The old Philips tube radio was my best friend in those Wexford boyhood days.
It took a couple of minutes to warm up but then it delivered the sweetest, fullest sound.
And on a particular evening I had it blazing, for I was alone in my grandfather’s house.
From the first notes of a new song - a big jumble of Hammond organ, Fender Stratocaster, and an in-your-face New York rhythm section - I knew the world was changing.
By the time Bob Dylan sang, I knew he had changed too, for he was no longer the polite folkie apologizing, “look out your window and I’ll be gone;” instead, he was sneering a caustic kiss-off, “How does it feel to be on your own... a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”
It was a Rock ‘n’ Roll moment I’ve treasured down the years. Within a week I’d learned the full four verses, and have sung them well over a thousand times. A gig can be falling on its face, but that song can always turn around a saloon, a club or even a stadium.
So, I was leery about seeing "A Complete Unknown" with Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan who went electric with that song, and turned the 1965 Newport Folk Festival on its prissy ear. His portrayal of Dylan is excellent, as far as it goes.
Pete Seeger. Library of Congress photo collection.
He definitely captures the confident young singer who hitches from Minnesota to Greenwich Village, and in short order becomes the reigning prince of Folk City, Café Wha, and wherever else acoustic guitars were plucked.
There are beautiful moments when he visits Woody Guthrie, wasting away from Huntington’s Disease in a New Jersey Hospital, and assumes his mantle.
His quirky romances with Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez are handled sensitively, and Monica Barbaro as Joan is a knockout both in voice and character. Director James Mangold captures the essence of the West Village as “the times they are a’changing,” though much was apparently filmed in Jersey City and Hoboken.
Chalamet even sparks rare glimpses of Dylan’s cyclonic artistic vision, and his refusal to allow anyone to limit it. Dylan is still a wonder - even now in his 80s he’s out there touring, doing it his way. I saw him some years back in unfashionable Bridgeport.
After waiting through two long opening acts, most of his boomer audience had drifted off home because he refused to pay homage to his standards. He wasn’t even playing guitar anymore, arthritis had choked his hands, but his new songs sounded great. I was proud of Dylan.
He still didn’t give a fiddler’s, it was his way or the highway, and that’s something Hollywood never captures when it comes to Rock ‘n’ Roll. The vision and toughness of legendary musicians – I am the boss, and I know best.
Chalamet gives it his all but method acting, no matter how good, can only take you so far. You’ve had to have done it to pull it off – to have been there on stage and know that you are right and the rest of the world is wrong. That’s what’s missing in Chalamet’s very honest portrayal: edge, toughness, hardness, whatever you want to call it.
And that only comes from a life on the road, failure, messing up, then picking up the pieces and pushing on. Samuel Beckett summed it up best: “fail better.”
Oddly enough, the actor playing a lit-up Johnny Cash backstage at the Newport Festival does capture that essence; whereas an ever-smiling Ed Norton, though he’s receiving almost universal accolades, doesn’t come close to capturing the Pete Seeger I knew.
He definitely nails the enveloping warmth and grace of this iconic figure, but not Pete’s craggy patrician nature or, for that matter, his sheer orneriness. Dude stood up to the U.S. Government and wouldn’t name names during the McCarthy witch hunts. He preferred to lose his living and be blacklisted.
Pete was an almost biblical man of principle who didn’t waste smiles – but when you earned one, oh man, did you bask in it. So, go see Timothée Chalamet in "A Complete Unknown."
It’s a lovely, if innocent, look at a watershed moment in popular culture. Then check out "Don’t Look Back," D.A. Pennebaker’s unsparing look at Dylan, the hard man of genius.
His destiny was to change music and sweep so much else aside, and oh my, did he do so – and spectacularly!
