Why is the film about Bob Dylan so fascinating?

BarcelonaSuddenly, I began to cry, deeply moved by everything that the scene I was watching in the movie explained. By how filmmaker James Mangold had decided to stage the interpretation of the song. The times they are a-changin' by Bob Dylan, because of the way actor Timothée Chalamet was singing it... and because verses eroded by clichés took on new meanings at that precise moment.

A complete unknown, the film about Bob Dylan's early artistic years (1961-1965), is a fascinating proposal constructed as a legend that consciously plays with simulation and anachronism, sometimes leaving the documented facts in the limbo of the off-screen and generating a hilarious possibility: that some Dylanophile might sulk like some folk purists did when Dylan brandished the electric guitar. It is a fable that, as defended the deputy head of Culture of the ARA, Xavi Serra, challenges the clichés of biopic because it avoids stories of overcoming and/or redemption. The dramatic arc does not aim to close a moral story, but rather to place the protagonist in the situation of the character of western The film ends with him walking toward the horizon, the sun on his back and his saddlebags filled with longing, unanswered prayers, dreams, and dignity, all at once. But instead of on horseback, he's riding a motorcycle.

As film critic Eulàlia Iglesias says, Mangold chooses the path of the end of The man who shot Liberty Valance ("Print the legend!"), because in the West (as in music), "when legend surpasses reality, the legend is published." Although, apparently, the script is based on the book Dylan goes electric!, by Elijah Wald, the filmmaker does not challenge "the Dylan mystery" with the vast journalistic documentation on that period or with the biographical material from books such as Positively Main Street (1971), by Toby Thompson; Dylan (1972), by Anthony Scaduto, or above all In Freewheelin' time: a memoir of Greenwich Village in the sixties, by Suze Rotolo, the woman who in the film is represented by Sylvie Russo's character, played by actress Elle Fanning. Mangold prefers to challenge the mystery by showing the backstory of an artist who wasn't exactly "unknown." He does this with small details placed at relevant moments, such as the photo album that Joan Baez's character (actress Monica Barbaro) flips through, which debunks the fabrication of his carny past; a fantasy, incidentally, that Dylan himself would evoke in the seventies with the minstrel tour The Rolling Thunder Revue.

Dylan, dressed as a legend

Mangold missed the mark with the biopic by Johnny Cash, On the tightrope (2005), too attached to the conventions of the genre. However, in A complete unknown plays with a different card, presenting Dylan as a 20-year-old man who invents the past to dress up as a legend, although his talent surely doesn't need so many masks to legitimize itself. And once the deck is dealt, he constructs a fiction based on real events and lies that, paradoxically, becomes a magnificent portrait of the young artist. He doesn't paint a Dylan touched by an innate genius, but rather a curious young man who internalizes the musical poetics of Woody Guthrie (whose he probably envies for living the reality he expressed in his songs) and the folk bonhomie of Pete Seeger (whose enthusiasm he admires) with the same naturalness with which he will be fascinated by the electric blues of guitarist Mike Bloomfield.

Misanthropy and narcissism creep in; it would be absurd to ignore their presence, but Mangold compensates with scenes in which Dylan makes decisions based on the advice of others or on artistic discoveries that he praises and subsequently embraces with open arms. The film focuses on this Dylan as a spectator who listens to and considers the opinions of others, whether it's Russo's recommendation to record new songs or the support he receives when Johnny Cash's character tells him not to stop messing around. In any case, it describes narcissism and respect without overloading the calligraphy, simply with details such as turning off a television bored with current events or dedicating a few seconds to the exchange of glances between Dylan and Seeger (an extraordinary Edward Norton playing one of the best people in the world).

Yes, knowing the context and biography of Bob Dylan surely enriches the vision of A complete unknown, but the merit of the film is that it works perfectly as a story of the longings, contradictions and conflicts inherent in the transactions between life and art. All of this between the interpretation of A song for Woody, in 1961, in a hospital in front of Woody Guthrie himself (actor Scoot McNairy) and the moment when he sings and plays the acoustic guitar It's all over now, Baby Blue at the 1965 Newport Festival, just after he had unleashed the thunderstorm with Maggie's farm, Like a Rolling Stone and It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry. It is worth highlighting the magnificent performance, as an actor and as a singer, offered by Timothée Chalamet, who embodies the legend of Dylan with the same attitude with which the singer Cat Power faced the songbook of the author of Blowin' in the wind on the disk Cat Power sings Dylan: the 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert (2023): escaping imitation to scrape the bottom of the glass of the most genuine emotions. Incidentally, the controversy over whether Dylan's acoustic or electric style was better was settled by Dylan himself on that 1966 British tour: the pinch was as good and as exciting on electric as on acoustic.

Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro, an impeccable duo

As noted the critic Gerard Casau, A complete unknown It's a kind of musical that doesn't seem like one, but where most of the songs have an intentional dramatic meaning. This is one of the film's most fascinating proposals: the way in which the interpretations of the songs build the story and convey its emotional charge. There are three prodigious examples, which also evoke different off-screen scenes. One is the scene in which Chalamet and Barbaro, playing Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, sing It ain't me, babeThe song's lyrics confirm that whatever bonded them romantically isn't going anywhere, but the performance speaks to the absolute happiness they both find together on stage. Furthermore, Mangold makes Sylvie Russo's character, watching from the sidelines, embrace the difficulty of being part of that adventure. The offscreen scene is a future in which Dylan, married to Sara Lownds, will release the song. Visions of Johanna. Because artists never close a story.

The second example is a fabricated scene in which Dylan visits the public television studio where Pete Seeger is hosting an educational music program. The guest is the bluesman Jesse Moffette, a fictional character played by the son of Chicago blues pioneer Muddy Waters (as Xavi Serra pointed out to me). Dylan approaches to improvise a blues with Moffette, and Mangold uses the scene to convey that a musician's primary desire is to play for the pleasure of playing. The off-screen shot is twofold: to the past, to the legacy of Muddy Waters; and to the future, Dylan's endless tour.

The third example, although there are others, is the one I explain at the beginning of the article: the interpretation of The times they are a-changin'Musically, it echoes American folk and Scottish ballads, and thematically, it combines the archetypal protest song with generational confrontation and a few drops of unmistakably biblical prophetic alarm. Chalamet sings it respecting these origins, but aware of what Mangold wants to do. The reverse shot is a succession of reverse shots of the audience and musicians like Pete Seeger, and each seems to be interpreting in their own way lines like "don't criticize what you can't understand" or that speak of paths that have aged. The off-screen is the audience's power to dispossess the author and appropriate the songs. For things like this, and for Timothée Chalamet, A complete unknown It's such a fascinating movie.