"A Complete Unknown": He Likes To Live Dangerously

 There were no guarantees that James Mangold’s delivery of the story of Bob Dylan’s early days—quite strictly confined to the years 1961 through 1965 following Dylan’s arrival in New York from hometown Hibbing, Minnesota—would work quite so well as it does. And even with Timothe'e Chalamet’s rapidly ascending stardom and already well-proven acting chops, there was ample room for doubt. 

What has emerged is a richly entertaining chapter of American pop culture history, a project in which Mangold, no stranger to crossing genres varying from an Indiana Jones reboot to darker societal studies like “Copland,” has run toward the danger.

The path to actually shooting the film was anything but easy, but Mangold, who made a memorable entry into biopics with the Johnny Cash exemplar, 2005's “Walk the Line,” once more proves himself a resourceful cinematic technician. In going close focus on an epochal moment in musical and societal history, Mangold has created not just a vibrant living document of the Dylan who was, but also reaffirming that Dylan—even as we honor him more for these early days than later ones—will always be a monumental figure.

 The feature began more humbly as a potential HBO streamer, deriving its central career drama from the well-executed folk-turns to-rock history by Elijah Wald, “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.”  The hard-to-kill notion of a biopic (as Mangold hates to hear it described) had its own development purgatory that included pauses for the pandemic, for the industry strikes, and got past a certain early ambivalence from the artist himself.

 Albeit centered on 'Bobby', it has real vigor as an ensemble piece. E.g., there’s plenty to say about Ed Norton as Pete Seeger in a meticulously tuned performance that shows the great older folkie’s mixture of envy of and support for the abrupt rise of Dylan in a closiered world he sonn busted out of. As happens with each musician we watch in the film, Norton works live, as he plays and sings out with Seeger’s vaunted sincerity (sometimes leavened with just a touch of corn). The supporting actor kudos should continue to come—just as one already did from the Golden Globes, along with noms for Chalamet as Best Actor and the film for Best Drama. Reviews have been warm...ish. (E.g., as Justin Chang occupies the lead reviewer chair and is evidently making the New Yorker's focus more cineaste-adjacent, Richard Brody has had to step in to frog-march more mainstream fare to the woodshed, as he seeks to do with Mangold's film.)

 Perhaps the most striking surprise from the project, as we await a Christmas day release (IMAX on 12/18) , comes with the arrival to a new visibility for Monica Barbaro in the pivotal role of Joan Baez. As Dylan’s sometime lover, mentor, and harmonizer, and as the vessel carrying much of our point of view as filmgoers, Barbaro like Baez makes her own beauty a secondary qualification.  At 34, she’s hardly a complete unknown herself, but is feasibly a casting stretch whose most cited credit, after “Top Gun: Maverick,” is as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s daughter in “Fubar”. 

As David Rooney writes in his Hollywood Reporter review, “Barbaro sings like an angel, her voice rich, clear and expressive. She gives the character the radiant self-possession of a woman who never loses sight of who she is, even — or maybe especially — when she falls into an unsatisfying relationship with Bob.”  Mangold doesn’t hide his canny casting choice in the film’s trailer; we see Barbaro as Joan, brimming with a kind of awe and artistic fellowship in one snippet, and in another, see her unveiling Joan’s  casually defiant mode. When Dylan compares her trying -too-hard songwriting to “an oil painting at the dentist’s office,” she observes, with a level glance, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.” 

 Chalamet’s  Dylan, as  boldly revealed in the hands of (the himself at times acerbic) Mangold, characteristically has zero fucks to give: “Yeah, I guess,” he replies dismissively. As we know from footage in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 “No Direction Home,” a comprehensive 207-minute doc depicting largely he same period as the new film, Dylan’s hair was on fire creatively and he didn’t want it doused with opinions or even acclaim from others. 

“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he wrote in the slightly misdirecting memoir  “Chronicles,” "It wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything, and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.”

At first Dylan and his cadre—longtime trusted wingman Jeff Rosen was key in all the back and forth—resisted broadening the narrative beyond what transpired on various stages as the performer’s sound and approach veered towards stardom. Reminiscing in the doc and or at various turning points in Mangold’s film, Dylan cagily remains what he’s called a “fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.”

