Photo caption: Carrie Coon and Shea Whigham in LAKE GEORGE. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures & Magnolia Releasing.
As the comic neo-noir Lake George opens, the hangdog Don (Shea Whigham) has just been released from a ten-year stint in prison. He has no prospects and is coerced by the fearsome crime lord Armen (Glenn Fleshler) into taking a job he doesn’t want. Having done his stretch for a white collar crime, Don is decidedly non-violent (and unlucky). He would be the first to agree that he is the worst possible choice to pull off a murder-for-hire, but Armen and his henchman Hanout (Max Casella) insists, on pain of Don’s own life, that Don whack the boss’ girlfriend and business associate, Phyllis (Carrie Coon).
Don tracks down Phyllis, and, of course, things do not go according to plan. She convinces him to join her in stealing stashes of loot from Armen, and the two are off on an odd couple road trip.
Phyllis is much, much smarter and quicker-thinking than any of the men in this story. And she’s just as ruthless, too. She has an impressive gift of persuasion and can apparently manipulate anyone into anything. Imagine if Brigid O’Shaughnessy were a lot smarter than Sam Spade. Femme fatale, sociopath – that’s Phyllis.
Don, on the other hand, kno ws that he has been a loser and that he ain’t gonna win this time either. Even if he is not quickest, Don is by no means stupid. Don is smart enough to know that doing Phyllis’ bidding is unlikely to work out and that Phyllis is only out for herself and has zero loyalty to Don. That’s the core of Lake George – Don trudging along at Phyllis’ side because he can’t figure out any alternative.
Lake George is a character study, and it’s an acting showcase for Shea Whigham. Ever dazed by the Phyllis’ increasingly outrageous acts, Whigham’s Don seems to be squinting into a bright light as he ponders how he can possibly escape each situation with his life.
Whigham is one of those character actors who works a lot and is always memorable (The Gray Man, A Country Called Home, Boardwalk Empire, True Detective, The Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle, Take Shelter). It’s great to see him get a lead role.
Coon has fun with Phyllis’ ever-bubbling self-interest and almost manic charm. It’s an interesting take on the femme fatale because she doesn’t sexually seduce Don. Her smarts and gift of gab are so effective that she doesn’t need to use her gams.
There is a massive plot twist near the end. Lake George was written and directed by prolific TV director Jeffrey Reiner, his first theatrical feature in 29 years.
My personal preference would be to make Lake George more noir by cutting the last minute. But it’s a mildly entertaining lark, and the wonderful character study by Whigham is the most compelling reason to watch it.
Lake George is now streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.
Photo caption: Roser Tapias in YOU ARE NOT ME. Courtesy of Music Box Films.
In the Spanish psychological horror film You Are Not Me, Aitana (Roser Tapias) and her Brazilian partner Gabi (Yapoena Silva), with their adopted infant, show up early for Christmas at the Catalan home of Aitana’s affluent parents (Pilar Almeria and Alfred Pico). And Aitana seems to step into a nightmare. Or is it?
The first thing that rocks Aitana is her parents’ reaction. They don’t seem happy to see Aitana after many years, nor to meet her partner or their own first grandchild. They’re especially displeased that Aitana’s family has arrived on the eve of a dinner party they’ve planned, a special party that is not the usual family holiday get-together.
Why are the parents acting so inappropriately? Are they homophobic? Are they racist (the baby is black)? Are they still pissed off at Aitana? Aitana is headstrong and often tactless, and we learn that there’s some baggage; years before, the parents were hosting Aitana’s wedding to their ideal son-in-law, when Aitana, realizing she was a lesbian, suddenly ran away, leaving everyone in the lurch.
Aitana is also upset by the condition of her wheelchair-bound younger brother, Saul (Jorge Motos), whose degenerative disease is apparently getting worse.
But, what really sends Aitana over the edge is that her parents are fawning over a Romanian woman Aitana’s age, Nadia (Anna Kurikka). They have awarded Aitana’s room to Nadia, along with their affection and even Aitana’s wedding dress. When Aitana discovers evidence of Nadia’s dishonesty and even behavior that threatens Saul, the parents refuse to listen.
