Many weeks after the rest of the world saw it, and pronounced it the greatest thing ever — better than aioli, better than immunology — Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the legal spelling) and I finally dragged ourselves up to Shepherd’s Bush yesterday, to the biggest mall in the Western Hemisphere, and saw A Complete Unknown.
My main takeaway from which was that at least between 1960 and 1965, Bob Dylan was a smug, snide, arrogant, judgmental, self-mythologizing little prick who treated women badly and smoked too much, much as I was between 19 and 24, and continue to be, except I was never much for self-mythologizng, and, at 183 cm., am not little.
One is also reminded, of course, that there has never been a worse instrumentalist in modern recorded popular music than Bob Dylan the harmonicist.
There can be no faulting the filmmakers’ audacious casting. Jonah Hill as Albert Grossman and Ralph Fiennes in a fat suit as Alan Ginsberg were both revelatory, and I can’t imagine New Republic film critic D. J. Trump continuing to believe Meryl Streep overrated after he’s seen her as Dylan’s first New York City girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (Suze Rotorooter in real life). Former Boston Red Sox pitcher Kurt Schilling as Clive Davis, Denzel Washington as Miles Davis, Margot Robbie as Bette Davis, Beyoncé as Angela Davis, Art Carney as Ed Norton, and Clint Eastwood as Pete Seeger also perform compellingly.
I applaud director James Mangold for insisting that all five members of Los Angeles’s most obstinate punk band, the Fast-Acting Laxatives — formed in 1978, and still going, if not exactly strong, in 2024 — were hired to portray Dylan’s accompanists at the “Like a Rolling” session, though the only one who looks like one of the real session guys is the Harvey Brooks. On the other hand, the Al Kooper actor looks as much like Al as you look like Joan Sutherland, the Australian dramatic coloratura soprano known for her contribution to the revival of the bel canto repertoire back when Bob Dylan was still living with Ma and Pa in the northern Midwest.
The most audacious casting of all, though, is that of Pamela Anderson, fresh from her breakout triumph as a Las Vegas showgirl in The Last Showgirl, in which she channels Marilyn Monroe vocally and appears in some scenes without makeup, as Joan Baez. Heretofore best known for her portrayal of the least likely lifeguard in human history in Baywatch, and for a succession of spectacularly awful matrimonial choices, Anderson gives Baez a Avril Lavigne-like joie de vivre that somehow makes her all the more sympathetic in the scene in which Dylan condemns her original songs as “like oil paintings in immunologists’ offices”.
There’s one glaringly incredible scene, that in which, at a beatnik get-together, presumably in Greenwich Village, Sylvie finds on the host’s cluttered coffee table Dylan’s childhood scrapbook, which reveals that, far from a carnival roustabout to whom cowboys named Wigglefoot — what else? — taught guitar chords, Dylan was little Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota.
We’re meant to believe that, rather than a nice Beaujolais, one invited to such a party brought his or her childhood scrapbook?
I’ll do what I do so seldom, and recommend the work of another. If you liked A Complete Unknown, you may well love Scott Spencer’s sublime 1998 novel The Rich Man’s Table, whose protagonist tries to bond with a fervently elusive pop star father, extremely like Bob Dylan. I will not profit materially from your purchase of the book. Your pleasure will be my reward.
"Art Carney as Ed Norton?" The other way around, right?