
Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN
Whatever you think of director James Mangold's new musical bio-pic, you can't accuse it of false advertising. As indicated by the title, Bob Dylan is most assuredly A Complete Unknown here, with “complete” being the operative word. And I respect that, as it would be a fool's errand for any filmmaker to try to “explain” this singular artist through the type of chronological survey of his early years that Mangold and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks deliver. Yet that puts the movie, and its viewers, in a bind. Because without any hope of understanding the musician's motives and behavior, to say nothing of where all that genius talent came from, what we're left with is a lot of event (plus, granted, a lot of great songs) but little reason to care. Although its subject has to be one of the most interesting Americans to have ever lived, and Timothée Chalamet plays the role with commendable skill, Dylan remains frustratingly uninteresting as a screen protagonist – at least this particular screen protagonist.
Maybe you just need a little bit of madness to do Dylan justice, because it's not as though, in non-documentary form, we haven't been here before. Todd Haynes' I'm Not There famously cast six actors – among them Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, and Cate Blanchett – as various aspects of the man's public persona, none of their characters ever directly referenced as “Bob Dylan.” Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, meanwhile, took a roundabout way of exploring the legend, Oscar Isaac's titular folk singer – a New Yorker seeking his big break in the Midwest – a Dylan inverse who, in the final minutes, gets tragicomically usurped by the genuine article. Both movies are challenging, wondrous, and weird. The professional-to-a-fault James Mangold, however, is who you go to when you want the opposite of all that. Mangold makes solid, meat-and-potatoes entertainments, more than a few of which (Ford v Ferrari, Logan, 3:10 to Yuma) are quite enjoyable. Yet the title that likely secured his Complete Unknown participation has got to be the musical biography Walk the Line, a genre piece so formulaic that it served as nearly the entire inspiration for the Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story spoof. Mangold's ode to Johnny and June Carter Cash hit all the beats correctly, and precisely when you expected them; the film was safe, unthreatening, and easy to sit through. So is the director's latest … and therein lies the problem. Although the movie ends with Dylan going electric (and is, in fact, based on Elijah Wald's 2015 nonfiction Dylan Goes Electric!), electricity, unfortunately, is exactly what's missing.
Covering a period from 1961 to 1965, A Complete Unknown opens with the pre-famous Dylan's pilgrimage to the hospitalized Woody Guthrie (a moving, nonverbal Scoot McNairy) and climaxes with the icon's groundbreaking performance at the Newport Folk Festival, where his embrace of raucous rock stylings and “betrayal” of folk etiquette led to the crowd initially booing and throwing shit. That's a lot of terrain for a 140-minute movie, so it makes sense that the script would only lightly touch on a number of seminal incidents from this period, even when they're all but begging for deeper analysis. (How did Dylan react to Albert Grossman's apparent hostile takeover of his management? Were there any P.R. repercussions for Dylan barreling off-stage, mid-set, during his concert with Joan Baez?) What makes the Wikipedia-esque skimming borderline maddening, though, is what Mangold and Cocks choose to focus on instead, because a full third of the movie, or even more, seems devoted to Dylan's affairs with Monica Barbaro's Baez and Elle Fanning's Sylvie Russo (a rebranded Suze Rotolo), neither of whom are allowed to do much more than bask in Dylan's greatness and chide him for his emotional constipation.
Barbaro at least has Baez's confident presence and self-sufficiency to fall back on, and her annoyed reaction shots – looks suggesting “Why does this apathetic jerk have to be so gifted?!” – provide a fair amount of subtle comedy. Too often, however, she's merely a willing satellite orbiting Planet Bob, and Fanning's Russo fares considerably worse, forever on the verge of tears, or crying outright, at the minimal attention she's receiving, as well as her own complicity in putting up with it. It should go without saying that long-suffering girlfriends or spouses are, evidently by necessity, a musical-bio-pic staple. Yet with all due respect to the hardworking Barbaro and Fanning, one such stereotype would've been more than plenty here, especially when the considerable time spent with them means less time spent with more intriguing figures, such as Norbert Leo Butz's folk purist Alan Lomax or Boyd Holbrook's energetically soused Johnny Cash. Or, principally, Edward Norton's Pete Seeger, who's saddled with a long-suffering spouse of his own (Eriko Hatsune, with a fixed expression of revulsion), but who's so affable, charming, and touching in his squareness that his every scene is pure pleasure. Were Chalamet not as strong as he is, Norton, boasting remarkable musicianship to match his beautiful portrayal, would probably be all that Complete Unknown patrons would want to talk about.