A scene from in YOU ARE NOT ME. Courtesy of Music Box Films.
Finally, there’s the parents’ formal dinner party, hosting several couples their age. The parents are meeting many of the guests, from several European countries, for the first time. The guests are unusually convivial (and horny). Although the guests are outwardly very traditional, they make what is a decidedly a creepy assemblage. Everything is conventional, but Aitana and the audience feel that something must be amiss.
You Are Not Me was co-written and co-directed by Marisa Crespo and Moisés Romera in their second feature film. It’s a well-directed film that benefits from a clever story that keeps the audience off-balance. Are these things really happening, or is Aitana imagining or dreaming them, or even hallucinating? Is Aitana just easily offended or is she paranoid or even schizophrenic? Her well-balanced partner Gabi is rolling with the punches and unintentionally gaslighting Aitana. By making Aitana so prickly, having her jet-lagged and then drunk, Crespo and Romera keep us wondering. And just when we think that the ending is outrageously cheesy, Crespo and Romera creep us out again.
You Are Not Me is streaming on Amazon and Fandango.
Photo caption: Ralph Fiennes in THE RETURN. Courtesy of Bleecker Street Media.
The Return brings 21st Century sensibilities to The Odyssey, a story that the ancient Homer told of an even more ancient time.
Odysseus is the king of of the island of Ithaca, and is known as the smartest of the great warrior kings who left their Greek homes for ten years to fight the Trojan War (Homer’s The Iliad). The Odyssey spans the ten years it takes Odysseus to return home, in which he pleases and displeases various Olympian gods, blinds and slaughters an assortment of monsters and shacks up with a witch-goddess and then a nymph. Most tellings of The Odyssey focus on those rip-roaring adventures. That’s the case with the delightful 1954 Kirk Douglas version, Ulysses, and the really bad 1997 miniseries with Armanda Assante and Greta Scacchi. (Christopher Nolan, in his first film after Oppenheimer, will release his version of The Odyssey later this year.)
The Returnis based on the very end of The Odyssey, when a shipwrecked Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) is finally cast upon the beach at Ithaca, and doesn’t like what he finds. His kingdom is overrun with suitors for his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche). The suitors are demanding that Penelope, with Odysseus presumed dead after twenty years, marry one of them (and make the guy king).. They are a scummy lot, and Penelope is resisting with delaying tactics, but the pressure is overwhelming. The suitors are enjoying one big frat party, whoring and stripping the island’s economy of food and wine. Her son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) is now a callow twenty-year-old, old enough to hate the situation, but too young to do anything about it. Can Odysseus set things right? Will he be accepted by his people? By the wife he hasn’t seen him for twenty years? By the son who doesn’t know him?
There’s no Poseidon and Athena, cyclops or sea monster in The Return. Director and co-writer Uberto Pasolini has stripped the mythology and supernatural out of the story to focus on human reactions to the consequences of our choices, to war and to abandonment.
What was not well-understood in Homer’s time is that even the glory of victory does not wash away away the emotional impacts of having experienced war. The Return’s Odysseus suffers from PTSD, no longer reveling in winning a war that slaughtered the civilians of Troy. He is feeling guilt for the war, for leading his Ithacan comrades to their deaths, and for abandoning Penelope, Telemachus and Ithaca for so many years. Sure, Penelope’s suitors are the direct cause of the current chaos, but the root is in Odysseus’ original decision to leave.
Similarly, Penelope has feelings that are intense and ambivalent. She doesn’t know whether to grieve the loss of her husband. She’s been single parenting for twenty years, running both a household and a kingdom. She’s worried about her son’s survival, given that his existence is inconvenient for the suitors. She’s stressed and weary, and the pressure from the suitors is pushing her over the edge. On the one hand, she yearns for the man she loves and wants Odysseus to come back and fix this mess. On the other, she resents whatever he’s been doing these past ten years (and with whom), and she feels the hurt of his original decision to go off to war.
I appreciated seeing Odysseus and Penelope through a 21st Century lens. The first encounter between the two is electrifying and emotionally rich. I did find their dialogue in the final scene to be stilted.
