Can we ever really know another person? James Mangold’s Bob Dylan film gives Jett and Gareth a reason to ask, while also raising the equally urgent question of why A Complete Unknown occasionally appears to inhabit the same cinematic universe as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Identity, performance, mythmaking, and hats ensue.
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Oh, my goodness, folks, I am so excited today to talk about A Complete Unknown.
No, I'm not talking about Professor Dr. Gareth Higgins. I'm talking about that new film about Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan and the Dial of Destiny.
I'm Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins.
The Conversation never ends. Can we really truly know anybody, even ourselves? No, this film, I'm not sure.
You know, I hate to start on a note of disagreement. And I want to gently push back on how you just described the film, because I'm not sure what film you're talking about.
I'm here to talk about A Complete Unknown, the fantastic new biopic of folk singer and activist Pete Seeger played brilliantly by Ed Norton.
I see what you did there. He is wonderful in the film.
Wonderful. And it's a film, I'm not kidding, actually. I absolutely felt I learned more about Pete Seeger than Bob Dylan in this film.
But as I imagine you may feel yourself, Jett, and you're listening to those of you who've seen it, perhaps that is the point that Bob Dylan is inscrutable.
As played by Timothy Chalamet, we see the public Dylan and an imagination, of course, of what he might have been behind the scenes.
We also see him located in the history of American music, being passed the torch by Pete Seeger, who himself had received it from Woody Guthrie.
But what Dylan does with this torch, let's say one would imagine Pete Seeger might have had mixed feelings about it. But before we get into the depth of it, I believe we have a clip.
We do have a clip. I want to get to that clip in one second. It is a biopic about Pete Seeger, but let's be honest, you can't go into a Hollywood studio and say, hey, here's my pitch.
Yes, for the Seeger story.
From the director of Ford vs.
Ferrari in Indiana Jones, The Dial of Destiny, it's Seeger. No one is, they're not going to... We got Ed Norton.
Ed Norton has been, 20 years of his life, he's been dedicated to learning and everything he can about Pete Seeger and living, frankly, as Pete Seeger. They're not going to fund the film. So you got to go for the more popular artist, Bob Dylan.
Ordinarily, we'd play a clip. Then I'd make some joke about, oh, here's a clip in which there's a clip. Instead of the clip, Gareth and dear listeners, I'm going to read a tweet that Bob Dylan did about the film.
Here's the tweet.
It's at Bob Dylan.
There's a movie about me opening soon called The Complete Unknown. What a title. Timothy Chalamet is starring in the lead role.
Timmy is a brilliant actor, so I'm sure he's going to be completely believable as me, or a younger me, or some other me. The film is taken from Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric, a book that came out in 2015.
It's a fantastic retelling of events from the early 60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you've seen the movie, read the book.
Thank you, at Bob Dylan.
I want to say one thing before we start, Gareth. You know, movies are very long these days. This movie is like two hours, 20 minutes.
I normally sit, dear listeners, in the back of the theater, so I can see how the audience reacts. Are they shifting their seats? Are they going to go to the bathroom?
Whatever. I myself, possibly, like the film critics in Civil War, we've talked about them before, sometimes leave several times to go to the bathroom. I sat in the back row of the theater.
The theater sold out. An older crowd, because movies are expensive. Maybe these people are fans of Bob Dylan.
Guy next to me, oxygen tank. Older crowd.
Okay.
Not one person moved in their seats. Not one person, including myself, got up to go. The entire audience was wrapped from start to finish.
And that says something.
Well, what does it say?
It's a good movie. Here's the thing. And here's the deal, right?
How do you deal with a life that's so complex, that's so rich, that's so multifaceted? You can maybe cast different actors as Bob Dylan.
Who would do such a thing?
What a crazy, crazy idea.
Crazy idea. That's a reference, of course, folks, to I'm Not There. And that tells you something about Bob Dylan, that one film of his life is called I'm Not There, and another one's called A Complete Unknown.
