Category: Timothée Chalamet

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: James Mangold
CAST: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 79% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1961, Bob Dylan arrives in NYC for the first time.  Four years later, his groundbreaking performance in Newport changed the music world forever.


The 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams began as a small-scale, 30-minute project concentrating on two inner-city boys who dreamed of making it to the NBA.  It was supposed to cover only a few months in their lives, but as their stories progressed, the filmmakers just continued filming, and the sprawling documentary eventually covered five years and became an absorbing three-hour odyssey.

In a weird way, that’s how I felt about James Mangold’s Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.  The movie opens with no backstory, no flashbacks, just a disheveled young Bobby Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arriving in 1961 New York City with his guitar, determined to meet his idol, legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, hospitalized at the time with Huntington’s disease and no longer able to sing or speak.  In Guthrie’s hospital room, Dylan also meets another folk legend, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), in what must count as one of the greatest musical summit conferences of all time.

The way this scene is shot, it almost feels like, after it’s over, it could be the end of a marvelous short film about three legends bumping into each other.  But, like Hoop Dreams, this biopic remains focused on the unknown Bobby Dylan, with his nasal whine and preternatural gift for lyrics, for five years.  He eventually gets more and more exposure and cuts his first album.  Along the way, he meets two women who will be his emotional touchstones during the film: the celebrated Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), whom Dylan accuses of being and singing “too pretty,” and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who becomes his girlfriend despite his flirtations with Ms. Baez.

But throughout the film – and this is one of the reasons I enjoyed it more than I thought I would – we remain focused almost exclusively on Dylan, the man and his music.  We are treated to countless scenes of Dylan performing live, Dylan recording in a studio, Dylan scratching out a new song note for note and word for word.  If a soundtrack album were ever compiled of the full-length versions of all the songs we hear in A Complete Unknown, I have to believe it would be between two to three hours long, if not more.

Why did I react so favorably to this kind of treatment?  My two favorite musical biopics of all time are Ray [2004] and Amadeus [1984].  Amadeus certainly contains a LOT of music, much like A Complete Unknown, but we are given a lot of background information into Mozart’s life, his relationship with his father, his childhood years, and so on, whereas the Dylan film presents him as a blank slate without a single flashback to his younger years.  Ray is much more in the vein of your “traditional” musical biopics like Walk the Line [2005, also directed by Mangold] or Bohemian Rhapsody [2018], containing the standard story beats of struggles in their personal lives, a haunting past, liberal-to-moderate use of flashbacks, you get the idea.

I suppose part of my enjoyment of A Complete Unknown stems from the fact that, even though I’m not a Dylan fan, or Fan with a capital F, I appreciate the songs themselves, with their intricate lyrics and folksy rhythms, so I thoroughly enjoyed the myriad musical breaks.  I also liked the way the movie did not spoon-feed me chunks of information it felt I needed to know.  Instead of the movie telling me how I should feel about a scene or a moment with clunky dialogue or exposition, it simply presents a situation and kind of stands back from it, allowing me to form my own emotional reactions to the material.  That’s a tricky storytelling method; one false step and you’re left with a story with no heart, no meat in the middle.  But A Complete Unknown pulls it off extremely well.  I’m sure there’s a way to explain how they did it, but I’m not the one to try.  I just know that it works, and that’s enough for me.

Any discussion of this movie must necessarily include Timothée Chalamet’s magnetic performance as Bob Dylan.  It is destined for an Oscar nomination.  I am reliably informed that Chalamet did all the singing himself (as did Norton and Barbaro as Seeger and Baez, and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash), and he went to great lengths to mimic Dylan’s trademark sound.  Combined with the pitch-perfect hair and makeup, it really feels like the real Dylan onscreen, especially when the movie jumps forward to the Newport Music Festivals of ‘64 and ‘65.  Of course, I wasn’t alive back then, but I have seen pictures and documentary footage of the man himself, and Chalamet is utterly convincing.  Even if you’re not a Dylan fan, this movie is worth watching just to see Chalamet’s performance…he’s that good.

My colleague, Marc Sanders, mentions in his review how the production design of the film went to great lengths to recreate early-1960s New York City, and I second that statement.  It’s as utterly convincing as Chalamet himself, especially when it comes to the various “underground” music clubs Dylan performs in, clubs where the folk music revolution was born.  I get the feeling that anyone who watches this movie, who was also alive at the time, will be easily transported back to that era when Kennedy’s Camelot was in full swing, as was the hippie movement, the folk movement, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, the Beatles.  There are aspects of this film that I may never fully appreciate since I was born in the early ‘70s, but I get the gist.