The Return is an acting showcase for Ralph Fiennes. This Odysseus, besides being emotionally tortured, must show the effects of two decades of suffering on a middle-aged man and also retain the combat skills of an ancient Special Ops warrior. In a remarkable performance, Fiennes pulls it off in spades.
I have to also mention that, at age 62, Fiennes is a remarkable physical specimen. He is so ripped that his extreme exploits at the film’s climax are entirely believable.
Juliette Binoche is similarly excellent as her Penelope feels determination, hopelessness, longing, resentment, anger and disgust, often at the same time.
Marwan Kenzari is really good as Antinous, by far the smartest and most manipulative of the suitors, the lone slick conniver amid a gang of thugs.
The Return is only the fourth film that Uberto Pasolini has directed in a quarter century. Hw was Oscar-nominated for the massive 1997 arthouse hit The Full Monty. He is not related to the groundbreaking filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, but he is the nephew of iconic director Luchino Visconti.
The Return is now streaming on Amazon, AppleTV and Fandango.
Olivia Hussey was only 15 when she began filming Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Zeffirelli had decided to tell the story of impulsive, over-dramatic teenage love with actual teenage actors, and Hussey rewarded him with a rapturous and genuine performance. She worked with Zeffirelli again in the best-ever biblical epic, Jesus of Nazareth, as Mary, mother of Jesus.
CURRENT MOVIES
Anora: human spirit vs the oligarchs. In theaters.
Sweetheart Deal: a triumph of cinéma vérité. In arthouse theaters.
Love Lies Bleeding: obsessions and impulses collide. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
I Saw the TV Glow: brimming with originality. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
ON TV
Ann-Margret and Elvis Presley in VIA LAS VEGAS
OK, I’m not saying that Viva Las Vegas (Turner Classic Movies on January 8) is neither a good movie nor an overlooked one, but it’s tough to beat for sheer vibrancy and sexual chemistry. Virtually all Elvis Presley, movies had silly, barely visible plots contrived as an excuse for Elvis to perform a few songs and to canoodle with a pretty female. What’s different about Viva Las Vegas is that his co-star Ann-Margret had the musical talent and charisma to match up with Elvis; her dancing here is captivating. Ann-Margret has confirmed that she and Elvis enjoyed a torrid fling during the shoot, and their lustful passion is evident (meaning that Elvis didn’t need to rely on his acting skills to appear smitten). (BTW the one good Elvis movie was Kid Creole – check it out.)
Director George Sidney (nearing the end of a career making light-hearted musicals) seems so obsessed with Ann-Margret’s derriere, that you can play a drinking game on the extended, lingering shots of her walking away from the camera; don’t blame Sidney – nobody in Kiss Me Kate or Annie, Get Your Gun! was as overtly sexual as Ann-Margret.
Photo caption: Daniel Craig in QUEER. Courtesy of A24.
The first thing I need to tell you about Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is something that I knew beforehand but failed to internalize – it is based on a William S. Burroughs story, an autobiographical one at that. Had I been thinking about that, I wouldn’t have been so jarred when the film veered into the super trippy.
Queer starts off coloring within the lines of a character study and romantic drama. William Lee (Daniel Craig) is an American expat in 1950s Mexico City; a man of independent means, he is continually drinking and prowling for sex with younger men. He glimpses Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a gorgeous American of ambiguous sexuality and is instantly infatuated; Lee begins a pursuit, and Eugene is hard to get, until he isn’t.
That’s the first act, which absorbed me. But it didn’t prepare me for the turgid second act, which is about opiate addiction nor the third act, which is about a search for psychedelics. That third act is bizarre, with some ripping moments.
Luca Guadagnino is known for visually striking, even delectable, movies; he and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (also Call Me By Your Name and Challengers) oblige with plenty of Mexico City and Ecuadorian jungle eye candy, mostly shot in an Italian studio. There’s an especially wonderful dream sequence after Lee’s most extreme drunk night. This is the first Guadagnino movie I’ve seen with special effects, which are necessary in the hallucinatory third act.
But Queer is too long overall, especially the hallucination scene. The entire second act drags.