No one is knowable. So what do you do? Do you make some sort of multifaceted, frenetic, fast-paced picture?
Maybe you're cutting it like Orson Welles did in the segments he worked on in Other Side of the Wind. It's cutty, cutty, cutty. It's a maelstrom of images.
Or do you make it really simple and just feature the songs? And that's why this film worked, dear listeners. I think to a lot of people's surprise, it's mostly just the songs.
There's a few little bits of dialogue, mostly about what a jerk Dylan is.
And then we cut to a song that showcases that he had an incredible genius for creating myth from words, from just tiny little words with names like Hattie and Tambourine, whatever.
He was able to create incredible narratives and there was definitely what we would call a genius there. And then in between these scenes, we see just a young guy. And that simplicity makes the film work because you're completely drawn into it.
Now, whatever you do, let's say you're watching it at home with friends and you're drinking and you want to do a drinking game.
Do not do a drinking game where you take a shot every time the camera pushes in on somebody rapidly listening to Bob Dylan and realizing he's a genius because you'll be drunk within a few minutes.
It's overdone, but the simplicity is what makes the film work.
Well, I completely disagree in ways that may not be that important and may actually be a misreading of the film. I'll start with what I liked, the way the thing looks.
James Mangold, as you've already said, directed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, one of at least three highly underrated Indiana Jones movies, at least in our book, and he managed to make Glasgow look like what we imagined New York in the late
60s would look like. I don't know where this film was shot, but it absolutely looks authentic and it feels real.
The most real part of this film to me was that one night when the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its peak, when there was a sense of panic in the streets and the possibility that I think the phrase nuclear war is a misnomer, it wouldn't be a war, it
would just be a nuclear holocaust, that there was this sense it might happen within hours. And some people, of course, as artists and creative people, always do, decided to gather and play music that night. That feels really authentic.
I think also the portrayal of Woody Guthrie in Hospital played by Scoot McNary. Hard to tell if this is a great performance or just an impossible role to play.
Scoot McNary, Scoot McNary is what, listen, have you seen Speak No Evil? Scoot McNary, one of our finest actors, Speak No Evil, Killing Them Softly, he may be the finest actor.
Oh, we love him in Killing Them Softly. He's great. But it's also, it's hard to tell if this is a great performance or just an impossible role to play.
He does everything he can with it. That hospital felt real to me.
And everything about it actually felt broadly real, except the gap in this film for me is there's no exploration of who Bob Dylan was and why he became who he was then, never mind who he is.
Now, there's a cursory mention of his childhood in Minnesota, and there's no exploration of where did these words come from? Where did this commitment come from? What was he trying to do or say?
It may well be the James Mangold and Jay Cox, the co-screenwriter, and as far as I can tell, Jay Cox wrote a script probably many years ago.
And Jay Cox, a very interesting man, a contemporary, Martin Scorsese was a film critic for I believe Time Magazine 50 years ago, would have been a contemporary of Dylan's as well.
And I imagine Mangold dusted that script off and then wrote his own version, have a co-screenwriting credit. I can imagine that both of them decided, Dylan is so inscrutable, he can't be scruted, you can't scrut Dylan.
How would you know if what you're saying is authentic? Because Dylan is such a trickster. And at the same time, I wanted an exploration, or at least an imaginative attempt at why he became who he was.
It's like there's a gap in the midst of really, really good scaffolding. And some of that scaffolding includes this wonderful performance by Ed Norton as Pete Seeger. You don't just learn about Pete Seeger, you learn about Pete Seeger's family.
Yes, yes.
The film is about an open book versus a closed book. It's about withdrawing into yourself versus helping the community. Because what is the last shot of Pete Seeger?
It is so beautiful. He is putting away the chairs at the festival. He is helping.
He's pitching in. And I thought, oh, does Dylan stop his motorcycle and help to pit? No, no, he doesn't.
