be Blue, Straight Outta Compton, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Respect, 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.”  Director Mangold referred to the arc of the real story as “Shakespearian” and “like a fairy tale” and that it’s so naturally dramatic “it sounds like a movie pitch.” 

The film is like a Dylan song — a poetic interpretation inspired by something that happened.  Sadly some Bob ‘purists’ don’t grasp the concept and are booing an electric guitar they haven’t even seen yet. 

.

 

It was Bob’s own management company who optioned the book Dylan Goes Electric! according to its author Elijah Wald, and Bob’s longtime manager Jeff Rosen is 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 Chalamet — who was Oscar nominated for Best Lead Actor at the ripe old age of 22 (for Call Me By Your Name). 

.
Dylan’s team were in negotiations with both HBO and Amazon but ultimately went with Searchlight because they wanted a full theatrical release.  They 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 Chalamet 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 asked, ‘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 home 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 (2005) — about a musician Bob knew well and respected.  They went to where the flag was planted.

And Dylan didn’t just sign off on this — he spent five full days with the director one-on-one, including performing the entire script together with Dylan reading all the Bob parts and offering insights and even new lines that made it into the finished film.  I’m betting one of them was, “These chords I learned from a cowboy named Wigglefoot.”  😅

Bob’s a longtime cinephile having loved movies since he was a kid.  He’s mentioned them in his lyrics, starred in them, written songs for them, made his own a couple times, and proudly had his Oscar on stage with him for years.  He has a well-thought-out understanding of what makes a good film, and he’s embraced and blessed this particular auteur.  According to Mangold, the first thing Bob said upon them meeting was how much he loved his Cop Land movie (1997).  And he certainly knew that the musical performances in Walk The Line were the actors singing live — something the director repeated on camera with all the performances in A Complete Unknown.

When Mangold first explained his vision to Bob, “I knew he didn’t want a 20-minute pitch. I said:  ‘It’s about a young guy in Minnesota who’s suffocating and feeling desperate and who leaves everything – friends, family – behind and, with just a few dollars in his pocket, makes his way across the country and creates a new identity and makes new friends, finds a new family and blossoms, becomes successful, then starts to suffocate again and runs away.’”  Then Mangold says, “He smiled and that was all.  He didn’t have anything more to say, but I knew that meant, to me, that he didn’t take issue.”  

Mangold has also talked about 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.  He has a history of successfully bringing real artists to life on screen.

Something else writer-director Mangold said in a recent interview that I’ll never forget and applies to the pacing I mentioned in my first-viewing riff (above).  You can hear the whole 5-minutes 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 film, and if you take too long to describe what’s happening you’ll fall behind because the movie’s still moving.“

He’s made a 2¼ hour film about a story 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 several scenes that I would have enjoyed going on longer — like Bob and Joan bantering and bickering about songwriting in a small Greenwich Village apartment circa 1962, or when he finally gets in the 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 choosing the right director, the most important thing in filmmaking is casting, and, boy, Mangold nailed that, too. 

As I mentioned, Chalamet 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 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 soundtrack . . . if the audience doesn’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.  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). 

.
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 … two directions … two 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.”  And boy does he make effective use of lyrics to help tell the story in that 40 percent!

The casting of these elevated characters was essential to the film’s success — and number one was Pete Seeger who has the second most screen time in the film.  Originally it 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 to prepare Edward Norton jumped in.  He so moves, sounds & looks like Seeger this viewer forgot it wasn’t really him.

.
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.  The 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!

Bob’s pre-fame girlfriend, named Sylvie here and played by Elle Fanning, made me choked up when she got choked up, so she was transmitting the emotion from the screen to the seats.  And she was the favorite part of the movie for the 21-yr-old female film student / Dylan fan I happened to sit beside.

Boyd Holbrook has the unenviable task of playing Johnny Cash in a movie made by the same guy who directed Joaquin Phoenix to his Oscar-nominated performance in Walk The Line (who only didn’t win because Philip Seymour Hoffman played Capote the same year).  Holbrook (no relation to Hal) has a really well drawn character written for him, and he delivers the mannerisms, intensity & gravitas that the real father figure had.

Two other supporting performances worth noting are Dan Folger as Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, who Mangold has written as comic relief.  I’m sure The Screenwriter’s Handbook doesn’t suggest turning a famously tough & gruff manager into a lovable Oliver Hardy — but it happened!  The other is an actor who speaks zero lines but has lots of screen time, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie, who was bedridden with Huntington’s disease by the time Dylan showed up in 1961.  Actors spend their whole lives learning how to deliver lines and move around a stage, and this person brings vividly 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 one-eyed half-blind judge in the first Pete Seeger scene.

