A Complete Unknown

How I Thought I Knew What I Know Well and Was Completely Mistaken.

Let’s say: it’s a confession and a report.

The confession: A hater confesses. I was not in. I was all out. Call it suspicion, or being protective, call it bias, call it snobbery. I was out, completely out, and I was wrong, completely wrong, also. I live and breathe Bob Dylan since my most tender age. My father only had five or six records, and three of them were Dylan’s. I sang Blowing in the Wind and Girl from the North Country before I could answer in English to the question “What is your name?”.

When I took up the guitar when I was six, it was Dylan I started playing. Around my Bar Mitzvah, I used to pray that I would look like Bob on the cover of the first Bootleg Series (the book inside the boxset, with the suede jacket). Anyway, there are too many examples of my complete symbiosis with the work of Bob Dylan, and that is not what this piece is about. With the awe and the love, comes a good dose of internalized ownership, in my case. When No Direction Home came out, I was scared to watch it, and thought all the new guys with the Greek fisherman hats who carried their guitar at breast level were ridiculous. When “I’m Not There” came about, I thought it was the worst thing ever made. To me, the only Dylan biopics were Renaldo & Clara (I had a bootleg copy) and Masked and Anonymous. I revered both those films as canon. Later, my other Jewish heroes, in film, the Cohen Brothers made Inside Llewyn Davis, and I thought that I had seen the best Dylan biopic ever, especially since him-not-being-in-it says it all, up until the end when by hearing him sing HIS farewell, we understand the tragedy AND the futility of trying to matter, when who really matters never really tried to. It felt so close to the bone, it hurt.

So, when I first saw clips of Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning in the trailer for A Complete Unknown, needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled. I’m (obviously) a huge Dune fan, and I liked TC as Muad’Dib, but he couldn’t possibly be my two biggest heroes on screen and make it a double whammy. That’s the thinking. For months I kept telling myself I would not go witness the wreckage. Maybe I would not have to do this confession business if I had only told myself, to be honest, but the thing is, I told everyone I knew I was not going to see ACU, and was pretty proud that I wouldn’t go. Now came Christmas Eve, and, as Jews do, I and my wife planned to go to the movies at The Pike in Long Beach, and eat at PF Chang’s. Not all Jews go to The Pike in Long Beach and PF Chang’s, but some version of that, wherever they are, on Christmas Eve. For the movies it was either Wicked (which we had seen), Moana 2, a whole other bunch of animated crap for kids, or A Complete Unknown. Was it Rationalization? I don’t know, but I felt like we had no choice. I booked two tickets for the Five-Twenty-Five showing, while my wife took care of the reservation for Mapo-Tofu and Fried Green Beans at Eight.

I’m always excited to go to the movies, always, the minute I sit in the theater, I’m happy, I always laugh at the Pagliacci sketch from Cinemark, or the M&M’s ad where Red says “You think I’m an idiot?”, I can watch and love the new Sydney Sweeney as much as I can research and read about Mulholland Drive for ever. Now as the movie started, and TC as Bob gets off that ride he got into Manhattan, I thought of Llewyn Davis. I also noticed that that unbuttoned flat-hat should have been felt, not corduroy (I just looked it up, it WAS corduroy, that goes to show I don’t know what I’m talking about). Chalamet looks nothing like Bob, I think, he sounds even less like him, I think again, but for the sake of movie magic, I let myself do the translation, and dive in. Boy, it was worth it.

So, part Two, the report.

I won’t be too long, but there’ll be spoilers still. I’ll start by saying it, it was AMAZING. I’ll tell you more about HOW it was amazing to me a little later, but let me just use a few of the notes I took right after seeing A Complete Unknown, before I planned to write this, just because I had trashed the movie so excessively before-hand with my good friend, and Dylan fanatic, Turner Cody, that I felt I should write him a message to say I was wrong.

Technically, it’s very technical, I choked and almost cried several times: when he sings I Was Young When I Left Home, when he sings Like a Rolling Stone, when he sings Times They Are A’ Changing, basically, you got me, whenever he sings, I got choked up and cried. Just to hear the songs being written, performed, or recorded felt incredible.