He goes off with Lawrence of Arabia, is it right? So the last shot of the film is Lawrence of Arabia. He's on his motorcycle, off he goes to more greatness.
It's the young self-involved person versus the person who is about community. You talk about that great scene in New York. Oh, it's the Cuban Missile Crisis and this community.
Yeah, but guess what? Bob Dylan doesn't go in there and stay and be part of a community. He goes, does a hit song and then goes out and goes to sleep with Joan Baez, right?
So he's not hanging out. He's not buying drinks for anybody. He's out doing his thing, right?
And there's so much Pete Seeger in it, you realize early on, oh, the themes of the film, it's not about Bob Dylan. It's about a way of being.
It's about how do we tell ourselves the stories we want to hear about ourselves and how do we participate in the community. And there's a model with Pete Seeger who is flawed.
See about how he kind of almost pushes off to the side, the old blues man, once Bob Dylan does come into the studio. So we're saying he wants success as well, but there's different modes of being.
And so in that way, it's a complete film and it becomes a great film because of the interplaying between Seeger and Dylan. You could say, are these two different, it's like Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, right?
There's Tuco, who's the worst of humanity. There's the angel with Clint Eastwood. There's the devil.
Well, then who is the omnipresent God who can't speak to us, but we want to hear what he has to say? Well, that's Woody Guthrie.
That's Woody Guthrie.
It's Woody Guthrie, right? He is the deity, but he can't talk to us. So it's up to us to figure out what he wants.
So in that way, I think the film is brilliant.
You're doing this thing is happening, it happens from time to time. I'm on the verge of reconsidering something.
But at the same time, it also has the exact look of Dial of Destiny, has the same color grading.
It does, well, it doesn't have any. I could have done with more supernatural deep sea diving sequences.
We needed France's Greatest Frog Man in there.
We did.
France's Greatest, is it not Spain's Greatest Frog Man?
Probably.
Spain's Greatest Frog Man actually is in one of the more interesting films released in the last month or two.
Flawed as well, that's Antonio Banderas and Baby Girl. All right, so what's fascinating to me is, I'm wondering, is this an example of a film that my response to it is we change if it had a different title or if it was marketed in a different way.
Cigar and Dylan.
If it had been marketed as like the Three Amigos, right? That it's, because it isn't, you're right, it's not just Cigar and Dylan. Woody Guthrie, despite not being able to say anything, except he does say Bob at one point.
I think that's the only word that he speaks because he has lost the power of speech due to hunting. I believe it's hunting disease. Terrible struggle of a condition to have.
It's about the three of them, and you're right, it is about modes of being, and it is about the last century in the US.
And perhaps the thing that's most notable about it for me is that it doesn't portray, not just Pete Seeger, but it doesn't portray Dylan as a good guy the whole way through, you know, as some kind of saintly figure.
And that's kind of intriguing to me that Dylan sent that tweet. I was surprised that he sent that tweet. I wonder, has he seen the film?
I wonder, does he care about seeing the film? I saw Timothy Chalamet interview the other day. He said he hasn't even met Dylan and that he would only do that at Dylan's request.
He has not made any attempt at meeting him. And he wants to be respectful there. You are making me reconsider the thing.
If it had been marketed as the good, the bad, and the ugly with the Three Amigos or a film about three different men, I would feel that it has vastly succeeded in that endeavor.
But perhaps my programming and expectations regarding the traditional biopic have gotten in the way and I'm judging the film harshly because of that.
Well, you know, I forgot more to say. The problem is, I did watch that other Bob Dylan film, I'm Not There, right afterwards, and it's so full of good stuff that I'm probably mixing in.
Mixing the two.
I can't, you know, I mean, you could have the long drawn out sequence where he goes electric or you could just have the shot of Cate Blanchett, aka the mysterious woman. That's her voice, folks, and eyes wide shut. In case you didn't know that.