Daniel Craig’s acting ability was justifiably admired before he became such an iconic James Bond. Here, his Lee is so fascinated and yet mystified by Eugene. Lee is always off-balance when he can win Eugene’s company, but he can’t control him. Lee has attained a relationship, but it’s an asymmetric one.
If there’s any doubt that he is very comfortable putting James Bond behind him, that doubt is erased when we see Daniel Craig playing a character with semen glistening on his lips.
Craig also plays drunk very well – which many actors fail to do convincingly. He nails the various degrees, starting at the point where Lee fails to read the room correctly and acts cutesy when it isn’t funny. As Lee becomes more tipsy, Craig perfectly adds a slight sway to his gait, then a bigger one.
We have known Craig can act since The Mother (2003) and Layer Cake (2004), so Drew Starkey, who hadn’t yet had a memorable performance, is the real discovery here. Eugene is anything but demonstrative, and Starkey communicates all of Eugene’s interest in Lee and resistance to Lee, with his eyes and body.
Lesley Manville jumps off the screen in what must be the most bizarre portrayal in her storied career; at some point, she must have played one of the witches from Macbeth, but she looks more the part here, with greasy hair, darkened teeth and unhinged eyes, than she could have in any other production. Her performance is very, very strong.
Jason Schwartzman, playing one of Lee’s Mexico City expat buddies, is very funny every time he’s on the screen.
So, what do I think about Queer? Luca Guadagnino and his team are interesting and accomplished artists, Daniel Craig is an actor worthy of his stardom and it’s great to have a non-heterosexual romantic drama – BUT, the choice to hew so closely to Burroughs’ source material, along with some self-indulgent editing, condemns the second half of Queer to lose the audience (me, at least).
Photo caption: Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in ANORA. Courtesy of NEON.
Every year, I keep a running list of the best movies I’ve seen this year. By the end of the year, I usually end up with a Top Ten and another 5-15 mentions. Here are my Best Movies of 2023 and Best Movies of 2022 lists. To get on my year-end list, a movie has to be one that thrills me while I’m watching it and one that I’m still thinking about a couple of days later.
When I wrote my year’s end post last December 31, I had already seen the best two films, Oppenheimer and Anatomy of a Fall. Today, I still haven’t seen many of the films I expect to contend for this list, includingThe Room Next Door, The Brutalist, Hard Truths, All We Imagine as Light and Hard Truths. Pretty sure most of those will end up high on my list when I finalize it in a couple months. Sean Baker’s Anora is brilliant film, but I expect it to be surpassed on my list by one or some of the upcoming releases.
I HAVE seen 126 2024 films so far. BTW that 126 total for 2024 doesn’t include the 105 festival submissions that I’ve screened (those will be 2025 films) nor the 104 movies from earlier years that I watched this year.
Monica Barbaro and Timothee Chalamet in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Here’s the entire list of the best of 2024:
Anora: human spirit vs the oligarchs. In theaters.
Photo caption: Donna Reed in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE – the second best wife ever
Happy 24th Anniversary to The Wife, also known as Lisa, The Love of My Life!
We started out the year by binge-watching The Crown (season 6) and Shetland (season 6), and ended, as is our beloved Holiday tradition, watching It’s a Wonderful Lifeon the big screen
I really enjoyed introducing her to Anatomy of a Fall in January. Together, we discovered Ghostlight and The Bikeriders in July and Conclave, A Real Pain, A Complete Unknown and Queer to close out the year.
After a year-long streak of stinkers, she revived her own movie-picking credibility with Wicked Little Letters andKneecap.
Once again, she tolerated my spending huge chunks of time covering Noir City and the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival in person and Cinequest, Slamdance, Frameline, San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), Nashville Film Festival and San Francisco Jewish Film Festival virtually. She was also OK with my helping out Cinequest by screening over 100 film submissions. I’m getting ready now to cover Noir City in person and Slamdance virtually again in January.
She joined me on my bucket list pilgrimage to the 105-year-old Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank Grill. We sat at the bar where William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett imbibed (and where Hammett wrote). We dined at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s regular booth and passed by Charlie Chaplin’s regular table by the front window. Unforgettable.
