Who else could recreate a 20-year-old Bob Dylan capable of making Joan Baez, upon hearing a performance of a song, go, 'Of course, my insides are completely shattered, because it's so beautiful', other than Timothée Chalamet?
Scene from A Complete Unknown - IMdB photo
With his slim figure, messy curly hair, deep eyes that seem to always travel to a realm that others can hardly see, a rough voice like a mixture of "sand and glue", Timothée Chalamet has full authority to play a guy who is both sweet and mean, an artist who is cruel to those who love him but they still cannot help but love him and forgive him.
In other words, Chalamet has all the qualities to summon the legendary Bob Dylan from the past. Except that the most anticipated biopic of early 2025, A Complete Unknown by director James Mangold, does not bring the best script.
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN Trailer
Anonymous or unknown?
The film's title can be understood in two ways: "a completely unknown person", or "a person no one understands".
The first interpretation corresponds to the film's setting in 1961, when Bob Dylan, alone with a guitar, traveled from Minnesota to New York to find his idol, folk singer Woodie Wuthrie.
The second understanding corresponds to the bottomless depths that no one - not even Bob's friends, lovers, benefactors, or confidants - can reach.
But the way Mangold tells a linear story and then tries to decode Bob Dylan in the familiar biopic format makes us think we can understand Bob Dylan, that his decision to switch to electric guitar - a pivotal moment in the history of popular music - came from a desire to become the person everyone wanted him to be.
Bob Dylan is complex in the film, simple as that, simple as it gets: he's a rebel, a maverick, a maverick. All of these things are expected, which is what makes it so disappointing.
The constant conflict within Bob Dylan is inexplicable, so the best works about Bob Dylan always have to break down conventional structures: Todd Haynes's I'm Not There fragments Dylan's six personalities among six actors of varying ages and genders;
Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue is billed as a documentary but is peppered with imaginative details, challenging the notion of distinction between fact/fake, fiction/non-fiction, official history/unofficial history.
Bob Dylan
I sleep with life and death in the same bed
From the very beginning, these works established that there was no way to look at Bob Dylan's true face, because there was no such thing as the "true face" of that person.
Of course, A Complete Unknown has its own audience. It serves as an introduction to the legendary musician, and viewers new to him will enjoy it, with its beautiful frames that seem to be cut from musical memory:
Bob Dylan strolling the streets with Suze Rostolo (played by Elle Fanning) under the orange New York sun; or Bob Dylan on stage with Joan Baez (actress Monica Barbaro), the two sharing a microphone, singing It Ain't Me Baby while gazing lovingly at each other at the Newport Festival.
The actors' faces were all excited and beautiful - the 1960s were here, a decade of dreams, of protest culture, of a time when young people dared to rebel against the old, worn-out world.
The most regrettable thing in A Complete Unknown is the moment when Joan Baez calls Bob Dylan. Before that, she, like everyone else, didn't want him to give up folk music to pursue electric guitar. He still went ahead, despite all the objections, and he did it. She told him he had his freedom.
Then there’s Bob Dylan riding a big bike, making that freedom tangible. The story of a hero (or anti-hero) achieving freedom is always compelling, but it also makes this a bland success story.
At the age of 80, Bob Dylan wrote a song that included the line: "I sleep with life and death in the same bed." In other words, to live is to struggle. A Complete Unknown pretends that Bob's struggle was completed in his twenties. If Bob Dylan had achieved freedom so early, what was left for him to pursue?
Bob Dylan is a troubadour and a star, a poet and a Christian, a lover and a philosopher, a revolutionary and a fugitive, an original storyteller and a picker-upper, or as he describes himself: "I'll play Beethoven's sonatas and Chopin's preludes. I have many faces."
Source: https://tuoitre.vn/timothee-chalamet-ban-lai-dien-muc-cua-bob-dylan-20250119084213336.htm
Comment (0)