My little eyes wide shut tidbit for today. Just machine gunning the audience and I'm not there. Can we talk about a couple of the things that I think the film is about?
Be my guest, be my guest. I think the analog versus the digital is ever present. Now we're in such a digital world.
One of the ways that Mangold and his, I'll say his cinematographer, his DP, and maybe the people that work with him, his AD blocking and stuff.
One of the things they do to establish that the time frame is, when first time we see New York, the camera is panning and there's young Dylan walking and there's a man in a phone booth and he's banging the phone in the phone booth and they add the
sound effects. So it makes sure we're drawn to it, right? And then establishes, oh yeah, we used to have phones.
We used to have this thing and by having them angry, not just the background that draws attention to it, which tells us this is important in the movie, right?
It shows us a world in which communication was vastly different and you would even, and communication causes friction. You mind, he's banging, he's banging the phone there. There's problems, he can't get through, he's angry with the conversation.
So the whole film has this sort of interplay with our modern digital age and the old days of the analog where things took a lot longer.
But for me, and this is, I would imagine it's unintentional, it reaches its pinnacle in the very eerie, uncanny feeling I have watching the entire film. And that comes from the budget.
And what I mean by this is that when you have crowd scenes, you don't have the money to pay the extras. You don't have all that money. How do you save money?
Well, we just put in some CGI characters. Now, I take it you've seen Titanic, right? You've seen the Cameron picture, right?
In Titanic, we got the big...
Did James Cameron make that?
He did. It was a big hit. Big hit.
People loved it. Did we ever talk about the last Avatar we got to talk about? Anyway, in Titanic, people criticize it because if you look at the figures walking on the deck, they're obviously CG.
And the reason why we notice it is not because the CG is bad. It's just because humans have a huge amount of processing power, right? And our brains determine, are you a human or not?
Are you a sick human? Are you a good human or not? So we can tell when the animation doesn't 100% feel like human being.
And so when you watch A Complete Unknown, when you see these crowd scenes, if you do not look at Dylan and you look in the background, you'll notice it's all... You're CG characters.
And the problem is that when you have all these wide shots, we're behind Dylan. And so we're like as if we're just a few feet behind him and up above, but we see the crowd.
And then once you realize that they're all CG, it's like Dylan, the analog avatar, is being watched by the machines. He's being watched by a crowd of machines who are all plotting him.
And so for me, that created a whole uncanny experience as if we're in the realm, far in the future, 2,000 years in the future, of the AI of the robots in Spielberg's AI, who are exhuming and examining human culture.
It felt like the machines, the learning machines were watching our old analog self. So very uncanny. Just thought I'd throw that out there, Gareth.
Dear listener, if you have a thought, if indeed A Complete Unknown is representing the perspective of two millennia from now, AI creatures watching one of the great artists of our time, we'd be glad to hear from you.
Is there more you want to say about A Complete Unknown?
Well, we talked about how great Scoot McNary is. I've become a huge fan of Boyd Holbrook. I loved him in Dial of Destiny and The Bike Riders.
Al Fanning is great in a role that could have been thankless.
Could I say though, do you wish, was there not some part of you, some little ember inside that said, Oh, I wish they had brought Joaquin Phoenix back as Johnny Cash?
So it could be part, because Mangold did the Johnny Cash, Joaquin Phoenix.
Walked the line, yeah.
That is part of the Johnny Cash, Joaquin Phoenix cinematic universe. That aside, Boyd Holbrook did a great job. Fantastic scene in a public TV station.
We talked a little bit about it earlier with The Bluesman. That could have been a short film unto itself. I would recommend if you want to know more about Bob Dylan or get more of that Dylan experience, do see I'm not there.
Read Chronicles. It's a great book by Dylan. I don't know if he ever did a volume two.
It's 10 years old.
No, he didn't. He wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Philosophy of Modern Song. But I actually think you're sparking something here.
Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez is brilliant as well. Watch the documentary that came out last year called Joan Baez, I Am a Noise.
One of the more meaningfully exploratory documentaries rather than the kind of documentary biopic that just tells you things you already knew or illustrates them with some still photographs and the Ken Burns effect.
This is a genuinely revelatory film that adds to our knowledge of Joan Baez.
And I wonder, I want to acknowledge something, I actually wonder if I'm guilty of frankly, as sort of a patriarchal blindness here, because Joan Baez is, the character of Joan Baez is in the film as much as Woody Guthrie and as much as Pete Seeger.
It's really a biopic of the four of them.
The flaw here, I think, is that it feels like Baez is there just to show us how much of a jerk Dylan is, right?
Because you don't get much of a sense of her particular contribution.
We don't get scenes, here's a question. How many scenes do we get of her without Dylan, right? Because we get Pete Seeger sitting down with Theodore Bickle.
I never thought I'd see that. But anyway, about the planning of the festival, we don't have scenes independent of Dylan, if I recall correctly, with Joan Baez.
And you don't see-
That way she becomes an appendage, which is how she was also viewed at the time, which is really, this is not the Baez biopic that we need. We have that documentary.
You're right. And at the same time though, like Susie's character, the character played by Al Fanning, and even Toshi Seeger have memorable moments in this film. It is much more of an ensemble piece than it looks.
And I have to say, I'm going to watch this film again.
Good.
And I appreciate what you've shared about it, because you've provoked me in a good direction.
Well, that's...
It's never happened before.
No, there's never really been a genuine dialogue between us. I think it's a great picture. I think folks there should see it.
And I think the decisions they made work in terms of how to structure it, how to examine these people's lives, and just to do it through song, right?
And then also then, when you have so little dialogue, then of course elevates the dialogue, because everything's got to be important. Everything's got to mean something, because there's so little of it. We could end on Timothée Chalamet.
I thought he's fantastic. In a way that Christopher Reeve was in Superman. And in the great casting concept they must have in Superman, like how do we cast a guy who's supposed to be from another planet, who has so much more power than us?
Almost like he's an aristocrat. Well, we cast somebody from an aristocratic family in New England, probably can trace her family back to the Mayflower. So he's almost like slumming it by doing movies.
And that takes care of a lot of the acting if you get the casting right. Timothée Chalamet, you kind of get the feeling of Bob Dylan, very talented as a young man, but let's face it, a jerk. And a lot of the time.
So Timothée Chalamet, I'm not saying he's a jerk, but he's been great at playing those young...
Interesting.
Young men who have great abilities, but are kind of jerkish.
Interesting. So Dune and Dune 2, right?
Dune and Dune 2, his other movies too.
Sure, sure, sure. And he's making a habit every December of playing a real life character in a biopic with Dylan this year and Willy Wonka last year, of course. Looking forward to seeing...
I don't trust that chocolate I never have and I never will.
What will he do with the rest of his life?
Well, folks, it's been a fun show.
Don't forget, if you want to support the program, you can always go to thefilmtalk.com/patreon. We're on the Facebook, right, Gareth? We're on Facebook at facebook.com/thefilmtalk.
Ye olde Facebook.
Ye olde facebook.com/thefilmtalk.
We were on Twitter, we're Bob Dylan is, but I can't, I had to get out. Can't do it. Just can't.
Can't do it. Can't do it, folks.
We wish everybody well, but sometimes they need to stop what they're doing first.
And put away the chairs. Just put away the chairs. You know, what the 20th century would have been different if Bob Dylan had just stopped his motorcycle and helped Pete Beater put away the chairs after the festival.
I love talking with you. I'm excited for our next show, which we talk about the films of the year and what we're looking forward to in 2025.
Folks, I've been, as far as I know, I'm not always there, and I'm pretty unknown even to myself, but as far as I know, I've been Jett Loe.
I've been Gareth Higgins. We'll keep talking.
Next time.