I feel compelled to rebut a specific argument from my girlfriend, who did not like the movie because it did not give us any real background information about who Bob Dylan really is.  (We only get a single tantalizing glimpse when someone leafs through one of his old scrapbooks that had been delivered to a “Mr. Zimmerman.”)  All the movie does, so her argument goes, is present us with a performer singing his music, culminating in a pivotal big concert, of which the same could be said of many other biopics that came before.  A Complete Unknown could just as well have been about Richie Havens, or Jerry Lee Lewis, or Janis Joplin, or anyone else.  There is no real personal conflict presented in the film.

To which I have to say…that’s not quite true.  I acknowledge the absence of background story and flashbacks, but for me, as I said, that’s a strength, not a weakness.  It follows the theme set up by the film’s title, after all.  Also, there is a real conflict in the story, as Dylan, after becoming the figurehead for the folk music movement in America, takes the unprecedented step of recording an album and performing live songs that are (gasp!) non-acoustic.  He complains that his fans want him to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the rest of his life. This generates shockwaves throughout the folk community, and at one of his concerts where he performs an electric set, the crowd jeers, throws trash at him, and even calls him “Judas.”  That pretty much counts as “conflict,” in my opinion.

A Complete Unknown goes down as one of the best films of 2024 that I’ve seen.  For Dylan fans, it is an absolute must-see.  For fans of great acting, it’s also a must-see.  If you’re not a Dylan fan at all, well, it’s not likely to change your mind, but do yourself a favor and give it a chance.  Not many musical biopics, or films of ANY kind, are made this well and with as much loving care as A Complete Unknown.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

By Marc S. Sanders

A drifter hitches a ride into New York City with a guitar on his back looking for Woody Guthrie.  He only comes to realize that his musical idol is in a New Jersey hospital ward with a debilitating illness. The drifter just came from Jersey.

The young stranger eventually catches up with the legendary folk singer, and a friend named Pete Seegar.  He plays a song he wrote for the ill and mute Mr. Guthrie and the men are dazzled by this young man.  This is Bob Dylan, and he writes music and lyrics as quickly as he breathes.  But where did this wunderkind stem from?  To everyone that encounters Bob Dylan, he’s simply A Complete Unknown.

Timothée Chalamet delivers a blazingly convincing performance as Bob Dylan, surely a front runner for the Best Actor Oscar.  The appearance is easy to get used to. The dialect and expressions of what I’d like to think is the summit of what most of us know about the musician never falters from an apathetic expression or that mumbling hoarseness we all know.  Everything from the clothes to the shaggy brown hair to the sunglasses and motorcycle he confidently rides perfect this embodiment. In James Mangold’s latest musician biography (prior credits include the Johnny Cash bio Walk The Line), with Timothée Chalamet in this role, I was truly watching a Bob Dylan of the early to mid-1960’s.

Any movie has a conflict for its story to work around.  There’s more than one conflict in A Complete Unknown, but Bob Dylan would not know that.  He’s content with doing what he does and has not one care for what anyone else wants him to be or wants him to share.  Bob lacks much concern for the tumultuous times of the mid twentieth century either.  JFK and Malcolm X are assassinated.  The Vietnam War persists.  The Cuban Missile Crisis terrifies everyone.  Yet, Bob only focuses on his songwriting.  He’ll make connections with Pete Seegar (Edward Norton) and develop a sometimes-romantic tryst but mostly singing partnership with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).  He also gets involved with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), one of his first fans.  However, no matter what they might expect of the performer, he’s only going to follow the path that drives him.  Therefore, that will be their own respective problems to contend with, not his.  Bob is only going to follow that path that he chooses.

Sylvie wants to know more about her live-in boyfriend who only tells tales of when he moved with a travelling carnival.  Joan wants to know where he learned to play guitar or even how he developed a knack for poetic lyricism.  Later, she’ll want to play the original numbers that solidified their friendship on stage despite his stubbornness not to agree.  It becomes curious when photo albums are delivered, addressed to a Robert Zimmerman.  Pete and his other peers want Bob, a now marquee name, to hold on to the grassroots of folk singing.  Bob will not acquiesce though.  Like other masterful musicians such as Prince or John Lennon and Elton John, Bob Dylan is going to continue to reinvent himself. 

