A Complete Unknown

There have been many movies and documentaries made about the great folk songwriter Bob Dylan. In "A Complete Unknown", the movie focuses on Dylan during his years in the West Village and between the years 1961-1964.

The movie provides a lot of nostalgia for anyone who is familiar with MacDougal Street in the Village. Even today a person can go see a show at Cafe Wha? Unfortunately, this club is the only one that remains from the 60's. The Gaslight Cafe is gone, The Folk Club is gone, and so are many others. The Village has transformed from the early days, even the 80's has seen a dramatic change... The Top of The Village gate, The Dugout have all been replaced with CVS stores and other commercial shops.

The movie tries to capture the pulse of the 60' in the bowels of where folk music was relevant, The West Village, New York City, New York. At the time the biggest and best played here: Joni Mitchell, Pete Seeger, Woody and Arlo Guthrie; would be rock legends also were anointed in the Village: Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, The Kinks and so on and so forth. If you were a musician, an artist, or an actor, The Village was a happening place.

It would make sense to make a movie about Dylan or anyone else who played here at this historic period; it was the right time in the right place. Any movie made could have many of the legends interacting with one another, collecting each others point of view on music and other things. Here in this movie we see a lot of Pete Seeger (a brilliant Ed Norton), Woody Guthrie (an incapacitated Scott McNairy), Joan Baez (a soulful Monica Barbaro) and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, more on here later).

The movie gives some insight into the illusive Bob Dylan; Dylan has never been a public person, not when it comes to his life. Where the movie goes a little deeper is when he is writing, but even here, it never exposes anything about what moved him to write songs; in fact, the only time we see him moved to write a song is when he writes and sings a song about Woody Guthrie.

As a history piece, "A Complete Unknown" is not one. It is more of a movie capturing this time and place piece. Director James Mangold has the actors in form for the most part (some actors are better than others). Where the movie brings forth a Pete Seeger we recognize, Sylvie is not well cast nor portrayed very well. Sylvie in real life was Suze Rotolo, an artist who actually wrote some of Dylan's songs; other times she inspired or corrected his writings. Rotolo of Italian ancestry was replaced by a red head of Irish ancestry. By doing this the look and feel of the character never felt right.

The conflict and relationship between Dylan and Joan Baez was a big part of the movie. Dylan looked down on Baez's ability to write songs. He never thought that she could write and the duets they played in concert were mostly Dylan's songs. The relationship they had was never fully developed in the the movie and nether was the artistic relationship between Johnny Cash and Dylan. Boyd Holbrook was the weakest of the characters in the movie. Holbrook was never believable as Cash- he physically didn't look like Johnny Cash.

While politics and radical thought was prevalent at the time, the movie only scratched the surface. Rotolo, a communist, was the person who told Dylan what was going on in America at the time; Dylan was never a political person. The movie never brings this forth and it should have.

The movie as I see it was good, it brought me back to a time that was relevant to the music seen. It brought forward many great musicians, artists and writers (the beat writers came from this time and place). While I do not agree with a lot of the Folk singers ideologies nor their politics, I do like many of the artists music. The movie gives us some great songs by many of the musicians at that time, and I enjoyed that about the movie.

Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Edward Norton, The West Village, New York City, Hollywood, Los Angeles Fires.