Blessedly, however, Chalamet is exceptional, and considering that he's not able to express much in the way of Dylan's interior life, he really needed to be. The trailers suggested that Chalamet would nail the vocal quality and the singing, and he does. With Dylan's unmistakable nasal croak and cadences sounding wholly unrehearsed, the actor's early, deeply earnest rendition of “Song for Woody” leads to dynamic interpretations of classics including “Like a Rolling Stone” and “The Times They Are A-Changin'.” Yet what impressed me even more than his musicianship was Chalamet's clarity of focus: the reverence in his eyes when addressing Guthrie; the lovestruck (or hormone-struck) attention he gives Baez in duets; the glazed indifference on display when enduring empty praise. For maybe the first time since 2018's Beautiful Boy, I didn't look at Timothée Chalamet and see Timothée Chalamet. I saw a full, complex other person, and it's a shame that A Complete Unknown, by design, can't give its star anywhere exceptional to go with his riveting impersonation. Mangold's bio-musical is hardly an embarrassment; to cite a Dylan song title, it's all right. But it's hardly I'm Not There. It's more like I'm All There – It's My Movie That's Missing.
NOSFERATU
Even though all three of writer/director Robert Eggers' previous features inspired a handful of nervous giggles, there wasn't much that was outright funny about 2015's edgy horror film The Witch, 2019's paranoid two-hander The Lighthouse, and 2022's Viking epic The Northman. Yet with just a few tweaks in emphasis, I'm thinking that his remake of F.W. Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu could've been a broad comedy for the ages, given that this deeply sincere vampire yarn continually teeters thisclose to abject, unintentional hilarity without ever quite landing there. Because the grim production design is so superb and Eggers so clearly determined to deliver a moody, evocative knockout, I think a lot of patrons (and reviewers) are willing to accept the enervating goings-on as high drama. It took all my will, though, not to inappropriately laugh at the pompous, dreary solemnity of it all, and I might've actually done so if I wasn't so busy yawning.
I say this, by the way, with intense regret, as I loved two of Eggers' previous movies and was certainly never bored by The Lighthouse. But beginning with everyone in the film's German setting speaking with refined British dialects – or, in Willem Dafoe's case, speaking the way he always does – so little of Nosferatu goes right that it's astonishing that it's an Eggers at all. The plot follows the Murnau more or less as I remember it, with estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) commissioned to Transylvania at the request of the mysterious, castle-bound Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the young man unaware that his vampiric host is the psychic paramour of Thomas' new wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). By the time Thomas headed there some 20 minutes into the picture, I was already fighting the urge to chuckle, put off as I was by the geographically incorrect accents, stilted expository dialogue (which wasn't an issue in Eggers' previous period efforts), and frankly amateurish acting by Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and two ceaselessly fraudulent child actors whose names I'm happy to omit. But then Thomas met Orlok, with Skarsgård buried under grisly prosthetics and a bushy mustache, and the count began to talk. Is it just me, I wondered, or does he sound exactly like a half-speed version of Kayvan Novak's vampire on What We Do in the Shadows?!
To his credit, Hoult does a sensational job of miming apoplectic fear, which he's required to do practically the entire time Thomas is trapped in the castle. But the source of his terror, at least to me, was so unfailingly comedic – Skarsgård all but hisses “I vaaaant to suuuuck your blooooood!!!” – that I never bought into Thomas' peril. And although she performs wonders with the spasmodic physicality required of Ellen throughout, I never believed in Depp's trauma, either, as she doesn't appear capable of implying genuine emotional torment; her inertly delivered words all sound strangely disassociated from her expressions, as though they were looped in later when Depp was in a less anguished state. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke's images have a satisfying, otherworldly bleakness, and the sets, costumes, and makeup and visual effects (especially when packs of rats swarm Germany) are consistently topnotch. But technical acumen is no substitute for legitimate engagement, and at no point was I invested in the fates of anyone on-screen. Even the traditionally solid Emma Corrin, stuck with the phlegmatic Taylor-Johnson as her husband as those aforementioned unnamed brats as her kids, lost me when her character witnessed Ellen enduring shrieking, supernatural contortions, and her only response was, “She needs her husband!” Ummm … yes. And maybe also an exorcist.