Movies are not documentaries. When they work, they don’t work for you because they enable you to gather good Information, they work through Empathy. A movie works when you can project yourself onto the protagonists, and feel what they feel. I was NOT expecting to be able to do this with Bob, like ever. Here, I’ll tell you a thing, and I just told my therapist about it, so I guess it’s OK to put it down here. Bob Dylan is in my dreams, more often than I’d want to admit. Most of the time, as some sort of judgmental figure, he’s on stage when I perform or I open for him and he watches, passing judgement on me. Sometimes, I dream that I get to meet the person, not the icon and he takes me around for a walk to talk about his life. That’s to say, I’m familiar with Dylanesque Unconsciousness. But I’ll say this: my dreams don’t make much sense, and I don’t even remember them very well, so it’s not very interesting. What I’d also say, and David Lynch would surely agree, is that a movie is like a dream, when it works well. A mixture between a dream and a carnival ride. You suspend reality long enough to be immersed in another story, to dive through the camera lens into a different world. So here’s what A Complete Unknown did to me: like the Starwars ride at Disneyland, it let me be the Fly-on-the-wall guy in a universe I’ve been obsessed with long enough that I could have grown my own Millennium-Redwood forest by now. Watching the movie was like being in a dream, one I can remember quite well. I was in the places where some of the most important things of my cultural life happened, I was there, and it gave me goose bumps. For instance: when Al Kooper, gets on the Hammond B3 for Rolling Stone, I had heard and read that story many times, but now I’m in the dream that results from hearing and reading the story. The way he tries to turn it on, the way the song starts and he’s not ready, but comes up, instinctively, with the chord-line we all recognize the song for, it is incredible, brings such a smile to my face, I really live it, I am there.

Let’s give it to Chalamet. Let’s give it to him, and even more since I wasn’t going to, give it to him. A Hollywood celebrity, a young man with all the opportunities, a good-looking kid who’d probably make my hero a poseur, that’s what I was expecting. I loved his performance. I thought he went at Bob like an actor, not like a fan, or an impersonator. Maybe he’s not a fan, and maybe he is not good at impressions, but the way he went at Bob was the way an actor should, he wasn’t trying to remind us of interviews or photos we know of Dylan, he was living through the scenes like if it was the first time they ever existed. I really noticed and appreciated the little smiles, the attitudes, the intensity, for itself, not because it was giving Bob. He can’t sing or play like Bob (how could he?) but he sang and played with his heart, with the paradoxical nonchalance and seriousness that only a conveyor of magic could experience. So Chalamet, Big Thumbs Up! But I also loved how Edward Norton was embarrassing, as Pete Seeger probably was, how intense Scoot McNairy was as Woody Guthrie, the way I can hear he was, and how Dan Fogler was hilarious, the way I had no idea Albert Grossman was.

In terms of script and writing, I really think some serious Bob-understanding, and great decisions were involved. To stop the movie before Blonde on Blonde, and the motorcycle accident was a great idea. I think most of my friends agreed the movie would stop with the bike crashing, and it would have been dramatic, but actually, this time frame was perfect. You can’t put too much in a movie, and there was so much to tell already. The way it starts and ends, I thought of a tagline for the movie: “A COMPLETE UNKNOWN – How Bob Dylan zoomed through the Folk-Revival scene in New York City, only to strip them of their dreams, and delusions”, which in a way could be one of the tag-lines for Llewyn Davis (except you’d have to add: how a man didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and how orange cats are the best).

My favorite line in the movie: “They ask me where the songs come from, but what they mean is why they didn’t come to them”. I like this line SO MUCH. I’ve read that Dylan sat down with James Mangold and read the script out-loud. I wonder what he thought when this line came up, but I also wonder if he didn’t add it in, it’s so good, and sounds so true. This one line, in the movie, was very important for me to hear. As a songwriter, I often struggle with the feeling that no matter what I write, I’ll never matter, because only Bob matters. I also have, in my humble career, encountered jealousy, people asking me how they could be me, or how they could have what I have, in more or less subtle ways. I had to mention it to my therapist, that this was my favorite line, and she interpreted it at first as some sort of need for validation. But the great thing about that movie is that it puts you in that difficult position, of witnessing a once-in-a-civilization kind of genius and gift, but it also offers you ways to deal with it. Two Characters are extremely important in the movie, and say beautiful things to that effect. First Johnny Cash. It’s funny because, when I don’t think about Bob Dylan, and listen to Cash, I often tell myself: he IS the best, there is no one like Johnny. Same thing when I listen to Willie, Kris, or Townes, or, of course, my master and beacon, Leonard Cohen, when I listen to them I feel like there is nothing better on earth. And then I put on Tom Thumb, or Fourth Time Around, or Every Grain of Sand, and I get this tingle, like the point of a knife, in my gut. Well, in the movie, Johnny Cash shows you the way. Out of all the characters in that movie, he is the only one who can witness the glory of Bob performing his ‘62-to-’65 flood of miracles, and still stand proud, without envy, write the kid a letter of admiration (and make him happy), play before him, watch the show side-stage, pass him the guitar (if I’m not wrong the guitar he’ll later use for Nashville Skyline). Cash is the only artist in the movie who can stand tall next to Bob. I think the reason for that is not only Johnny’s own genius and importance, it is some kind of Faith, some kind of appreciation of beauty, some sort of thankfulness for what one has, and some notion that coveting another man’s treasure is nothing, or like Voltaire would say: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin”. I should add here that Mangold directed the excellent Cash biopic “Walk The Line”, so I feel like he brought that experience, and his knowledge of the Man in Black to the party.

