Spoiler alert: I am admittedly prone to over-enthusiasm, but that said, “A Complete Unknown” is a masterpiece. How Timothée Chalamet not only learned to play the guitar and harmonica and sing arguably as good as, and channel the elusive Dylan - insolence and all - is just spectacular.
I saw it twice and today found out that 4 of my friends did the same. It’s that good.
Monica Barbero (a graduate of Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley) also learned to sing and play guitar for her role as Joan Baez, and she kills it as well.
The electric sets at Newport sounds every bit as good to me as the originals. Unbelievable.
In the first electric number, “Maggie’s Farm, “he sings:
“Well, I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them
They sing while you slave and I just get bored…”
I realized that this was probably his coding for being bored with folk music.
To appease those angry with him for the electric music, he does an acoustic “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue “ as a last number.
It ends with him roaring off in his motorcycle, an obvious (out of sequence) reference to the (Triumph) motorcycle accident in 1966, wherein he broke several vertebrae in his back and didn’t appear in public for 8 years.
Don’t follow leaders,
Watch the parkin meters.
***
Dylan fans, I recommend this book: all his lyrics in chronological order. No text, no index, just the poetry:
PS So as to not bother other viewers,I darkened he screen of my iPhone so there was hardly any light emanating, and I sat in the very last row of the Fairfax Theater, with no one behind me and in fact, no one on either side.
I saw it. I went alone. I wept. For the loss of the times and places and people, but mostly because there was just so much being born….and it was fantastically hopeful and now, now? I weep for my nation….
It took me back ! It was so perfectly done - the village apartments, the parties, the clubs...I was young but I was there with my parents. I was blown away by that movie and the acting. I hope Ed Norton gets the Oscar too!