A Complete Unknown says little about Jewish star – The Forward

The Bob Dylan world is buzzing with anticipation, bated breath, and maybe some pleasure upon the discharge earlier this week of the primary official “teaser trailer” for the upcoming Dylan biopic, A Full Unknown, directed by James Mangold (Stroll the Line, Ford v. Ferrari) and starring Timothée Chalamet (Dune, Name Me By Your Title) because the younger Dylan. Filming solely simply ended earlier this month; the film is anticipated to get a theatrical launch towards the top of this yr or early in 2025.

The biopic just isn’t a whole life story, however quite hones in on Dylan’s early years, from his arrival in New York Metropolis’s Greenwich Village in 1961 via his well-known — or notorious, relying upon your perspective — look on the 1965 Newport People Competition. There, he carried out with a plugged-in rock band for the very first time, surprising the viewers, his followers, and the world at giant, which till that second had thought of Dylan an acoustic-folk artist. 

Whereas the discharge of the brief, two-minute trailer doesn’t reveal a lot concerning the tone of the movie, it definitely succeeds in “teasing” viewers with recommendations about the way it intends to inform Dylan’s story. It apparently recounts Dylan’s journey from a whole unknown Midwesterner, newly arrived within the Village, to worldwide fame as “the voice of a technology” who married a classy poetic strategy to songwriting with a social and political consciousness in songs that made their method to the highest of the pop charts, together with “Blowin’ within the Wind,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Brief clips within the trailer embody a number of scenes that includes actor Edward Norton taking part in Pete Seeger. Then it cuts to a scene that includes Chalamet/Dylan onstage, shot from the rear for optimum dramatic impact, with a highlight casting a glow upon the actor, seen principally in silhouette. Chalamet, who does his personal singing within the film, is performing “A Laborious Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” in a reasonably convincing imitation of Dylan. 

Brief, out-of-sequence pictures of Dylan discover him strolling the streets of Greenwich Village carrying his guitar, adopted by scenes capturing the budding romance between Dylan and Suze Rotolo, right here given the identify Sylvie Russo and performed by Ellie Fanning, with no try made to make the ginger-haired Fanning appear to be the real-life, brunette Rotolo. Minimize to scenes of Dylan watching a younger Joan Baez (performed by Monica Barbaro), who was already well-known as “the Queen of People,” and the 2 of them stealing kisses backstage. Quickly, Dylan joins Baez onstage as a particular visitor, the 2 taking part in out their very own incipient romance for all of the world to see, a teary-eyed Fanning, now simply one other member of the viewers.

The trailer raises extra questions than it solutions. How a lot of the narrative goes to concentrate on Dylan’s relationship with the Suze Rotolo character and Joan Baez on the expense of portraying Dylan’s inventive improvement? These sorts of biographical films usually forefront the romantic dramas on the expense of exploring the interior workings of the primary character. (See Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro.) The trailer additionally gives no clue as to the relative wit of the film dialogue. 

Maybe most significantly, how will the film (and Chalamet) painting Dylan himself? Will it solid its hero as a divinely impressed prophet, or will it emphasize his blind ambition and his human foibles? Given how little we actually learn about Dylan the person — regardless of his being the topic of a number of hundred books and dozens of  films — how would one even go about making such choices?

One newly revealed clue is that Bob Dylan is listed as an govt producer of the movie, and in a current interview in Rolling Stone, director Mangold says he was in frequent contact with the Nobel Prize-winner. If that’s the case, how a lot stress will Dylan exert on the way in which he’s portrayed within the closing reduce? And does it actually matter?

On the planet of ardent Dylan followers and so-called Dylanologists, there has all the time been nice skepticism about this movie, courting again 4 years to the earliest studies of its manufacturing. This skepticism ranged from grumbling concerning the suitability of Chalamet for the function to grumbling about Mangold’s monitor file as a maker of biopics. Whereas his Johnny Money movie, Stroll the Line, was a lot lauded, the movie’s emphasis was not on Money the musician, however as a substitute on Money’s private struggles. 

There may be additionally the query of why. Why even make this film? There isn’t a dearth of Dylan on movie, particularly in documentaries overlaying the identical period, together with D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Again and Murray Lerner’s Competition, which incorporates footage of Dylan’s infamous efficiency on the 1965 Newport People Competition. Dylan turned the digital camera on himself a number of occasions all through his profession, in movies together with Eat the Doc, Renaldo and Clara, and Masked and Nameless. 

The query stays, how can one seize the essence of Bob Dylan in a traditional Hollywood drama? Dylan has all the time been so elusive and enigmatic that such an effort appears certain to fail. The one profitable try at portraying Dylan in all his multitudes was Todd Haynes’s 2007 movie, I’m Not There, by which six totally different actors portrayed Dylan — most memorably Cate Blanchett, who portrayed the 1965/1966-era Dylan. The film’s non-linear narrative and its shifting factors of view echoed a few of Dylan’s personal narrative methods in track. Additionally, the movie was co-written by Haynes and filmmaker Oren Moverman, and between the 2 they appear to have watched each body of each Dylan look and browse each interview Dylan ever gave; that authenticity is baked into the movie. 

Based mostly on a two-minute trailer of a movie that hasn’t even but been accomplished, it’s too quickly to render judgment on the hassle. The trailer definitely has sparked curiosity amongst many and helped prime most of the people for what is going to doubtless be a highly regarded film when it’s launched. Chalamet and Fanning are fairly good bets for Oscar nominations; that’s simply the way in which Hollywood works. 

As for shining a lightweight on Bob Dylan, we will count on a slew of tales about his early years to accompany the discharge of the movie. And we will solely hope that we don’t go away film theaters muttering beneath our breath, like Dylan in his track “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” that “nothing is revealed.”