Fleapit revisited:A Complete Unknown.

"How does it feel? how does it feel to be without a home? Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone" - Like A Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan

What a joyous film A Complete Unknown (directed by James Mangold, based on Elijah Ward's book Dylan Goes Electric!) is! From the first minute to the one hundred and fortieth there's not a dull moment. There's hardly a moment when music isn't playing and the music is, of course, both first class and in the many live scenes it feels metaphorically as well as, later on, literally electric.

When some performances ended I felt myself getting ready to applaud, other times there was a lump in my throat. Timothee Chalamet plays the young Bob Dylan from the time he arrives as 'a complete unknown' in New York City to the infamous performance at 1965's Newport Folk Festival when him, and his band, shocked, outraged, and, in some cases, delighted the audience by performing with their instruments plugged in and turned up loud.

Chalamet's Dylan is just one version of Dylan and this story is just one version of Dylan's story, not one that pretends to be true but one that feels very true. Dylan comes across as mercurial and capricious, a genius with words and songs but also something of an 'arsehole' and a 'jerk'. Two accusations that are quite reasonably thrown at him by Joan Baez (a superb Monica Barbaro) whom Dylan enjoyed a complicated relationship with.

 

To be fair, all his relationships seem to be pretty complicated. There's his actual relationship with Sylvie Russo (based on Suze Rotolo with her name changed on Dylan's request and played by Elle Fanning) whom he falls in love with, moves in with, cheats on, splits up with, and then keeps on turning up at her apartment when the mood takes him. She accuses him of being like a French plate spinner they'd seen on television. Dylan replies that he likes those guys. To which she responds that, yeah, it's cool to be the plate spinner but not so great being the plate.

Then there's Edward Norton's Pete Seeger. A kindly avuncular figure who, with his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune), takes the young Dylan under his wing, gives him somewhere to stay and acts to all intents and purposes like a trendy school teacher intent on ridding the world of racism and war via the power of folk music.

Two people that Dylan shows nothing but total respect for are the frail and dying, and no longer capable of speech yet alone song, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) whom Dylan, and Seeger, perform songs to as he lays in his hospital bed and Boyd Holbrook's Johnny Cash. Dylan and Cash become 'pen pals' and when Dylan wonders about going electric it is Cash, in a drunken - or worse - stupor, who advises him to "get some mud on the carpet".

It's not just the live scenes and the performances that are excellent. New York looks fantastic too and the period detail is superb from the clothes to the cars to the televisions that blast out all the major events on the era:- the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Civil Rights actions in Alabama.

All huge stories in their own right but background here to the story of Dylan, the attitude of Dylan (at one point he's asked if he thinks he's God, to which he replies "how many more times .... yes"), and the songs of Dylan. From the folk classics like Mr Tambourine Man, Blowin' in the Wind, and A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall to the far more interesting, and powerful, likes of Highway 61 Revisited, Maggie's Farm, Subterranean Homesick Blues, and, of course, Like A Rolling Stone itself.

Barbaro sounds great as Baez, Norton does a great Seeger, Holbrook may not look a lot like Cash but he pulls of his mannerisms and sounds like him, and Chalamet is a great Dylan. He's not the full Dylan, that's not possible - Dylan contains multitudes, but he is great as a version of Dylan and props should also go to Dan Fogler as Dylan's manager Albert Grossman, Will Harrison as Bob Neuwith, and Charlie Tahan as Al Kooper but most of all to Chalamet who is captivating throughout.

I wondered (curiously, rather than condescendingly) if the younger visitors to the Peckhamplex to see the film might have been Chalamet, rather than Dylan, fans, and what they made of it all but then realised that all the events in this film happened before my life time. I wouldn't normally wallow in nostalgia but James Mangold has pulled off an incredible trick by making Dylan relevant and revolutionary sounding for a new audience without losing the old. A trick Dylan himself found pretty tricky to pull off back in 1965 - but still managed. At the end of the film Bob Dylan rides his motorbike off into the distance and, as we all know now, one of the most glittering, fascinating, and inspiring careers in music history. How does it feel? How does it feel? It feels pretty bloody great.