Will Leitch in The Washington Post:
Bob Dylan is so inherently unclassifiable that, when the great filmmaker Todd Haynes made a purposefully disjointed and elliptical film about the songwriter, he had to cast six actors to play Dylan, including Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and an 11-year-old. There would seem to be no greater fool’s errand than to try to plug Dylan into a conventional or pop star biopic, the sort of straightforward narrative that in recent years has won Oscar nominations for Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. There is nothing normal about Bob Dylan; how could you possibly make a normal movie about him? He is so unknowable that he has been mistaken for a vagrant by four generations in a row now.
“A Complete Unknown,” the new biopic of Dylan directed by James Mangold, turns Dylan’s stubborn insistence on hiding in plain sight, the impossibility of ever truly understanding him, into the film’s central tension. It’s a movie about a main character who keeps trying to run away from his own movie.
Most Dylan fans I know — a club that very much claims me as a member — have been dreading the movie since it was first announced, particularly when they learned that Timothée Chalamet, the elfish man in all those perfume ads in the corner of your browser windows, would be portraying him. But I am delighted to let everyone know that our fears were unfounded. The movie, and Chalamet’s devoted and truthful portrayal of Dylan, has constructed itself with a deliberate hole at its center. To paraphrase Haynes’s movie title, he’s not here. It’s as true to Dylan as if he were to play the part himself.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.