Chalamet strategically nudges Dylan’s manner away from what can be an ornery sacred monster’s mien to show him  displaying a more quizzical, at times almost elfin, magnetism. (The singing is all one could ask—having seen Dylan play extensively from yards away on several days of set visits the snafu’ed film that was “Masked and Anonymous,” I found Chalamet channels him more than deftly--never more so than, early on, singing “Song to Woody” with arresting focus, to moving effect.) The actor is properly reed-thin, quicksilver in speech, and despite a fugitive charm, ultimately unknowable behind a nuanced smirk and a sparing but potent use of eye contact. If the nimbly-paced script shows a hero’s odyssey towards fame as events and timing are re-jiggered by Mangold’s storytelling stratagems, the actor who turns 28 on the 27th of this month wholly owns the role and turns our perceptions from “I’m Not There” to “There Bob is—maybe?” 

Mangold cogently argues that, satisfying as the musical moments are, the songs are not  dished out  as ornaments, as a jukebox musical might drop them. Rather they emerge as motivated, as Dylan’s story telling itself, even as he downloads his life to his manual typewriter. To that end, we hear and see some of Dylan’s most revelatory classics, including, though not in this order, “Girl From the North Country,” "The Times They Are A-Changin,”  “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “All I Really Want To Do,”  “Blowin’ in the Wind,”  “God on Our Side,” “Masters of War,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Desolation Row,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and  “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”  Now, as the TV ads say, how much would you pay?

 This post has ducked spoilers so far, but in the below, edited-for- space commentary by Mangold at the Writers Guild screening, please note there are some minor reveals.  

 Mangold hewed strictly to a story bounded in time between Dylan’s 1961 arrival East—and his 1965 appearance—plus 72 hours of aftermath—at the legendary Newport Folk Festival:

 One of the great struggles with true life stories, is that they're unwieldy. A kind of crutch is kind of to go birth to death, and that could work, but it's kind of, kind of, it feels to me like an easy way out sometimes, because, well, of course, birth is beginning and death is an ending, but they're both really predictable. 

 Where I think these stories get so tricky, is you need to actually find the story in the story, or the story in the life. Not only Bob and that folk scene in New York at that time, but the culture at that time… what made me so excited about this movie is that this book that targeted the timeline of those years was bigger than Bob. It was a story really about talent, or genius, or how do we manage [that]?

The added benefit was that between 1961 and 1965 he wrote all the songs you heard in this movie. The guy was not even 24 when this movie ends, and [you hear] a tenth  of the songs he wrote in that period. An incredible output, that even he doesn't quite understand how it could happen.

 It was less about curating the songs, which is really hard to do because there's so many great ones, but about how they dropped into the drama and how they revealed more… and arranging them in the order that they happened in relation to what was going on in his life and the world. 

 Having stayed in steady contact with Dylan since the artist bought into the project  (although as with the Scorsese doc, as of last week the musician  has not registered a reaction beyond generic praise for Chalamet), the filmmaker disputes the longstanding quest by his public to uncover the man’s supposed essence:

 The music gave me so many thoughts…people talk about how enigmatic Bob is– well, he had about 35 monologs in this movie talking about how he feels. And if that's still too enigmatic for you, then fuck off. 

The reality is, the guy's emotional, vulnerable, poetic output is so huge, but it's still never enough, if he doesn't also tell them what chocolate bar he ate yesterday… I know Timmy felt the same way. You get really close to him working on this material, and you realize just how hard it must have been to be that young man.

 The movie had a previous iteration at HBO with a more confined brief, which ended set aside in turnaround. That iteration’s script by Jay Cocks as based fully on the book “had many wonderful things about it that I cherished and kept,” but at first the Dylan camp pushed back on the writer-director’s probes into a more personal story:

 There were rules about--just do what's in the book, and nothing more. And I’d felt there was just no way to put this thing on its legs without addressing personal aspects—how would you direct this movie where you're  averting your eyes from everything that isn't in a studio or on a stage? I just wrote on spec what I thought the movie should be, and Bob said let me read this thing, and they liked it. I got an open line whenever I wanted it, about whatever questions I had and his reactions to stuff, but also just to mount a movie that accurately reflected things.

The big takeaway was just, what an emotionally convulsive time, that he didn't completely understand…he gave me very unguarded access to just what he felt about that period so long ago in his life. 

 It just dawns on you, because you the same thing happened when I made the Johnny Cash movie--everyone thinks of the guy we know now, and you don't think of him as this kid he was just getting started. What does that feel like to be that person, who when they do a slight gesture, causes this strange, cultish ripple effect, and what does that make that person feel like? What do they want to do? I’d want to withdraw. In the culture we live in now, where, where celebrity and the importance every melon you're buying today is on your Instagram, every detail that we are somehow owed, of everyone's life all the time, I kind of have come to admire someone who goes, no, not mine. You know, not mine.