In a matter of months, the signer becomes a nationwide superstar and he can’t walk the streets without getting bombarded; something he never wanted.  He performs with a passion for the music he’s written and he persists in making the next new thing with his talents as he transitions from acoustic to electric guitar and incorporates keyboards and drums to accompany his performances.  His friend Pete sees a berth becoming wider from the folk music he parades at annual festivals in Newport, Rhode Island and what Dylan insists on only playing.  Record producers (primarily represented by actor Dan Fogler) beg the singer to perform his older familiar tracks, but Bob Dylan only wants to move on to what is new and fresh. 

A Complete Unknown is full of such energy because it delivers what was produced by the guy who composed all of these magnificent and magnetic tracks from Song To Woodie to Blowin’ In The Wind to Like A Rolling Stone and to The Time’s They Are A Changing and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.  You might not know or even understand all the verses by heart, but you quickly catch on to the choruses. To hear these newly composed songs pulled out of a dusty attic for an updated biography, performed by Timothée Chalamet in underground bars, at concert festivals or even in messy apartments is addicting.  You don’t want the actor to stop the song.  You don’t want the film to cut away from any of the numbers and you wish the concert would never end.  Like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan’s works stay with you.

I’ve become a huge admirer of James Mangold.  He’s a writer/director who does not criticize his subjects.  He empathizes with them and respects their boundaries.  We might find frustrations in people like Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash, but Mangold does not compromise the biography.  He finds reasons for you to like these men even while those who stand in their circles might not care for their attitudes. 

The director is also skillful at showing the history of the time.  Like the last Indiana Jones film he covered, the settings are so authentic.  New York City in A Complete Unknown is depicted down to the finest detail including the yellow street signs within the small boroughs of damp Brownstones and city streets that Bob Dylan navigates. The musty interiors of Woody Guthrie’s hospital room or Pete Seegar’s cabin home are shot with a hazy photography.  The Newport music festival, full of concert spectator extras feels like it was pulled from a documentary; what maybe a calm and relaxing Woodstock might have looked like.

Beyond Timothée Chalamet, the cast of this film is superb.  Elle Fanning need not say a word as James Mangold provides an assortment of close ups depicting her pain of wanting to love Bob Dylan but knowing she just can’t.  Her complexion turns into a weeping pink without one tear shed.  Monica Barbaro is on the cusp of becoming a marquee name in films.  The actress who was recently in action material with Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger hides so well under the folk appearance of Joan Baez and she carries an immense stage presence. Scoot McNairy is Woody Guthrie who never speaks and only stares straight ahead during visits from Bob and Pete. Yet, the silent performance offers the only character who truly understood the value of an enigmatic Bob Dylan. Edward Norton has given a new range as a liberal and calm Pete Seegar who uses folk music as an escape from the turmoil of the times and not as a harbor to protest or fight an authority with aggression and violence.  He might wish for his friend Bob Dylan to uphold the value of folk music, but he knows he can’t keep a bird caged in one place either.  Norton’s introductory scene in a courthouse with a banjo in hand is unforgettable.  The casting is simply perfect in A Complete Unknown.

Since I saw this film on Christmas Day, I have not stopped thinking about it, and I think I want to see it again in a theater with a speaker system that amplifies the power of Bob Dylan’s guitar and mumbly vocals.  Right now, nothing sounds better.

A Complete Unknown is one of the best films of the year.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (Italy, 2017)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Luca Guadagnino
CAST: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1980s Italy, romance blossoms between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man hired as his father’s research assistant.


Call Me by Your Name is remarkable because it tells a heartbreaking first-love story that could have easily devolved into cheap melodrama.  I mean, look at the plot description above.  It has “soap opera” written all over it.  But because director Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All, the 2018 remake of Suspiria) applies restraint, and because the screenplay by James Ivory (of Merchant Ivory fame) sticks to realism as opposed to predictable scripted nonsense, and because of the fearlessness of the film’s two leads, Call Me by Your Name becomes one of the best films about the thrill and heartbreak of first love I’ve ever seen.

The story takes place in the summer of 1983, in Italy.  The Perlmans are on vacation at their villa in the Italian countryside.  Mr. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) has hired an American, Oliver (Armie Hammer), to assist him with research over the holiday.  Elio (Timothée Chalamet), Mr. Perlman’s 17-year-old son, appears to take an instant dislike to Oliver, but we later see this is a maneuver designed to disguise his real, and scary, crush on Oliver.

…but I don’t want to write a full synopsis of the story, because I guarantee it would read like someone’s Twilight fan-fiction or something similar.  What happens is reasonably predictable and has been seen in countless movies from Douglas Sirk to Nora Ephron.  What makes this movie special is how it happens.

