'A Complete Unknown.'

[Khandro]

.... is the title of the new film about Bod Dylan now 'at various cinemas' in the UK. It gets a very good review in the TLS, which I've just read.

Has anyone seen it yet & if so what did you think ?

[albaqwerty]

I've seen it. Twas OK. A bit of dramatic licence here and there and there and back here again.

If you're a casual fan, it'll pass, if a hard core fan I imagine you might feel as if you've wasted you time.

[Atheist]

And yet it wasn't reviewed at all in the LRB, which I've just read. I wonder why?

Word on the street is that it's a good film.

[Khandro]

 Review begins;

James Mangold’s new Bob Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, nails its colours to the mast with its title: why even bother trying to get under the skin of this most-mythologized and self-mythologizing of poets, performers, prophets, Nobel prize-winners – what does one even call Dylan these days – when there is so much more fun to be had in submitting to the lore?

On the one hand, this is indeed the story of a young folk (and Elvis Presley) enthusiast from Saint Louis County, Minnesota, who rocks up in New York with a guitar and a whole load of chutzpah and proceeds very quickly to become Bob Dylan; on the other, it is the story of an artist who has remained, to his public and – in the public imagination – to those around him, wilfully unknowable, mercurial, mutable, prodigious, dissembling, disappointing, the most fecund empty vessel who ever did live. Focusing on the four extraordinarily productive years between 1961 and 1965 when Dylan went from being Woody Guthrie’s heir to a feedback-emitting “Judas” (another overblown legend), Mangold’s movie is more mythopic than biopic – and highly entertaining for it.

If Robert Zimmerman was born to be Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet was born to play him. Several other actors have given it a go, including a full six in Todd Haynes’s experimental capitulation to the singer’s shapeshifting, I’m Not There (2007), but I suspect it will be Chalamet who will be remembered over time. He looks the part – reedy, tousled, prettily inscrutable, as smooth as a mossless stone; he knows how to suck on a cigarette and blow on a harmonica and wield a guitar and sneer at the men in suits. And he mostly sounds the part, capturing, in speech, the throwaway drawl, the Midwest snicker, and, in song, the “voice like sand and glue” (see David Bowie), “as if sandpaper could sing” (see Joyce Carol Oates). And if he is sometimes in danger of overdoing it, that seems fair enough: so was Bob.

Perhaps more surprising is the revelation that Edward Norton was born to play Pete Seeger, the folk singer, social activist, friend of Guthrie’s, early mentor of Dylan’s and co-founder of the hugely influential (and, of course, much-storied) Newport Folk Festival, around which a good portion of Complete Unknown revolves. If Chalamet’s Dylan remains all dazzling surface, Norton’s Seeger is this film’s emotional heart:…

 

 

 

 

 

[237SJ]

I wasn't a Bob Dylan fan as he was a bit before my time and I only really heard of him when he released Hurricane but I like biographical films (especially about the music industry)  I didn't look at any reviews so went off to see the film and enjoyed it so much I went back a second time.  A friend of mine did the same.

[Ken4155]

As Alba says, lots of poetic licence on show and the film feels a tad clunky at times.

However, and i speak as a Dylan fan, it is worth watching if only for the performances of the 3 main characters - Dylan, Baez and Seeger.

Timothee Chalamet does an excellent job as Dylan - performing the tracks himself - and there are odd occasions when you forget it is him and not Dylan up there on stage. All the more remarkable is the fact that, prior to this film, he could only play sings in one chord.

He is more than ably supported by Ed Norton as Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. 

This isn't Dylans life story, just a small piece of it and the only downside to it is that few of the songs are sung in their entirity. Leaving fans, such as myself, reaching for the Dylan CDs and playing them until the early hours.