“A complete unknown”, the film about Bob Dylan: “It’s not Wikipedia”
The film’s climactic scene recounts Bob Dylan’s legendary performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festivalthe Indian reservation of the American folk scene that the American singer-songwriter electrified and shocked by celebrating his “electric turning point”. While Dylan, played by the surprising Timothée Chalametsounds “Like a Rolling Stone” (the actor actually recorded it for the film and the single, taken from the soundtrack, is on the radio from today), a woman gets up from her chair and – in the general chaos – points her finger at the artist, giving him of the «traitor».
He replies defiantly: «I don’t believe you». And he tells the band to play even louder, while .Pete Seegerwho is played by Edward Norton in the film, for a few moments he thinks about cutting the cables of Dylan and his band’s amplifiers with an axe.
That back and forth between Dylan-Judas and the audience is legendary, so much so that it was placed at the end of “No direction home”, Scorsese’s documentary. But it actually happened a year later in England (in Manchester, although for a long time it was mistakenly placed at the Royal Albert Hall). «We didn’t want to make a Wikipedia page“, however, explains the cast of “A complete unknown”, ithe first official biopic dedicated to the singer-songwriter who forever changed the course of the history of American musicbecoming the first to win a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. The film, which like Scorsese’s documentary borrows its title from a phrase in “Like a rolling stone”, will arrive in theaters on January 23 after five years of work and today the cast, led by director James Mangold61 years old, already the author of “When Love Burns the Soul” in 2005, with which he told the love story between Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, presented it in preview in Rome.
The songs from the soundtrack
Fun fact: the Eternal City is also mentioned at a certain point in the film, in a dialogue between Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (who, however, in the film is called Sylvie Russo and is played by Elle Fanning). The reference is to the journey that the latter undertook in 1962 in Italy, with a stop in Rome, where according to legend Dylan arrived from the United States to track her down (also making a trip to the legendary Folkstudio in via Garibaldi in Trastevere, where they set out their first steps Antonello Venditti and Francesco De Gregori). “A complete unknown”, after all, it does not tell the entire life of Bob Dylan, now 83 years old, but it is a sort of Bildungsroman that tells the very first phase of his parable: from arriving in New York and meeting his idol
Woody Guthrieas well as with Pete Seeger, who introduced him to the folk scene, up until the aforementioned epochal performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, on the threshold of the publication of the masterpiece “Highway 61 revisited”. In the movie, which comes three years after Bob Dylan sold his catalog to Sony Musicmention is made of records such as the eponymous debut with Columbia Records from 1962, “The freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” from 1963, “The Times they are a-changing’” from 1964, “Another side of Bob Dylan” from 1964 and “Bringing it all back home” from 1965, with a nod to “Highway 61 revisited”. There soundtrackwhich is already available for streaming and will be released in physical format on February 23 (it is already on pre-order on the Sony Music website), contains Chalamet’s interpretations of classics such as “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall”, “Masters of war”, “Blowin’ in the wind”, “The times they are a-chaning’”: «I don’t know what kind of cultural, social and political lesson from Dylan’s early work is for young people today to grasp, perhaps what remains is the idea of finding your own creative spirit, your own name and your own art. Dylan had many stories to tell. One lesson we can learn is that of self-creation: not being limited by who you are or have been”, says the 29-year-old actor, who had already shown off his vocal skills last year in the musical “Wonka”, prequel to “The Chocolate Factory”.
The actors who play Joan Baez and Pete Seeger
But what also embellishes the film are the performances of Monica Barbaro in the shoes of Joan Baez. The 34-year-old actress, seen three years ago in “Top Gun: Maverick,” is of Italian descent. Unlike Chalamet, who never met Dylan, he had the opportunity to hang out with the great singer-songwriter – now 84 years old – who shared those magical years with the singer-songwriter. In the film he tries his hand at “Girl from the North Country”, “Silver dagger”, “House of the rising sun”, as well as “The times they are a-changing’” in duet with Chalamet: «When you play a character like this it’s difficult not to always have in mind the desire to be as accurate as possible in portraying him, because there are his fans to whom you want to be recognisable. But at a certain point it was Joan herself who said: “If you try to make something perfect you deprive it of what is interesting”. The director told us: stop telling us what really happened.
This is not a Wikipedia page, it’s a film,” he explains. .Edward Norton55 years old, as Pete Seeger he displaces by playing the banjo: «YouTube has been my main source of inspiration. It’s amazing what you find in there. You can find everything there, including a video of Seeger playing in a Berlin bar in 1963».
Films about Bob Dylan before “A complete unknown”
The film is part of a genre, that of biopics, which has become central again in Hollywood for a few years now. After the success of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Bryan Singer’s film with Rami Malek about the rise to success of Freddie Mercury and his Queen, biopics on the lives of pop and rock stars have multiplied, with mixed success: from “Rocketman” (about Elton John) to “Elvis” (about the king of rock’n’roll), passing through “Whitney” (about the unforgettable Whitney Houston) and “Back to black” (about Amy’s short and wild life Winehouse).
Already in 2007 Todd Haynes dedicated “.I’m not here”, with different actors (from Christian Bale to Cate Blanchett) playing the different Dylans. However, it was only a film «freely inspired by the music and sometimes life of Bob Dylan». Before Haynes captured the essence of the elusive singer-songwriter on film, Donn Alan Pennebaker had already thought about it in ’67 with the documentary “Don’t Look Back”, filming Dylan during the concerts of the tour done in the United Kingdom a year earlier. In 2005, Martin Scorsese signed “No Direction Home”, a docu-film that retraced the life of the Bard of Duluth from his beginnings to the motorcycle accident of ’66. The great director of “Taxi Driver” would return to deal with Dylan in 2019 by curating another documentary, “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story”, which however contained a good part of invented facts (such as the presence of a young Sharon Stone -groupie).
Mangold, who defines “A complete unknown” as «the story of an extraordinary moment in American culture», speaking of “his” Dylan he says: «My job as a director is always to question clichés. I spoke to Dylan himself and we reviewed articles from the time, watched documentaries, read books. But all this material tells subjective points of view. So instead of looking for the factual truth, we wanted to tell something else: we were looking for feelings».
