A Complete Prick | A Complete Unknown (2024) Movie Review | #OscarsHomework
I do NOT get it… 🫤
I LiveSkeet film reviews over on BlueSky, and then piece them together with commentary to make my full reviews here on Medium before they go to Letterbox’d. Please subscribe anywhere/everywhere you can for more of my shenanigans…
Let me state my personal biases for the record: Bob Dylan is one of my least-favorite pop idols of all time. I equate him to, like, a Jim Morrison of The Doors. They’re self-important, alleged ‘poets’ propped up by better musicians, with lengthy histories of mistreating and abusing women.
I enjoy James Mangold’s work, generally, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to turn me around on Bob Dylan.
What was surprising was that — after having watched it — I’m fairly certain the film has roughly the same opinion of Dylan I do. He is a contrarian, prickly bitch who will fight with literally anyone about literally anything.
So why do we keep lionizing this guy?
It’s definitely not that the man’s music never connected with me. I was moved to tears during several musical numbers in the film, always in response to turmoil caused in another character’s (person’s) life around him, turmoil always caused by Dylan.
Let me say that the filmmaking is unimpeachable. It’s lovingly shot, sumptuously appointed and set dressed, a terrific period piece. The performances are roundly incredible. But in service of what?
I have the same problem with almost all biopics. There’s something in the artistic/creative process of acting, some contribution (the ‘actor’s secret,’ what-have-you) that most actors typically get to make, and I think when actors are tasked with an impression of a real person — in this case, Timothee Chalamet taking on the mantle of not-only-real-person, but still-living-legend Bob Dylan — it just robs them of even the opportunity to mamke that vital creative contribution.
Chalamet did his homework. He allegedly learned to play guitar for the role (I think his guitar chops are hesitant and unconvincing, and the camera doesn’t linger on his finger technique, which — not for nothing — parallels Dylan, often the weakest technician or instrumentalist in his cadre of musicians), and he absolutely embodies and gives Dylan Energy, which is: the guy every woman, except every woman who already knows him, is dying to run into, but who is the absolute last person at the party you want to run into. A Johnny Depp, if you will.
Forgive me, but even in the script — textually, in this film — Dylan pretty much just walks around ruining everyone’s day. Again, I don’t get the sense that Mangold disagrees with my general assessment of Dylan’s — I won’t say character — but disposition.
If you’ve ever met anyone who’s pretty charming, but has been led to believe they’re exceptionally, or perhaps even uniquely, charming, you’ve met Chalamet’s Dylan in the flesh. As much as groupies and hangers-on fawningly tell Bobby over and over again what a genius he is, I get the sense that no one believes it more than he does.
Poor Sylvie. Played by Elle Fanning with so much poignancy and pathos, this woman’s only crime was being charmed enough by emotional vampire Bob Dylan on first meeting that he crept into her life, and then proceeds to never entirely creep out of it, often showing up inappropriately with no warning in the middle of the night.
One of their early dates is telling. He barely registers whatever it is she proposes doing before dismissing it as a dumb idea (I think a museum visit?), then he nods towards a movie marquee advertising tickets for fifty cents and says, “You got a dollar?”
I dare say nearly every adult woman in this country has been on a date with That Guy. It’s such a telling interaction, just a split second onscreen, but which also encapsulates everything unpleasant about knowing a Bob Dylan.
Why do we lionize this guy?
The plot revolves around the ‘infamous’ Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when Dylan famously — bravely, some would say — arguably breached his contract, and played music that a lot of the people there didn’t want to hear.
What a hero.
The script serves him up a very objectionable, purist asshole who sits atop the board of the festival and makes all kinds of threats, and is generally the kind of guy who deserves a Bob Dylan in his life.
But Pete Seeger — portrayed by famous Hollywood difficult person, Ed Norton, and the emotional heart of this film — flatly doesn’t. Seeger goes way out of his way to adopt and promote Dylan, and explicitly doesn’t give a shit if Dylan plays with an electric guitar, just prefers that — for the specific setlist for this specific festival that Dylan inarguably owes the early portion of his fame trajectory to — maybe don’t play those songs.
What a DRAG, MAN. Can you believe this good-hearted folk musician who unreservedly loves and supports Dylan is such a fucking SQUARE? WHAT a fucking tribulation for the Great Artist. Who, by the way, ignores his pleas to just give Pete a heads up about what’s coming.
Can you imagine if Oliver Stone’s (not-good) movie about The Doors — provocatively titled “The Doors” — all led up to and climaxed in the Ed Sullivan performance? It would seem silly, I think.