The film echoes Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in how it features real-life legends of the ’60s played by A-list actors placed in dramatic settings with some artistic license and all with an incredible soundtrack and Cinemascope framing.  Both films also share masterful production design bringing that decade to life.  Once Upon a Time won the Oscar for it, and there’s no question this’ll at least get nominated, as it did by the industry branch, The Art Directors Guild.  They also both enlisted the same consummate costume designer, Arianne Phillips, who was Oscar-nominated for Hollywood and may well be again here.  Besides the 67 costumes for Bob alone, and all the other leads, she dressed 4,500 background actors!

Curio – Sharon Tate carrying a promotional bag for
Bob’s Tarantula in 1966.  The book’s release was held
off after the motorcycle accident,
but the publisher was ready to run with it.
.

Like most of us, I love eye-candy cinematography — swooping cameras from wide to tight, flying thru windows and such — but this is wisely shot no-frills because they didn’t want to distract from the story.

Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael said it was 90% location shooting with very few sets.  They would dress whole blocks of streets and interiors, and there were no marks the actors were expected to hit — they could use the spaces instinctually as their characters saw fit in the moment.

Not only were all of the songs performed live on camera but they were performed in full takes as you see them in the film, and Bob’s climactic three-song electric set was filmed in its entirety without breaks.

But I’ll tell ya, that’s one shitty downside about this film — you can never watch a movie with music being lip-synched again! 

And something your average filmgoer may not notice much, but the sound mixing is something else I reckon they’ll be Oscar nominated for.  All the sounds of walking around the Village streets, and the chaos of all the club and concert scenes — what you need to hear, you hear — but it’s all within a real-world cacophony of life.  Plus during the concert scenes they mix the surround-sound so the clapping is behind you and beside you as though you’re sitting in the audience.  I thought this might’ve just been an IMAX feature but it also happened in the little 1914 art house theater I saw it in as well.

And of course any Dylan story wouldn’t be complete without the Beats. In his memoir Chronicles, Bob mentions Jack Kerouac as often as he does Woody Guthrie.  As he’s widely quoted as saying, “I read On The Road in maybe 1959.  It changed my life like it changed everybody else’s.”

Not only are legendary Beat haunts like the Kettle of Fish and the Gaslight featured prominently, but when Joan looks at Bob’s desk for the first time, sure enough there’s a 1958 Signet copy of On The Road on top of a pile!

And when Bob goes to a fancy party at promoter Harold Leventhal’s apartment in 1965, a bearded bald bespectacled Allen Ginsberg can be seen frolicking in the background, including standing next to Alan Lomax when Bob & Pete sing When The Ship Comes In. 

This also gives you a feel for the Cinemascope framing.

And not fer nuthin, but this whole movie is like one big Kerouac novel.  Pretty much everybody in it is a real person, and it’s all based on slightly fictionalized real events put into a dramatic structure.  Somewhere Sal Paradise is smiling.

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 these cinematic triumphs — this is just plain FUN.  And funny.  In both the big and small theaters, people were getting the humor and laughing out loud.

This is as close as we’re ever going to get to Bob making his own life story as a movie.  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 both its subject and his fans will appreciate.
.
.

.

=====================================
.

 

Here’s a fascinating conversation between director Mangold 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 about how ‘writer’s block’ doesn’t exist and how he writes screenplays.  (5:31)

.

Here’s a great conversation with director about how he created the movie.   (30:54)

 

Here’s an inspiring conversation with Mangold for Minnesota radio about Bob’s roots, and the director’s tips on living a creative life.  (15:10)

.

Here’s he is talking about writing the script and facts vs storytelling, and about Milos Foreman being his mentor and teacher.   (12:10) 

.

Here’s a pretty amazing mini-doc about the Production Design & Set Decoration including how they created Bob’s apartment, the Columbia recording studio, Pete’s cabin, Woody’s hospital, Folk City, the record store, MacDougal Street, Newport, the musician’s hotel . . . my Gawd what a passionate precision labor of love made by masters of their profession!  (39:51)

.

Here’s a great interview with Edward Norton talking about the concept behind the film, Chalamet’s historic performance, and the idea of portraying iconic virtuosos.  (8:58)

 

This is a great clip you’ll be happy you listened to — the priceless story wonderfully depicted in the movie of a young Prankster and how he walked into a room … and into the pages of history.  Kooper’s shared this story many times, but this is the most complete and fun version I’ve ever heard.  (8:37)

.

Here you can see the great Beat & culture historian Douglas Brinkley’s smart & cool summary of Dylan’s long love affair with the movies — on the “CBS Sunday Morning” show from December 22nd, 2024.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bob-dylans-enduring-love-affair-with-the-movies/

.
.

=====================================

 

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 film dramatizations.

And here’s what it’s like going to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa.

Or here’s the story of my first breakthrough understanding Bob in Greenwich Village.

Or here’s an account of being there when Springsteen brought Dylan out at Shea Stadium.

Or here’s what it was like seeing Bob in the small Kool Haus venue in Toronto.

Or here’s an amazing time-coded & annotated breakdown of the other sixties’ musical giant captured on film — The Beatles: Get Back.

.

============================================

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