If anyone appears to be aware that he's in an unrealized comedy, it's Dafoe. On several occasions, playing the de facto Van Helsing to Skarsgård's de facto Dracula, his occultist Albin Eberhart Von Franz reacts to purportedly horrific happenings with a blitheness that's almost gleeful. And this grizzled eccentric will no doubt endear himself to many American viewers with his insistence that people have put so much faith in science and fact that they're blinding themselves to things – vampires included – that are actually true. (Dafoe also scores the biggest unacknowledged visual gag in the film, at one point suddenly popping into view from the screen's lower-right corner like a Wes Anderson extra.) As a veteran of The Lighthouse and The Northman, though, Dafoe likely has too much professional dignity and affection for Eggers to visibly mock his circumstances here – much as some of us may have wanted him to. What results is a silly movie that desperately wants to be taken seriously, and one too funereally executed to grant us the relief of laughter. I read that, years ago, Eggers directed his high school's stage production of Nosferatu, and that the experience ultimately led to his becoming a filmmaker. I'm thrilled that he is one. But graphic violence, nudity, and $50-million budget aside, a high-school Nosferatu is what Eggers has somehow produced again.
THE FIRE INSIDE
Not long into director Rachel Morrison's The Fire Inside, our heroine, the teenage Olympic-boxer-to-be Claressa Shields (Ryan Destiny), wakes up in her shabby lower-middle-class home to discover a wonderful surprise: Her frequently absent mother (Oluniké Adeliyi) has not only cleaned the kitchen, but has gone shopping, meaning that Claressa and her two younger siblings will finally have something to eat in the morning. Mom pours them all bowls of cereal before realizing that while she did remember to shop, she forgot to get milk. Making the best of a bad situation, as you presume they've done hundreds of times before, the kids tell their mother not to worry – water and milk taste the same. They consequently top their cereal with generous helpings of tap water and dig in, which would be sad on its own, but is downright heartbreaking, if not horrifying, knowing they live in Flint, Michigan.
Although the scene takes place several years before Flint's 2014 crisis in which, after switching the city's water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River, poisonous contaminants suffused the drinking water and gravely endangered the citizenry, there's no way that Morrison and screenwriter Barry Jenkins were unaware of this when filming commenced. They certainly knew that we were aware of Flint's public-health calamity, too, and that knowledge doesn't merely underscore the triumph-of-the-underdog sports drama The Fire Inside; it becomes the movie's entire reason for being. Thirty-five years ago, in Roger & Me, documentarian Michael Moore made his name by casting his hometown as the worst city in America. Viewed a quarter-century later, as the water catastrophe hit, Moore may have been underselling his point. So the film's hardscrabble boxing tyro Claressa isn't simply emerging from trying, underprivileged circumstances – she's emerging from Flint, which means the deck is pretty much stacked against her from the get-go.
As a film experience, The Fire Inside is a very well-made version of an inspirational-athlete movie you've probably seen dozens (hundreds?) of times before, complete with all the expected trappings: humble beginnings, early victories, debilitating setbacks, ultimate triumph. That Morrison's feature debut tackles the cinematically niche arena of women's boxing helps somewhat with the built-in predictability, as does Harry Yoon's precise editing and the desolate honesty of cinematographer Rina Yang's compositions. (Morrison herself, for 2017's Mudbound, became the first female cinematographer nominated for an Academy Award.) Making everything immeasurably better are the two stalwart performers acting as Morrison's leads. Destiny is hard-earned braggadocio and fierceness incarnate until circumstances allow us to see the troubled, understandably needy child beneath all of Claressa's surface vigor; she's absolutely marvelous. And Brian Tyree Henry, an Oscar/Emmy/Tony-nominated talent who still seems tragically underrated, is phenomenal as Claressa's mentor/coach Jason Crutchfield, selflessly handling his young charge's career and emotional state while expecting nothing but a better life for Claressa in return.
As prototypical as their genre duties were, I adored watching these two, and got suitably misty-eyed when Claressa did indeed win gold in the women's middleweight division at the 2012 Olympics. But why was the music in this stand-up-and-cheer moment so melancholy? And why was it landing after only 70 minutes of movie? Those answers come when you discover that what Morrison's and Jenkins' incisive drama is really about is what happens after the Olympic high wears off – when, many months later, you're still a struggling young woman in Flint, and family responsibilities dictate that you can't leave, and the public doesn't care enough about women's boxing for anyone to offer endorsement deals. How does one underdog-triumph from that? Let me assure you that The Fire Inside isn't unremittingly dour after the Olympics; Claressa gets to enjoy a prom night that's like Carrie White's before everything almost literally went to Hell, and the climactic title-card updates on Claressa's subsequent career achievements made me unspeakably happy. But this boxing saga frequently hurts, and with its not-uncommon returns to the image of the Flint water tower, it should. Sometimes a powerful punch to the midsection isn't nearly as painful, and oddly welcome, as a sharp slap to the face.
