'A Complete Unknown' review: Chalamet scores like Bob Dylan

Folk music is something heard mainly in the elegant first section of “A Complete Unknown”; it's something that happens in the next room, down the hall, in a different club down the road, beyond the crazy tambourine. You lean in to listen to him, as do the characters, who gather together as if answering a call. Are they forming a community? That would be saying it too sentimentally. This is a scene.

Banjo chords float down the hallway of a ghostly, nearly deserted mental hospital in New Jersey, where an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) receives visitors. Joan Baez (Mónica Barbaro), walking through Greenwich Village, hears something new and slows down and drops into a basement to take a look. And some kids notice it too, one morning in the breakfast nook of their log cabin, when a stranger their father brought home, a boy named Bobby, works his way through the changes of a new song as the light of the sun softens the air. The room is haunted.

Bobby is, of course, Bob Dylan, played here by Timothée Chalamet in an almost magical performance that throws all the right sparks: novelty, genius, a touch of detachment that Dylan probably found easier to fake than modesty and, deep down , a kind of aggressive and combative hunger. Chalamet already took his boy messiah in the “Dune” films to a dangerously dark place; his Dylan is cut from the same cloth, uncomfortable with the mantle imposed on him. Director James Mangold favors the actor with long takes, during which you forget that Chalamet is there, just a master poker player waiting for the right hand to go all out.

Superfans won't necessarily love this. It is a film made with love, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can sometimes be idiots. Then again, his hero won't get a fairer deal than in “A Complete Unknown,” which vividly lays out the tunes (classic after classic, all sung live by the cast) while keeping things clearly chronological across the roughly four years. that any biopic interested in Dylan's artistic arrival would have to cover, from his penniless arrival in New York in 1961 to his 1965 rebellion at the Newport Folk Festival. Todd Haynes did all that and more in his dazzling, experimental “I'm Not There,” a 2007 film that even gives a wig-wearing Cate Blanchett the chance to play the singer, but arguably the direct approach of Mangold is a valid entry level. course.

In shaping the material (based on Elijah Wald's 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric!”) into a screenplay, Mangold and Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese's collaborator on some of his longest-running adaptations (“The Age of Innocence”) , “The Silence”) ) – have arrived at a contradictory but brilliant organizing principle, one that, in my opinion, no biopic about a great man has ever tried. For this dream to happen, that is, for Dylan to become Dylanmany other people's dreams had to die. We already know Minnesotans' penchant for self-review and self-destruction, and the film includes a bar mitzvah photo in a secret scrapbook.

But there's a surprising amount of collateral damage here, too. You see it in the film's collision of genres (folk, blues, rock) and its fine sense of ever-changing folk art. Edward Norton brings an amiable Pete Seeger to the film, someone accustomed to leading audiences with peaceful, utopian songs, but increasingly bewildered by this newcomer who sharpens the folk movement into a spear and then takes the battle in one direction. completely different.

Dylan's women suffer greatly; They are the heart of the film. We see Bárbaro's Báez struggle with his distance. Their date begins explosively: after their first night together, they wake up and discover that the Cuban missile crisis is fortunately over. (“Well, that's it,” mutters a Chalamet with his head on the bed). Then they sing “Blowin' in the Wind” between the sheets. However, it isn't long before Báez tires of his dismissal. Their sold-out tour as a duo turns into a nightmare of stage attacks.

Elle Fanning, already one of the most exquisite victims of American cinema, steals the film with her version of Suze Rotolo, here renamed Sylvie, Dylan's girlfriend at the time. An attractive, confident Manhattan resident with a schedule packed with activism, classes, and volunteering, she radicalizes Bob and leads him to civil rights speeches. But look how the film captures him walking away, appreciating the growing crowd. She's already losing him, and Fanning's character, with her devastated eyes, can't do anything about it. Seeing Dylan and Baez sing “It Ain't Me, Babe,” she flees in panic and Fanning uncorks the first shot of the year.

“You gave him the song,” Sylvie accuses him softly a little earlier, flattened, a line that reaches into something deeper. He gave us all the songs. And then it became ours, even as we still wonder, 60 years later, what we really got.