She’s the biggest fan and supporter of this blog DURING ALL OF ITS FOURTEEN YEARS, and I appreciate her and love her. Happy Anniversary, Honey!
In PBS’ American Experience documentary Jimmy Carter, The New Yorker writer and former Carter speechwriter Henrik Hertzberg says:
Jimmy Carter was what the American people always SAY they want – above politics, determined to do the right thing regardless of political consequences, a simple person who doesn’t lie, a modest man, not someone with a lot of imperial pretenses. That’s what people say they want. And that’s what they got with Jimmy Carter.
And herein lies the rub.
In 1976, Americans were reacting to Watergate and wanted a President the LEAST like Richard Nixon. We got him, in the form of Jimmy Carter; it turned out that Carter could deliver non-Nixonian decency, but not the leadership that the era required.
In Jimmy Carter, we hear from those who know Carter best – including his wife Rosalynn Carter, his vice-president Walter Mondale, and right-from-the-start Carter insiders Jody Powell, Pat Caddell and Bert Lance. How the times made this man, then propelled him to such improbable electoral success and then finally doomed his Administration, is a great and cautionary story.
Jimmy Carter is in two parts, which combine for two hours and 39 minutes. It’s available to stream from Amazon and AppleTV (I can find it on my app, but not on the website).
Photo caption: Craig Wasson and Jodi Thelen in FOUR FRIENDS
I see over 300 movies each year, and every time, I am hoping for an especially rewarding experience. Here are my favorite movie-going experiences of 2024.
A special screening of Four Friends at the Cambria Film Festival with stars Craig Wasson, Reed Birney and Jim Metzler. Critics loved this 1981 Arthur Penn film, and I loved it, and almost nobody else saw it. A film about an aspirational blue-collar young man in the turbulent Vietnam Era (like me), this film deeply resonated with me in 1981 and continues to do so. Grievously underrated, Four Friends isn’t available to stream and is very hard to find. It was wonderful to see it agaon, this time with an audience and the filmmakers.
Noir City: In recent years, Eddie Muller and team have been introducing me to international film noir. This year, they came through with the French Symphony for a Massacre and the British Across the Bridge. I attended Noir City in-person in Oakland, and I’ll be returning in January 2025.
Slamdance: This blog loves directorial debuts and world premieres – and that’s what Slamdance is all about. This year, the best two films were Italian: The Complex Forms and The Accident.
Cinequest: The film festival that launched this blog was once again rich with world premieres. The best were The Invisibles, Pain and Peace, and The Island Between the Tides, and the North American premiere of Human Resources. presented the remarkable In the Summers.
Nashville Film Festival: NashFilm has become one of my favorite film fests, and this year introduced me to In the Summers, which made my year-end top ten.
SFFILM: This time, SFFILM delivered two surprises of surrealism and absurdism: Mother Couch and The Practice.
San Luis Obispo International Film Festival: This year, the SLO Film Fest soared with its unique and very deep surf/skate program, and two indie charmers, Tokyo Cowboy and Chasing, Chasing Amy.
Frameline: San Francisco’s major LGBTQ fest brought us Gondola, another charming, dialogue-free comedy from German writer-director Veit Helmer, this one set in Georgia.
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival: The SFJFF is a major Jewish cultural event held against the backdrop of current events in Israel and Gaza, and the SFJFF leaned right into what would otherwise be the elephant in the room. I’ve been covering the SFJFF since 2016, I’m not Jewish and I can attest that this attitude is nothing new. I’ve seen SFJFF films with Palestinian voices, by Palestinian and Israeli Arab filmmakers, and about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Not for the first time: I re-experienced Man on a Train, The Day of the Jackal, The Valley of Elah and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.
Palm Theater: My hometown arthouse delivered The Taste of Things, La Chimera, Wicked Little Letters, Ghostlight, How to Come Alive, Didi, The Outrun, Anora, A Real Pain, Queer and A Complete Unknown.
Sweetheart Deal: I’ve reviewed fifteen documentaries this year and screened another 80 while helping to program a film festival. Sweetheart Deal is the best documentary I’ve seen this year.