BABYGIRL
We don't have any AMC theaters here in the Quad Cities. But because I spend so much time in Chicagoland, I'm forced, at least a couple dozen times a year, to visit one regardless, and I always somewhat dread the experience knowing I'm gonna have to sit through that obnoxious Nicole Kidman ad for the trillionth time. Even if you don't normally frequent an AMC, you know the promo I'm talking about: the one with Kidman, in heels and a sleek black-and-silver suit that no one would ever wear to the movies, expounding on the magic of cinema while sipping a (surely diet) soda in an otherwise-empty auditorium, and ensuring us that “heartbreak feels good in a place like this.” That ad has been running since, like, the Pleistocene Epoch, and it's cloying enough to make you wish that Nicole Kidman would disappear from big screens forever. Then, as happened on my latest trek to a Chicagoland AMC, she acts in something such as writer/director Halena Reijn's Babygirl. And all is once again forgiven.
When I mentioned to a friend that Babygirl cast Kidman as a middle-aged beauty who embarked on an affair with a much-younger man, she replied, “Didn't she just do that movie?” Because I hadn't seen this past summer's Netflix offering A Family Affair, I had to look up that info, but yeah – I guess she just did. If I were a 57-year-old A-lister who could greenlight most any project of my choosing, I might consider a back-to-back pair of age-irrelevant romances, too. But this one, I'm guessing, is a little spicier than the streaming rom-com, unless Zac Efron also fed Nicole from his hand when she was on all fours and manually serviced her until she verbalized her fear of peeing on the floor. Here, Kidman's high-powered, contentedly married robotics CEO Romy Mathis yearns to be sexually dominated, and finds the dom of her dreams in Harris Dickinson's intern Samuel, a 20-something with cookies in his pocket and tricks up his sleeve. That their unofficial Meet Cute involves a dog is just the first of Reign's narrative subversions that include startlingly brazen interview questions, acts of public self-debasement, and Samuel's visit to Romy's home, her husband Jacob played by Antonio Banderas. It's all as sordid and awkward and hot as could be. I had a blast.
I would've undoubtedly had more of one if this S&M relationship didn't feel so lopsided. Make fun of the Fifty Shades film series all you want (it certainly deserves its share of derision), but it at least felt as though both partners were getting something out of the experience. Anastasia and Christian even got married and were last seen expecting their second child! Yet because Samuel has been fashioned as such an enigmatic blank – his overheard recitation about his upbringing sounds entirely fabricated – we never glean what he truly feels about Romy, or whether their union, to him, is about anything other than fantasy cosplaying; he may verbalize his affections, but those sentiments continue to ring hollow as he purposefully causes the woman more and more trouble. Consequently, the talented, charismatic Dickinson can't effectively shape his performance, and even though he scores a number of lovely comedic grace notes – chiefly his boyish amazement when the couple's suite proves to have a living room – you don't know Samuel any better at the end than you did at the start. Not for nothing, but Babygirl is also a movie that, like the Fifty Shades trilogy, would've benefited from some equal-opportunity nudity to offset warranted charges of misogyny, his Beach Rats breakout demonstrating that, like Kidman, Dickinson isn't terribly shy in that regard. (“You know how big my dick is,” he says to a beau in that 2017 indie, and thanks to the film, now we all know.)
Despite Samuel remaining a cipher, however, Dickinson and his co-star share vibrant, sometimes intoxicating chemistry, there are just enough swerves in the narrative to keep things gripping, and the visuals and off-kilter images courtesy of cinematographer Jasper Wolf frequently create an almost hallucinogenic state – you feel sucked into an uncontrollable vortex the same way Romy does. Sophie Wlde, as Romy's personal assistant Esme, offers a first-rate performance, as does Banderas, who elevates his rather thankless role through sheer emotional force. (Jacob is a highly regarded theatre director, and in a big-screen rarity, evidence indicates that he's a spectacular theatre director.) But the chief reason to see Babygirl is Kidman, who gives one of those brutally honest, fearless, galvanizing performances of hers that somehow always get neglected come Oscars season. True, she hasn't been ignored for Rejn's film quite yet, and I won't ding her citations for The Hours (for which she won), Moulin Rouge!, and the others. But I'd argue that no living female actor has delivered quite so many thrilling, uncompromising portrayals that – as evidenced by To Die For, Eyes Wide Shut, Dogville, Birth, Destroyer, The Northman … – the Academy has collectively ignored. Maybe those roles make voters uncomfortable. That's how you know they're working. Thirty-five years into her screen career, Nicole Kidman is still making us deliriously uncomfortable, and I hope she never stops. Unless it means her stopping those AMC ads. A fan can only take so much.