“Completely Anonymous” chronicles the vital details of the life of a vast and complex artist
One doesn’t have to be a Dylanologist to know, or even sense, that The Complete Unknown, which opens on December 25, simplifies and tone-downs Bob Dylan’s early career. To some extent, it doesn’t matter: Dylan is a remarkable artist and a fascinating character, even as he remains unusually intense, at least by Hollywood standards. The quintessential pleasures of Completely Anonymous — the story of Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961, his rise to fame as a folk singer-songwriter, and his risking it all in 1965 to become a noisemaker and plugged into electricity. Rock Star – Point out purpose and pitfalls in all bio images. If Bob Dylan hadn’t existed, he would have been a compelling lead in an enjoyable but conventional drama about a musician doing what Dylan did. There’s just one problem: such strong and multiple characters were never invented by screenwriters. It has only been adapted into biographical pictures, even in veiled ones, like Citizen Kane.
The quirks and omissions inherent in the format — as here, with four eventful years crammed into just over two hours — are on display from the beginning of Completely Anonymous . Timothée Chalamet plays the film’s young hero, who I’ll awkwardly call Bob, to distinguish him from the real Dylan. Bob catches a ride to New York in the back of a station wagon, the driver unknown, their brief conversations non-existent, and he is lowered into an open tunnel shaft. He soon finds his way to Greenwich Village, stumbles upon a bar where folk musicians gather, and gets instructions from one of them on how to find the hospital in New Jersey where the terminally ill Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is being held. But who knows Bob in town? Where will he stay? How did he start his musical career?
The film offers answers that range from empty to contrived, leaving out practicalities and manipulating dates and names in order to focus the drama on a few characters. The main gambit, in these early scenes, is to emphasize the role of veteran folk singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) in Bob’s early accomplishments, so that Bob eventually, in 1965, adopts what Seeger disparagingly called “electrified instruments.” The loss of his friendship is so vividly recorded More severe as a price to pay.
The details omitted are not important, not least because they capture the zeitgeist: how a young musician without a day job finds a place to live in the village is more a symbol of the era than the hyper-precision of the work. Movie costumes, hairstyles and street life simulation. Without the anchor of material reality, the artist’s life becomes a story that soars above trivialities and complexities – a story that can be easily parsed down to its few dramatic lines as if the stars had been aligned from the beginning. What’s lost is the way in which a formidable soul like Dylan faces daily challenges with a heightened sense of elegance and audacity.
Thanks to a popular club show hosted by Pete, Bob became an overnight success, marked by a rave review in times and a recording contract arranged by his aggressive manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). In the process, Bob faces his first professional conflict: the record company Columbia rejects his original songs and only allows him to do covers of popular classics. As for his own music, he plays it at open mic nights and raves, and at one of these loose parties, he meets a young artist named Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who closely resembles the real-life Suze Rotolo. She recognizes his greatness, encourages him to fend for himself, and introduces him to the cultural life of the city. They become a couple, but as Bob’s career advances, and after Sylvie heads to Europe for a few months of study, he falls into the company of a rival and admirer, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), a top female star in folk. A scene that also starts a relationship with him.
Bob and Joan’s best scenes involve the clash between two strong-minded artists in the same field, embodying Bob’s unyielding arrogance and Joan’s enthusiastic appreciation and greed. When newcomer Bob hears Joan for the first time at a club before his appearance there, he announces to the audience that he finds her music “beautiful” and adds: “Maybe a little too pretty.” When they met, about a year later, he likened her songs to “an oil painting in a dentist’s office.” (“Kind of an idiot,” she answered lightly.) However, when she heard him sing, in private, a new song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” she asked him to give it to her to record first. She recruits him to perform in a duet with her, and even when their relationship becomes strained, leading to onstage disagreements, she maintains their musical partnership, which seems, above all, artistic and professional.
In contrast, Bob’s relationship with Sylvie reveals differences that reveal more about his personality and philosophy of life. Sylvie admires the man and the artist as well, only to discover that she barely knows the man at all – she is surprised to learn that “Dylan” is his pseudonym and is upset that he does not tell her about his family and hometown. His past. He responds with a remark that sounds like a credo: “People make things up, talk about whatever they want.” (For example, he told her in great detail about working at a carnival, which he didn’t do.) she When she talks about what really happened to her and the people she really knows, Bob responds, “Do you think these things define you?” He lives in the world of self-creation, the mythology of the artist as part of art itself. However, she concludes the argument with such insight that it’s a miserable failure of the film if it doesn’t pursue it further: “You’re ambitious. I think it scares you.”
Sylvie, a private person, attributes regular inhibitions and self-doubts to Bob, even though he betrays nothing. He understands what it takes to be successful, and in fact describes it to her the day they meet: “If someone’s going to catch you on stage, you have to be kind of weird. . . . You can be pretty or ugly, but you can’t To be ordinary.” The ordinary is the enemy and the danger. What seems to frighten Bob in the film is not his ambitions but the possibility of not achieving them. He molds his entire being to achieve what he has in mind, subjecting his very identity to the heat of the same crucible from which his songs emerge. It is Bob’s formation of a self that combines with his music in order to position him, and he, with the audience, is the energy with which “The Complete Unknown” operates.
But the autobiographical portrait falls short of the demands of this powerful subject, neither in substance nor in tone. “Totally Anonymous” forces Bob to have a laughable naivete about money (as does his apparent surprise at receiving a royalty check for ten thousand dollars) and nothing but annoyance at his sudden fame. As he writes to his new friend Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook): “He crept up on me and crushed me. In the words of Mr. Freud, I am completely paranoid. (Later, asked if he had children, he replied, “Thousands of them.”) Another moment in the film struck me with its unsophisticated abruptness: Sylvie sits at home, watching a television broadcast of the March on Washington, where who should show up to sing in support of the rights movement Civic but Bob Dylan. how? Who arranged it? What happened while he was there? Bob’s experience of such a historical event has been obscured. The film only depicts his public side.
“A Complete Unknown” also leaves out the Beatles, whose overwhelming popularity was an example that struck Dylan like a lightning bolt. The film’s finale, a major set piece, is his participation in the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, much to the anger of many in the audience and behind the scenes. In the process, Bob enters the pop paradigm and launches himself on the world stage. The text offers no idea of any such ambition. Rather, he links Bob’s stylistic shift to the enthusiasm he expresses for Little Richard and Buddy Holly, and to his happiness at hearing a new friend, Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison), play the electric guitar. It completely ignores what rock music can satisfy and what the niche world of folk cannot: the will to power.