In that way, this movie seems a little silly.
Not the craft of it. I cannot overstate how dynamic the performances are and how authentically represented the time periods feel, and it’s even exciting and amusing to watch Bob Dylan traipse through what he would call a life, just upsetting everyone around him constantly and being an insufferable prick every time anyone else gets a word in edgewise (rare).
This movie will be nominated for awards, and it will win awards, and it probably should? The work is good.
But in service of what? Why do we lionize this guy?!
A buddy of mine and coworker at the movie theatre reminded me that Dylan was not without his causes, and famously, Hurricane-era Dylan was concerned with justice and cared about people and their struggles, and it was a good reminder, because that Bob Dylan does not appear in this feature.
It is absolute anathema for Chalamet’s Dylan to even hear about the causes and principles that motivate the people around him. Thank goodness he’s always wearing his sunglasses indoors (classic Good Guy move), because otherwise we’d be watching him roll his eyes for two and a half straight hours.
Why do we lionize this guy?
Or more to the point, why do we lionize THIS Dylan? The cocksure, teenage, narcissistic prick he definitely was at the time has to be Dylan at his least interesting, and as exciting and dynamic as are the performances and historical settings, the young man Bob Dylan is a one-trick pony who wears so thin so quickly, not least for the people in his life.
At least in the period dramatized in the film, to know Dylan was to be hurt by Dylan, often capriciously or with absolute disregard for the interpersonal consequences.
Did he change the world with that revolutionary breach of contract and petty, apathetic, unworthy backstabbing of his good friend and mentor?
I guess? From a filmic standpoint, for ‘artists giving audiences something they’re not yet ready for,’ I’ll take Johnny Be Good from Back to the Future ten times out of ten.
Just because a moment is culturally or historically significant does not mean that it makes for a compelling film storyline. I think Rage Against the Machine protesting Steve Forbes on Saturday Night Live (who scheduled those two together? that seems insane if you know anything about either party) is a more heroic musical or political stand than what Dylan does at Newport, which is essentially ignore the express wish of the organizers, while not bucking them visibly or explicitly enough to warrant being pulled entirely, because he feels entitled to their stage.
He just dodges conversations and responsibility and puts a hard decision to the promoters about whether to even allow him to perform, and whether they made the right or wrong decision for their festival is a matter for debate, but more importantly: who cares?
And I don’t mean who cares about the event. Tons of people do. Inexplicably, my whole life, that Newport Folk Festival, ‘Dylan Goes Electric’ thing has been a pop-cultural landmark moment that’s been discussed ad naseum and my reaction has ALWAYS been: who cares? But boy, do people care. So whatever, that’s a Big Moment in Music History. I am fairly certain if I’d been alive and me in 1965, I’d have gotten carpal tunnel from making the ‘jerkoff motion’ constantly as people bring up Dylan Going Electric.
It may be a significant moment historically (I mean, it is, just by virtue of how much other people care and talk about it), but it isn’t a meaningful or significant stand to take, even in the context of the script. No one is telling Dylan not to play rock and roll, or he can’t play rock and roll. They ask him to stick to folk music for a Folk Festival, and he can’t be bothered to do it, but can’t be bothered to actually make a stand and confront anyone, either, stringing along the promoters and his close, personal friend Seeger until the eleventh hour.
It’s this weird, niche, internecine squabble between a self-important organization I don’t and never did care about (“Peter, Paul and Mary are a confection,” says one board member, officiously, triggering my gag reflex) and an absolutely insufferable, look-at-me-but-don’t-look-at-me artiste, and the language of filmmaking and structure of the script suggests that it’s an epic moment in history — and history, itself, suggests that this was a momentous moment — and I do. not. get it.
I’m reminded of the closing lines of unreadable-bad-book American Psycho by the Bob Dylan of the New York Literati, Bret Easton Ellis (the film is perhaps the greatest film ever made, and inarguably the best adaptation of book to movie, given the dubious quality of the source material):
“But even after admitting this — and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed — and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing...”
Bateman could just as easily be talking about Dylan’s over-documented hissy fit in Newport in 1965.
Why do we lionize this guy???
I don’t get it. Timothee Chalamet worked as diligently and fervently as an actor can to do what I think is essentially not acting, and turned in an incredible performance as a guy that makes my skin crawl and I would never want to be caught in a room with. Okay. Good Movie? Is it, even?
Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather see that level of care and craft and loving, slavish attention brought to bear on a story I think matters more. And I say that fully aware of how much that Moment in History matters to some people.
Just not me. I do not get it.
