Casual fans will be blown away and even hardcore ones impressed by the uncanny musical impersonations that James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown” Bob Dylan biography is built upon.
Timothee Chalamet‘s utter channeling of Babyfaced Bob, the early years, getting the tightlipped nasal twang of the Bard of the Iron Range just right and showing flashes of just how good Dylan got, early on, at playing the guitar carries the film.
Monica Barbaro may not be able to hit every note Joan Baez did and still does in that ethereal, almost supernatural range of hers. But Barbaro nails an earthiness and experience of the world that is missing from most portrayals of her as the Queen of Folk allegedly turned girlish and naive by taking up with the up and comer Dylan. This is a Grown Ass Woman Baez, with agency and accomplishment and less inclined to take guff from the mercurial child rocketing to fame in her limelight.
Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash comes off as folksy, famous and humble in the presence of someone he recognizes as a great talent. Holbrook looks and sounds more like Cash than Joaquin Phoenix and he makes Bob’s “pen pal” a burst of amusing showmanship/musicianship/fandom dropped into the middle of the movie.
But the portrayal that really got under my skin because of the way the actor touches the soul of his subject is Edward Norton‘s uncanny recreation of the folk icon and legendary blacklisted member of The Weavers, Pete Seeger.
Norton casts aside the cynicism that’s given many of his characters an edge over the decades and finds the sweet, earnest goodness of this lifelong do-gooder, the “conscience” of “A Complete Unknown.”
St. Pete takes in young Bob upon his arrival in New York. Pete introduces Bob to Woody, shows Bob the folk music world and the folk music performing ropes, gets him up on stages and sings the praises of a genius he and his old pal Woody (Scoot McNairy) recognized the instant Bob sang them something he’d written.
On screen and in person, Norton has that “Fight Club/Rounders” edge. That’s what makes his goofy turns in Wes Anderson’s non-animated cartoons such a hoot.
In “A Complete Unknown,” his Pete is a crusader, a troubadour and a peacemaker, winning over the courtroom if not the judge with his unwavering support of free speech, free thought and human rights,. The reason he was on trial was his defiance about answering questions about his activism and associations for the infamous right wing House Unamerican Activities Committee,
This Pete isn’t inclined to judge Bob’s decision to go electric, turning his back on the folk crowd that nurtured him to fame. But no, he didn’t like how “loud” Bob and his band were at Newport ’65. And yes, it is alleged that Peaceful Pete picked up a fire axe intent on cutting the PA system feed so as to lower the din.
I interviewed Seeger for a public radio station I worked for back in the ’80s — one of several figures depicted in “A Complete Unknown” I’ve had the pleasure of chatting up; Baez, Dave Van Ronk and Theodore Bikel among them. I think the focus of the interview was the State of Folk (many public radio stations played folk music programming then and a few still do) and an edgier discussion of Pete’s politics, which got him banned from performing for years, and got “The Smother Brothers Comedy Hour” canceled when Pete sang “Knee Deep in the Big Muddy” on the air.
His earliest activism was carried out alongside Woody Guthrie, advocating for unions, fighting fascism when it reared its head through manipulations of oligarchs, at home and abroad. His later years of activism were environmental in nature, supporting river keeper groups trying to police pollution on America’s waterways.
One guy who covered Pete’s most famous instrumental was the g, uitar virtuouso Leo Kottke. Kottke was a pretty good on stage and interview storyteller himself, and thanked Pete by mail for the tune, apologizing for what he’d done with it. He told me a version of this story of his encounter with the legend.
But Pete was a talented multi-instrumentalist and an excellent singer, never better than when he was leading his audiences in sing-alongs.
In the movie, Norton’s Seeger reminds the world that Pete was the guy who popularized the African song “Wimoweh,” and who later had a hand in getting royalties to the once-unknown publisher of the tune that inspired “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which made it into “The Lion King.”
Damned if Norton doesn’t hit some serious high notes — and not just on the banjo — in covering this immortal tune, Seeger “Sing Along” fashion, in the movie. I wonder if Norton learned Seeger’s “Living in the Country” himself?
Seeger, like many a folkie, was a song catcher, an amateur musicologist who knew every song most anybody who called themselves a folk singer would play. He’d recognize the melodies Dylan borrowed and adapted for his early compositions. Bob was a born poet. The music he wasn’t shy about taking shortcuts with.
As seen in the film, Pete had a public TV program or two about folk music — “Rainbow Quest” was the most famous. I don’t know if Dylan ever appeared on it.
But here are Pete Seeger and Judy Collins swapping tunes and opinions about melody “repurposing” of the Dylan school back in the ’60s.
Dylan became an overnight icon of American folk music, and it is those early tunes that got him a Nobel Prize for literature. But he was just a drive-by folkie, and “A Complete Unknown” reminds us of this.
Pete Seeger, like Baez, was the musical, moral and spiritual face and voice of American folk music, an activist active to the very end. Norton pays him the highest tribute by getting his portrayal of this heroic, almost martyred figure that close to perfect.
“A good song can only do good,” Norton’s Pete says in the movie, and if we take nothing else away from the Bio of Bob, that should be it.