The Bikeriders: Jeff Nichols has written and directed six films, and I have loved all five that I have seen, including this latest one with Jodie Comer’s fine performance.
Netflix: I expected Richard Linklater’s Hit Man to be good (and it was), but I was totally surprised by The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.
TO TOP EVERYTHING ELSE
This is not technically movie-GOING, but it topped my movie-RELATED experiences of 2024. The Wife and I were joined by our friends Keith, Cynthia and Nisan on a bucket list pilgrimage to the 105-year-old Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank Grill. The Wife and I sat at the bar where William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett imbibed (and where Hammett wrote). We dined at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s regular booth and passed by Charlie Chaplin’s regular table by the front window. (The old-school martini and the sweetbreads were the best I’ve had.)
THE WORST
I usually don’t have a “ten worst movie” list because I only choose to watch movies that I hope will be exceptionally good. After all, I don’t have an editor assigning me to review soulless franchise movies, predictable rom coms and cheesy horror flicks. And, I generally just choose NOT to write about a bad indie – indie filmmakers have invested years of their lives in their films, and they just don’t need snark from somebody like me. But EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, some film crosses the line.
This year, that film was a world premiere at Slamdance, the Japanese high school coming of age film House of Se, where one of the main characters is a menstruophile who swipes all the used sanitary napkins in the school. Anyone who makes a film this transgressive really must deliver a movie with some minimal production values and a coherent story, which House of Se fails to do. Of the 300+ movies that I watched in 2024, House of Se is unquestionably the very worst.
I did despise Kinds of Kindness and The Dead Don’t Hurt, but at least they were competently made.
Timothée Chalamet in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s brilliant biopic of Bob Dylan, is a film about genius. If you need to understand why Dylan is the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, here is why. It’s a fascinating story, and Mangold’s telling of it is insightful and entertaining.
The story begins with 19-year-old Bob Dylan showing up in New York City. No one knows who he is (a complete unknown), because he hasn’t done anything, but he wants to meet his hero, the now hospitalized folksinger Woody Guthrie. Dylan can’t pretend to be anything but another homeless musician wannabe, but legendary folksinger Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) takes Dylan under his wing. Starting with open mic nights, Dylan starts playing around the Greenwich Village folk scene.
Dylan meets Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) a student activist Dylan whom appreciates because she is pretty, smart, opinionated and has an apartment. Sylvie is a barely fictionalized Suze Rutolo, Dylan’s girlfriend of the period, who appears on the cover of his The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album.
Dylan meets another woman his age, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who is already a big deal. Baez had played the Newport Folk Festival at age eighteen and had already recorded three albums. Bob is excited by Baez’s stardom, and Joan admires Bob’s still undiscovered song writing. Without falling in love exactly, they begin an affair. Bob takes advantage of Joan’s connections and credibility (and apartment); he lets her cover Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right before he released his own version. You get the impression that Joan could have fallen in love with Bob if he would treat her with decency and affection, but Bob is only in love with himself.
Seeger, Baez and others in Greenwich Village’s music world soon recognize the extraordinary, generational genus of Dylan’s songwriting. He finally gets to record his own material in 1963 with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan; it was an auspicious and transformative collection of original songs from a 22-year-old: Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.
In what I found to be the most thrilling moment in A Complete Unknown, Dylan debuts The Times They Are a-Changin‘ to a live audience, and all the listeners, including Seeger and Baez, are captivated, by each new groundbreaking verse. Come mothers and fathers…Throughout the land…And don’t criticize…What you can’t understand…Your sons and your daughters…Are beyond your command. The song – and this scene in A Complete Unknown – completely capture the zeitgeist of the time.
Dylan becomes a huge star and cultural icon – a symbol of a generation. And he immediately is alienated by the accompanying trappings of celebrity.
Dylan also evolves musically from his roots in acoustic folk music. His mentors in the Folk Music movement have a tough time with that, and it all explodes at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan defiantly shows up with an electric rock band, the climax of A Complete Unknown.