Then Baez tells Bob: “you won” to which he answers “what did I win?” and she responds “you’re free from all of us now”. She sees how a SCENE is really a way to make insecure artists feel better about themselves. I have passed through several SCENES in my life and career, and I think specifically of one I passed through in the same city. A scene is a great trampoline to start on, it’s got a built-in audience, rules to guide you. If you’re in, you’ll be congratulated, and validated, even if you don’t deserve it, whether you’re aware of it or not. In a Scene, people make you feel better about your failures, and they’ll tell you the Scene is too good, too early for the public. But in a Scene, people resent you for your success, unless they can attach themselves to it, and if you dare to change your mind about the rules, or think for yourself, they’ll eat you up. This mixture of admiration and envy, that Bob MUST have lived with forever, what so well put to words by the character of Joan Baez, that I think it made her shine like the true star the real Baez is. the movie even made me wonder if it implied that maybe Bob left Minnesota because it had been the same, that his circle of friends had come to envy him there. Then, how sad he must have felt when he got to the biggest city in the USA to only hit the same wall!

Some other details I loved: Bob doesn’t really care about politics or the news. You see it several times in the movie, how he looks away from a TV, how he performs in a club when the City is freaking out about The Bay of Pigs, when he goes to meet Sylvie at a protest.

I love the Al Kooper scene (I mentioned it already), I loved seeing Tom Wilson (who produced Bob and The Velvet Underground), I loved learning that Bob met Bob Neuwrith so early. I love that the guitars were authentic, the mics, the instruments in general.

I’ll add that I thought it was a very Jewish movie, and if you know me, you know I appreciated that, especially in a climate where people feel free to appropriate the work of Jews without ever acknowledging their identity, and be anti-Semitic at the same time. I looked it up later, Mangold is Tribe, so it clicks. Here’s how I see the movie being Jewish: First off, like in the Book of Esther, there is no mention of G-d, or Religion, which I think only a Jewish movie would have chosen to do, for such an inspired and spiritual artist as Bob. No one seems religious, or to be a religious figure or metaphor. It’s really rare, especially for a movie about a guy that people kept calling a prophet, and whose songs went through as much exegesis as your typical Gospel. That was Jewish to me.

There’s an allusion to Sylvie’s family being anti-Semitic. I think you had to have some kind of Jewish spirit to understand that. The way Sylvie’s sister feels nothing but disdain for Bob, flipping through the book his mom sent him, when she reads his real name, and puts her fingers on his Bar Mitzvah portrait, to which his Tzit-Tzits are affixed, I think it takes a Jew to know that kind of Antisemitism, the kind that despises you if you conceal your identity, but hates you if you don’t. And then, I think it takes a Jew to figure out so perfectly the character of Albert Grossman, a manager who is funny, smart, and artistic, but also wants to make some dough. I feel like in most movies, he would have been made a greedy opportunist, but to see him as a good and genuine man was absolutely fantastic.

Anyway, I feel like I raved on long enough! I loved the movie, I’m a Dylan fan and I loved it, go see it, I give it six freaking stars out of five! If I had one thing to criticize, it’d be the wigs, they don’t look real, or the extras. Out on the West Village streets, they looked like a lesser version of extras on the set of Mad Men. The worst extras were audience members, they really didn’t know how to pretend they are listening to music, they looked like they were in a commercial for Coca Cola or something. But that didn’t spoil anything, I loved-loved the movie, I just wanted to find something I didn’t like, so that you would trust me, that is, IF you kept reading up to this point! Go see it in the theater, don’t wait for it to come to you. It’s like a ride I said, it’s immersive, fun and intense, and you wouldn’t want to do Galaxy’s Edge in your bedroom, is what I think.

Alright, let me drop the mic here. I’m working on a big piece about The Masterpiece, MULHOLLAND DRIVE (no, not Wicked, sorry), that I will put on here at some point. Until then, take care, love you guys!