Highway 61 Revisited

A Complete Unknown

17/01/25

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Writer/director James Mangold has been down the music biopic route before with 2005’s Walk The Line (featuring Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash), but the news that he was planning a film about Bob Dylan felt like a decidedly tall order. After all, Robert Zimmerman is the proverbial mystery wrapped up in an enigma, a man who has unabashedly invented (and reinvented) the details of his own story from the very start of his career. It’s to Mangold’s credit then, that A Complete Unknown is such a triumph, eschewing the idea of a ‘whole life’ depiction and choosing instead to focus on five turbulent years from the musician’s life.

it’s 1961 and a twenty-year-old Dylan hitchhikes from his home in Duluth, Minnesota to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, where folk legend Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairie) is slowly succumbing to the ravages of Huntingdon’s Disease. Guthrie is Dylan’s hero and he has come here to sing to him, as song he’s written all about the man. Present at the impromptu performance is Guthrie’s friend and fellow folk stalwart, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). He’s impressed both by the song and the performer’s confidence, so he takes Dylan under his wing and starts introducing him to the flourishing folk scene in the coffee houses of New York City.

It isn’t long before his regular appearances start to gain him a reputation. At one concert he meets Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, a thinly disguised version of Dylan’s real life muse, the late Suze Rotolo), and the two of them become lovers and constant companions. He also meets folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), already something of a star on the folk circuit. Baez covers some of Dylan’s songs and helps to bring his work to a wider audience, and inevitably, a romantic entanglement ensues between them.

And then, Dylan begins to tire of the strictures of the folk scene and finds himself increasingly drawn to the trappings of rock music – the fashions, the poses, the volume. But he is to discover that folk puritans are opposed to sullying ‘their’ music with electric guitars and keyboards. It becomes clear that the transition won’t be an easy one to make…

These days, I am by no means a Bob Dylan fan, but I did follow him during the mid sixties and have always held a soft spot for Highway 61 Revisited – which, coincidentally, is the album around which this film reaches its climax. In the lead role Timothée Chalamet is quite simply astonishing, offering a performance that goes beyond the realms of mere impersonation. He actually performs all the songs and plays guitar on them. (A post screening Q & A tells me that he didn’t play the instrument before this film, but had the opportunity to work on his character for five years and figured he might as well go all-in). Co-star Barbaro had barely sung a note before she landed the role of Joan Baez, but she somehow nails the woman’s unique vocal style effortlessly.

And then of course, there are the songs, each one indelibly memorable and delivered with enhanced power at this IMAX screening, so that the film’s two hour plus running time seems to positively flash by. Dylan, as portrayed by Chalamet, is a whole contradiction of characters, by turns vulnerable, scheming, hard bitten and amorous, sneering, vindictive, reckless and determined. Of course, Chalamet has been nominated for an Oscar and, should he be successful, then it will be well-earned.

A Complete Unknown is a remarkable achievement, a film that captures the era in which it’s set with absolute veracity and which chooses to focus on one of the most important moments in music history. It’s fascinating to watch it unfold. (Okay, so a few small details have been tweaked – that infamous cry of ‘Judas!’ occurred at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, not the Newport Folk Festival, but it matters not one jot.) This is a movie to enjoy on the big screen with the best sound system available. After the recent financial failure of the brilliant Better Man, I’m reluctant to speculate on what this film might achieve at the box office, but for my money, it ticks all the boxes.

It’s a musical feast. Dig in.

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Rolling Thunder Revue: a Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue featured an ad-hoc accidental masterpiece of a band, which played rousing, irreverent versions of songs from his catalog

22/06/19

True confession: I’ve never been one of Bob Dylan’s greatest fans.

There, I said it. Oh sure, I had a brief infatuation with Highway 61 Revisited back in the day, and I’d be the first to suggest that The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll is a strong contender for ‘greatest protest song ever written.’ But something in Dylan’s mannered drawling voice made me decide that I preferred his songs sung by other artists. Now along comes this unwieldily titled concert movie, and I find myself having to re-evaluate my position. Rolling Thunder portrays an artist at the very peak of his powers, casually throwing out solid-gold belters as though by some kind of involuntary reflex.

Of course, there’s nothing new about a lot of this footage. It’s been mostly salvaged from Dylan’s own attempt to film his 1975/6 tour under the title Renaldo and Clara, which died a quiet death at the box office more than forty years ago. And this isn’t exactly a straight concert film either, featuring – as it does – some fictional elements. There’s Martin Von Haselerg as ‘The Filmmaker,’ claiming to be the film’s true author. There’s Sharon Stone, telling us that she was taken on as a wardrobe assistant on the tour at the age of eighteen (she wasn’t). And there’s Michael Murphy as ‘The Politician,’ making comments about the bicentenary that was taking place as Dylan and his motley crew strutted their stuff around a series of intimate venues across America.

But there’s plenty here to enjoy, not least a pugnacious rendition of Hattie Carroll with Dylan contemptuously spitting out the lyrics at the crowd; the scene where Joan Baez and Dylan reveal that the two of them really should have married each other, instead of other people; and, of special interest to me, the sequence where a radiant Joni Mitchell knocks out an early draft of Coyote, while Dylan and Roger McGuinn meekly accompany her on guitars. (This song, of course, is about her brief affair with playwright Sam Shepard, who also appears in the film.)

With its hefty running time, this might not have found an audience at the cinema, so Netflix seems the ideal home for it. Dylan aficionados will have a field day – and those who, like me, have been sitting on the fence concerning Mr Zimmerman, may have something of an epiphany.

4.4 stars

Philip Caveney