The folk purists, like Pete Seeger and the musicologist Alan Lomax, saw folk music as politically significant and rock and roll music as politically inconsequential – history soon proved them very wrong about this. The old folkies had also suffered for their movement by being victimized in the McCarthy Era, earning some of their self-righteousness. What the old folkies could not comprehend – and would find abhorrent if they did – is that Bob Dylan was bigger than the genre of Folk Music itself.
Elle Fanning and Timothee Chalamet in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
So, just who IS Bob Dylan? We expect any biopic to reveal, but Mangold has targeted one of our culture’s most notorious enigmas. Mangold and Chalamet give us a Dylan perhaps less complicated than his image. Here, Dylan is ambitious and absolutely committed to his art. He will not prioritize any relationship or behavioral norm above his songwriting or his career.
He wants the recognition, fame and money that comes from having an audience and fans but, in person, he doesn’t want to experience the fandom or even respect the audience. In pursuit of his own vision, Dylan is not afraid to disappoint (or enrage) anyone else, nor does he feel constrained by loyalty. (Although, if consistent with his vision, he can be kind to his hero Woody Guthrie.)
There’s more than a touch of narcissism there, too. A Complete Unknown depicts Dylan between the ages of 19 to 24, when he was only as mature as most of us were at that age; after all, one can be important while still very immature. He can be a brat, but he isn’t a bad person; he just isn’t capable of a reciprocal relationship. Sylvie Russo and Joan Baez both come to understand that, whoever he really is, he’s not interested in giving them what they want.
The older generation of folksingers certainly don’t GET Dylan, His manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) doesn’t get him, but is fiercely devoted, anyway. In A Complete Unknown, the only people who get Bob are Bobby Neuwirth (Will Harrison), the singer-songwriter who became his road manager, and another icon, Johnny Cash (Boyd Harrison).
As far as I can tell, A Complete Unknown is remarkable for its historical accuracy. There are a few tiny factual quibbles (Dylan actually changed his name from Zimmerman just AFTER he arrived in New York), but none of them are important or detract from the essential truth.
A Complete Unknown is also a time capsule of the early 1960s, and will be especially evocative for Baby Boomers like me, right down to the institutional green paint on Woody Guthrie’s hospital walls. LBJ hadn’t yet escalated the Viet Nam War, so peaceniks were campaigning against the threat of nuclear annihilation and white college kids were flocking to the Civil Rights Movement. Mangold perfectly captures the instant terror and helplessness that Americans felt during The Cuban Missile Crisis – and the suddenness of relief when it was over.
If you know the story, there are lots of delicious tidbits. For example, in the recording session for Like a Rolling Stone, Al Kooper (Charlie Tahan of Ozark), whose services were not needed on guitar, switches instruments so he can get paid for the session and invents the 1960s’ most iconic organ riff.
Monica Barbaro and Timothee Chalamet in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Chalamet, whom I’ve always seen as a little kittenish, finally gets to be a little dangerous and is appropriately prickly as Bob Dylan. Chalamet portrays Dylan’s aching and yearning for artistic achievement, which allows us to root for a guy who often behaves badly.
Barbaro’s Joan Baez is especially vivid, especially as she sizes up Dylan’s talent and assesses his behavior. Bob, you’re kind of an asshole.
Scoot McNairy’s performance as Woody Guthrie is especially haunting. Guthrie had been suffering from the then little understood Huntington’s disease; because of the disabling neurological effects and the behavioral symptoms, he spent his final years confined in psychiatric hospitals.
Big Bill Morganfield’s performance as a fictional blues artist named Jesse Moffette, who clearly stands in for Muddy Waters, is especially charismatic. Morganfield happens to be the son of Muddy Waters.
Chalamet, Norton, Barbaro and Boyd Harrison do their own singing in A Complete Unknown, which has been much ballyhooed, but I don’t find that important to a successful biopic. Their singing in character is all very good, and I was impressed by how perfectly Barbaro nails Baez’s unique voice. Norton, BTW, plays his own banjo, which is also impressive.
The editing by Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris is exceptional – none of the shots or scenes linger even a half-second too long. This is a two hour, twenty minute film that never lags.
A Complete Unknown is the best biopic, showbiz or otherwise, since Walk the Line (also a James Mangold film) and it’s one of the Best Movies of 2024.
