By JOTABE MEDEIROS*
Commentary on the film, currently showing in theaters, by James Mangold.
Careless with his own emotions, obsessed with aesthetic provocation, blindly loyal to his intuition, a workaholic, slightly mythomaniac. The Bob Dylan that emerges from A Complete Stranger, contrary to the verse of Like a Rolling Stone who gives his name to James Mangold's film, is not exactly an unknown weirdo.
Dozens of biographies and books, in addition to the universal cult of the singer, have already examined all these facets of his personality. But it is in the practical application of these qualities that the story of the film unfolds, which is less concerned with writing a biography of the artist than with framing the importance of a song (and a performance) for the history of world popular music.
On July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan performed at the Newport Folk Festival, in Rhode Island, with a band whose weight was inversely proportional to the genre that the festival distinguished, folk. He flirted with noise and distortion, having at his side Barry Goldberg on piano and three members of the noisy Paul Butterfield Blues Band: Mike Bloomfield, guitarist, Jerome Arnold, bassist, Sam Lay, drummer, and the “party crasher” Al Kooper playing organ in Like a Rolling Stone (Kooper enlisted himself to play the instrument in the studio.)
Before the show, a panel of festival organizers had been desperately trying to convince Bob Dylan to play his setlist before the show, to make sure he would focus on his acoustic setlist. But Bob Dylan was already electrified and ready to go, and had instructed the technical team to obtain amplification that had never been tried before in that scene.
The presentation at the Newport festival was a landmark for opposing tradition and modernity, craftsmanship and technology, conservatism and provocation in huge doses. The viewer will only reach this pitched battle at the end of the film, because it is a process – many things are funneling and pushing the young artist in this direction.
Before that, James Mangold carefully showed how Bob Dylan's genius developed in a very short period of time, between his arrival in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1961, still a country boy and idolater, and the explosion with Like a Rolling Stone, in 1965, already an enfant terrible of Stratocaster and Triumph motorcycle.
Nesse intermezzo, the viewer will be delighted by the speed with which Bob Dylan transforms the reality around him into epic poetry. It is nothing short of breathtaking to see him singing Masters of war in a basement at a time when the streets of the entire East Coast of the United States are in panic over the imminence of a nuclear war. Or the moment when he amazes the audience by taking out A hard rain's a-gonna fall, also about the nightmare of war.
Bob Dylan builds biblical landscapes around burning everyday themes, giving the ordinary an aspiration to be a classic. This ability does not appear to be the fruit of erudition (there are no books by French symbolists on the shelves), but of a combined dose of talent and persistent sarcasm. He lies to his girlfriend, Sylvie (Elle Fanning), about his previous experience – he would have liked to be an outsider, but he was not exactly one.beatnik” like the people of the Village.
Sylvie is the character who portrays an effective relationship between Dylan, Suze Rotolo (the girl who is with the artist on the album cover) The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, from 1963), the only one whose real names were changed at Dylan's own request. The only one who continually faces and unmasks Bob Dylan is his antipode, the liberated Joan Baez (Monica Barbarro), the first one capable of recognizing both the brilliance and the moral ambiguities of an artist in formation.
Of course, now it’s time to talk about who was in charge of carrying this Dylan story on their backs – or in their disheveled wigs. Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan was not a random choice: in addition to being able to single-handedly carry everyone from pre-teens to hipsters with beards and one tattooed arm, from schoolgirls in pleated skirts to LGBTQIA+ fans into movie theaters, he’s the man. Extremely dedicated, he not only learned to mimic the looks, gestures and grimaces of the Minnesota bard, but he also managed to get into the spirit of 38 of the singer’s songs, something that many cover artists never manage to do.
Two parallel performances drive the dramatic strength of the production: Edward Norton is simply fabulous as Pete Seeger, and Scoot McNairy rocks as Woody Guthrie – the latter had no lines at his disposal, just murmurs and a touch of the hand, and yet he left an indelible mark on the film.
For the hardcore Dylan fan, it is important to acknowledge the film's efficiency in presenting scenes so deeply rooted in our abduction. Like the confrontation with the Newport audience, in which a spectator shouts at Dylan: “Judas!” To which Bob Dylan responds: “I don't believe you”. Bob Dylan's response is profound: he shows that he knows that the rejection he suffers there is momentary, that the detractor only has the conviction of circumstance – in the future, he will be one of the fanatics of electric music, just as he is of folk today. At that historic moment, refusing to sing his own hit, Blowin' in the wind, it was a herculean feat.
Some scenes seem made up, but they really happened, like the brawl between legendary folklorist Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) and Bob Dylan's manager Albert Grossman (Dan Foger) backstage at Newport, and Pete Seeger's attempt to cut the power cables at Bob Dylan's concert with an axe - the difference, as far as I can tell, is that Seeger was outraged by the guitar covering the singer's voice, but that wasn't exactly a problem.
A Complete Stranger may bore those unfamiliar with Bob Dylan's artistic saga. It is a film about music, about creative processes, about generational clashes, the overcoming of one generation by the next – although it is also, apparently, the story of a trivial love triangle.
There is a curious aspect: the epicenter of the story, the struggle between tradition and technological advancement, seems to be repeated in the production itself, which uses Artificial Intelligence in some scenes – it is said that it is not used in musical performances, but when Dylan/Chalamet plays the guitar in Newport, it is possible to see that the fingers make unnatural movements.
It is a debate that has led Hollywood to require films that use Artificial Intelligence in their productions to declare how much they used, in order to be eligible for an Oscar. A Complete Stranger was nominated for eight Oscars, and this certainly takes us back to that moment when audiences discovered that Britney Spears never actually sang in concert, that it was all technological. The problem now is that the machine is already dispensing with Britney herself, and not just her voice.
*Jotabê Medeiros is a journalist, music critic and writer. Author of, among other books, It's Lou Reed's fault (Reformatory Building).
Reference
A complete stranger (A Complete Unknown).
USA, 2024, 141 minutes.
Directed by: James Mangold.
Screenplay: James Mangold and Jay Cocks.
Cast: Timothee Chalamet, Monica Barbaro, Ellen Fanning, Edward Norton, Norbert Leo Butz.
Originally published on the Farofafá website [see here]
