A Complete Unknown 2024
James Mangold did a great job making a movie about Johnny Cash, so he was a perfect choice to make a movie about Bob Dylan. What he did well in Walk the Line was concentrate on the relationship between Johnny Cash and June Carter. He does something similar here by focusing on two women in Dylan's life. And he also limits the story to Dylan's early years between 1961 and 1965 as he becomes a huge star in folk music and then breaks out. It is a more intimate portrait by showing Dylan interacting with a small group of people, many, like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, who are already established and are blown away when Dylan shows up in New York at age 20 with this amazing musical superpower. He is writing iconic songs seemingly effortlessly. Since they can only fit so many songs in the movie, they are able to pick some of the best, including a few deeper cuts, so while we hear one great song after another, they were actually spread out over his first five or so albums. We don't necessarily find out why Dylan was so great as the music and reaction of the cast speak for themselves. Timothée Chalamet is very good singing like Dylan without it being a parody, and apparently also playing guitar. There are some nice lines of dialogue that keep things light and make the mercurial Dylan a little more human, even though the problem is he is intentionally a hard person to know (or even like). It is also a good chance to see some of the key players and as soon as I got home I had to look up not just Dylan, but Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez, plus look up what liberties were taken with the real story. Ultimately, the movie doesn't have that strong a finish because Dylan's career and life didn't resolve themselves in 1965. Still, I think the movie does a good job of telling this story of early Dylan and a few of these other characters without being a documentary or being too cliché. I enjoyed it.
Written: 31 Dec 2024