Directed by James Mangold, A Complete Unknown tells the story of Bob Dylan and his meteoric rise to fame.
Born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan and his grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Lithuania.
Robert Zimmerman is a most elusive mysterious man.
This is made clear by Joan Baez (Oscar Nom Supporting Actress Monica Barbaro) and Sylvie Russo (real name Suze Rotolo, Elle Fanning) when Joan thumbs through a scrapbook labelled Personal Property of Bobby Zimmerman.
Russo later tells Bobby that he never comes forward with who he really is, that he’s invented someone who keeps the real him to himself.
“You never talk about your family, your past.”
When Zimmerman arrived in New York to meet a hospitalised Woody Guthrie in 1961, he introduced himself as Bob Dylan, the Dylan coming from his love of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, information not forthcoming in the film.
It seems he made the name change decision to afford some anonymity on stage.
Picking a new name while performing meant he could become a whole new character.
That he had long fingernails is almost accurately portrayed.
Early in the movie they aren’t as long, but by the end, Dylan had some full-on nails that would make Nosferatu blush, if he could.
The theory is the nails helped him fingerpick guitar strings, whilst others claim it was just poor hygiene.
Dylan mostly used picks, fancy name plectrum.
Oscar-nominated-director James Mangold based his film on history but was mainly concerned with capturing the essence of the era 1961-65.
It makes us feel like we’re really in the ’60s.
“It’s not really a Bob Dylan biopic,” Mangold said.
Dylan himself wrote notes on the script and, at the final session, according to Mangold, he signed the script and said, “Go. With. God.”
There are about 40 songs featured in the movie.
Although never meeting, when Dylan (Oscar Nom Actor Timothée Chalamet) sings, it is Chalamet’s voice we hear.
Chalamet’s vocal sounds are so similar to Dylan’s, many fans wonder whose voice is on the soundtrack.
As Dylan, Chalamet also plays guitar and harmonica.
As to what it was like playing harmonica, his answer was simply, “a lotta sucking and blowing.” Producer Fred Berger confirmed that Chalamet sang and played “live, take after take after take.”
“It was important for me to sing and play live,” Chalamet told Entertainment Weekly, “because if I can actually do it, why should there be an element of artifice here? And I’m proud that we took that leap.”
Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan is solid; he absolutely disappears into the complex character, not by imitation, but by the closest means to Stanislavski’s Method Acting, by literally becoming the character – he even gained more than nine kilograms to play Dylan.
An unknown “urban hillbilly” (called so by Joan Baez), 19-year-old Bobby Zimmerman arrived in New York as a re-invented Bob Dylan in 1961.
With his guitar, he created alliances with musical icons Pete Seeger (Oscar Nom Supporting Actor Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), eventually Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook).
It’s a meteoric rise as a folk singer, to concerts and the top of the charts.
Groundbreaking was his electric rock-and-roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and the audience’s poor reception to it.
As much as Dylan desired fame, or not, to reach the summit of musical achievement, he disliked the trappings or extras that accompany fame, especially his worshipping fans and having to reprise his songs that gained popularity.
Timothée Chalamet played Dylan’s good and not-so-shining personality, accepted and depicted the callousness of Dylan’s imperfection.
Whether a fault in the movie’s screenplay or Dylan’s own character flaw, his dismissal of fan adulation, his treatment of the women in his life, his manipulation of the people who advanced his career and subsequent turning his back on them, these grated.
Dylan’s burgeoning celebrity strained his relationship with Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Sylvie, the love of his life.
There’s not a lot of happiness revolving around famous people in this biopic.
It’s about the pressures of being famous, about the pressures that come from the expectations from the community where one becomes famous.
Makes you wonder why people want to be famous at all! Ever!
