Everyone’s going to be asking Timothee Chalamet, “How does it feel? To be an Oscar winner.”
Chalamet, 28, sings and plays guitar in James Mangold’s exceptionally entertaining, “A Complete Unknown,” the story of how Bob Dylan went from nowhere to Everything from 1961 to 1965.
Dylan sat in on five script writing sessions, and last week he endorsed the film without having seen it. He knows Chalamet is that good. And so is everyone else.
Dylan arrived in New York as Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota in 1961. Guitar strapped to his back, he burst onto the folk music scene in Greenwich Village and immediately began his own revolution. But 1965 he overturned the Newport Folk Music Festival by “plugging in” and “going electric.” The moment caused a watershed in popular music.
When Dylan arrives he immediately connects with Pete Seeger, already a well established folk hero. Played by Edward Norton (also getting an Oscar nom), Seeger is a very interesting character. He’s not only a performer but a politician inside the folk world. Norton plays him with a great story arc, sort of seething with jealousy as Dylan goes from protege to superstar.
Seeger takes Dylan to meet Woody Guthrie, who’s locked up in a mental hospital and not speaking, just staring. This is Dylan’s idol, and whether or not these meetings too place, Scoot McNairy — in a wordless performance — is heartbreaking as he passes the baton. Dylan also meets Joan Baez, played and sung by Monica Barbaro. Baez is also a star already. Their connection is immediate — on again, off again romantic and musical relationship.
Mangold capitalizes on Chalamet’s chemistry with Elle Fanning from Woody Allen’s “A Rainy Day in New York.” Fanning plays a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s exasperate and loyal girlfriend during that time who appeared on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Her Sylvie wants more from Dylan than she’ll ever get, or anyone else will as songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin'” turn him into an overnight poet laureate who’s constantly trying to blow up his own fame.
Mangold and screenwriter Jay Cocks are not just going paint by numbers here. They’re building a world in which Dylan could have possibly existed and presenting it not only to his fans but generations who will just be learning about him. Mangold and Chalamet worked for five years to create this Dylan, and the work pays off. Chalamet could have come off as an impersonator doing an “SNL” sketch. Instead, he inhabits Dylan self-effacingly. Among rock and roll biopic performances this one is right up there with Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn and Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison.
Mangold uses Hoboken, New Jersey as Greenwich Village, which works unless you live in either place. But kudos to the re-creation. Mangold has been here before. He turned Johnny and June Carter Cash’s country beginnings into such a convincing world that Reese Witherspoon won an Oscar for her work. Mangold knows he’s telling a limited story. Dylan goes on to many other chapters after this time. But this is where it all began, and they are bringing it all back home.
Don’t complain to me there are “no movies to see” this holiday season. Here it is.
