Timothée Chalamet plays the young Bob Dylan in this entertaining look through his back pages
When it arrives, the obligatory music biopic montage in James Mangold's handsome Dylan flick is actually quite decent.
Here is young Bob at the height of his sulphuric beatnik prime, wandering around Greenwich Village in the early Sixties. He’s wearing sunglasses indoors and getting mobbed wherever he goes - and then punched out in a bar. It’s an early brush with fame and godhead that was to sour him for life.
Just three years previously, he had rolled into town like a cherubic musical refugee from Hibbing, Minnesota in a Huck Finn cap and with his own fabricated back story. He has come to pay his respects to folk music sage Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who is confined to his sick bed with Huntington’s Disease in a New Jersey hospital.
Also there at Guthrie’s bedside is the wise and fatherly keeper of the folk flame Pete Seeger (a very good Edward Norton). He takes the teenage folk singer under his wing and into his home, beginning a friendship and a debate about what actually constitutes "real" folk music that will eventually lead to the seismic night in 1965 when acoustic Dylan plugs in and the world drops out at the Newport Folk Festival.
Mangold has been here before with his sturdy Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line in 2005 and Cash, played with wry insouciance by Boyd Holbrook, features along with a busy supporting cast, from Dylan’s winsome folk foil Joan Baez, played with flinty poise by Monica Barbaro, to a great Dan Fogler as Dylan’s pugilistic manager Albert Grossman. A gawky Al Kooper and Dylan’s tousled fellow traveller Bob Neuwirth are also on board, along with Norbert Leo Butz as Alan Lomax, the pious ethnomusicologist and archivist.
It’s a packed cast, like something from one of Dylan’s rambling epics, but naturally, it’s Timothée Chalamet who is the centre of attention and the main cause of friction. He performs a total of 40 Dylan songs here, an act of elaborate mimicry in which he does a pretty good approximation of that gnarly engine whine of a voice.
Chalamet’s Dylan is bratty, brittle, irritable and insufferably cool but doesn’t he look uncomfortably like Elijah Wood’s Frodo in The Lord of The Rings? Then again, have you seen Dylan’s acting in movies such as Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid and the unintentionally comical Hearts of Fire?
The backdrop to the young Dylan’s arrival as a reluctant idol is exciting and terrifying - the Red Scare is festering, the Cuban Missile Crisis is nigh, the Vietnam War is turning very nasty and the calls for Civil Rights can no longer be batoned into submission. It’s a perfect storm and Greenwich Village is abuzz with serious young men with guitars sticking it to the man. Dylan enters the fray with low-key performances at open mic nights around the village and comes into the orbit of music impresario Grossman, Joan Baez, and record executive John Hammond, who all see something in this new kid’s mercurial and occasional surreal songs.
The film is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties and Mangold and his co-writer, Rolling Stone magazine alumnus Jay Cocks, cover already well documented events. But, of course, Dylan himself was all about myth making. He tells Baez he learnt his unorthodox guitar playing style from a cowboy he met when he worked on a travelling carnival and he bats off questions about himself with teasing fictions. However, he finds kinship with Bette Davis’ character in movie classic Now, Voyager, a woman who leaves home to become something else; "not something better, just something different.," he says to Sylvie Russo, his first girlfriend in New York.
She’s played by Elle Fanning as a stand-in for Dylan’s real-life early sixties partner Suze Rotolo, who famously features alongside him on the cover of 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. He treats Sylvie shamefully, cheating on her with Baez, who is already a successful singer with a recording contract.
Dylan’s fractious relationship with Baez gives the movie much of its sparky energy. He may be more than willing to perform with her and let her cover his far superior songs to help his profile but as he remarks to her, "Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist’s office." She avers, "You’re kind of an asshole, Bob."
Once we roll around to Newport in 1965, Mangold’s movie takes on something of the bustling atmosphere of Nashville by Robert Altman. Two music movements are about to collide as Dylan plots his electric shock and Lomax and Seeger battle to keep him pure. In one of the movie’s best scenes, an outraged Lomax bursts into Dylan’s room at a Newport motel to find the aftermath of an all-night bender with various musicians and Grossman lying about in a stupor. The Kinks are blaring from the radio as Lomax demands to know what Dylan is planning for that evening’s performance. Grossman barks, "You’re pushing candles and he’s selling lightbulbs."
Cash (drunk at breakfast time) urges him to "track some mud across the carpet, Big D." and so, Dylan goes electric and the old guard begins to crumble. Mangold gives the epochal Newport show lots of time, with Dylan and band blasting out Maggie’s Farm as an incensed and betrayed Seeger scrambles for the plug and gets into a brawl with Grossman.
The "thin, wild mercury sound" of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde were to follow but Dylan had already created his own carnival by then. Dylanologists will point newcomers in the direction of documentaries Eat The Document and Don’t Look Back but this is a superior and well-constructed biopic that never forgets that it is all about the music. Chalamet, springing up here and there like a jack in the box, does a good job of capturing Dylan as what he always was and always will be - completely unknowable.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
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