There is not a single scene or shot in the movie that feels routine.  Or, not “routine”, that’s not the right word.  The whole movie feels authentic.  Nobody talks in screenplay-ese (except for a sensational speech from Mr. Perlman near the end, which I will forgive because it works).  Whatever happens, whenever it happens, feels spontaneous and precisely observed.

Here is at least one moment that captures what I mean.  Elio’s crush on Oliver has gotten deeper, but he’s kept it to himself.  One night, the two of them and a bunch of Elio’s friends visit a local bar with an outdoor dance floor.  Oliver starts dancing with a pretty girl.  Elio’s friends get up to dance, but Elio stays behind, eyeing Oliver and the girl, and you can almost hear the gears turning over in Elio’s head.  He finally does get up to dance, but watch his movements carefully: he starts dancing with a girl, but surreptitiously moves closer to Oliver for a moment.  Oliver turns to Elio, and Elio abruptly turns away and pulls a little move and slide, pretending not to notice Oliver while also trying to impress him a little.  Elio turns back, sees that Oliver is no longer looking, and quickly moves back towards him.  This kind of behavior is so specific, and yet universally recognizable.  There was no dialogue, but I knew everything going through Elio’s head in every second of that scene.

I also admired the scene, done in one take, where Elio finally reveals his feelings to Oliver, but it’s all done in this marvelous code, where Elio never actually says precisely what he’s talking about, but Oliver is smart enough to decipher the code.  (“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”)  I’ve seen so many films where the Oliver character is written as an otherwise adult person but has to be incredibly dumb in order to prolong the “idiot plot.”  How refreshing to be confronted with characters with working brains.

Guadagnino also appears to be a great fan of Japanese films, particularly those of Yasujiro Ozu.  Throughout the movie, there are many scenes that are divided, almost like chapter headings, by a series of stationary shots, held for several seconds, of ordinary items: a window, or a staircase, or the still waters of a lake, or an apricot tree.  Ozu was known for doing the same thing in his films; they were called “pillow shots,” because Japanese poetry utilizes the same device, using words instead of shots, to separate thoughts or ideas.  These “pillow shots” lend a sense of poetry or…I don’t know what, exactly, to the film.  It may look (and sound) a little pretentious, but trust me, it works.  It made the movie feel as if there were great currents of significance rumbling below the surface.

Alert readers may notice I haven’t even mentioned the sex scenes yet.  Going into this movie, I remembered that there was some hoopla about the graphic nature of those scenes, but I get the feeling they’re like the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs: everyone thinks they remember seeing the ear actually getting cut off, but we don’t.  Tarantino tactfully moves the camera up and away and leaves the dismemberment off-camera.  Same thing here.  Guadagnino leaves no doubt as to what is about to happen, but then moves the camera away, or cuts to the next scene, or expertly positions the camera so the naughtiest actions are never actually seen.

This is shrewd filmmaking.  If the film had been filled with NC-17-worthy content, the message would have been lost.  It would have become a movie about the sex instead of being about the turmoil and ecstasy of being in love with someone who loves you back, even if it’s only for a short time.

I should also mention the roles of Elio’s parents.  I can see how some people might watch the movie and imagine that his parents are far too forgiving, especially given their religious upbringing.  However, this was another welcome departure from the realms of unnecessary melodrama.  Instead of scenes where the furious parents make unreasonable demands or deliver intolerant lectures, we are given a father and mother who know enough about parenting, and about their son, to realize when it’s time to lecture and when it’s time to just let things happen.  I’m not suggesting they would ever willingly allow their son to go into harm’s way.  But they’re smart enough to know how important it is that Oliver and Elio take a little sabbatical together before Oliver’s final departure.

(They also know when a small lie is sometimes necessary at the appropriate moment.  After Mr. Perlman’s wonderful speech at the end of the film, Elio asks him, “Does mother know?”  Mr. Perlman hesitates, then delivers a very tactful answer.  To me, this was his way of protecting his son at a time when he desperately needed comfort.  I suppose it could be interpreted either way, but since Mr. Perlman knows his wife, I believe it was a perfectly timed lie.  Just a small one.  It’s a magnificent button to the scene.)

Call Me by Your Name deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay that year.  It’s a masterpiece of storytelling by osmosis, without using signal flags or hokey dialogue.  It recalls with perfect precision how it feels to be uplifted and crushed emotionally, and how one must decide how to deal with those feelings.  I was never the 17-year-old son of a professor with romantic feelings for his assistant, but I understood and identified with Elio nearly every step of the way during the movie.  I would imagine many others can, too.