From the second Timothée Chalamet gets spit out of a hitched ride at the edge of the George Washington Bridge in ragged clothes and a cabbie hat, clutching an acoustic guitar and a rucksack wandering the beat carnival on MacDougal Street, A Complete Unknown is, as the biopic form requires, a two-hour compression of music mythology that plays loose with facts. And every minute is a total blast.
If there is a moment in A Complete Unknown that could move a Bobcat to tears, it comes in these opening scenes. After the young prodigy blown in from the Midwest cons a taxi driver into taking him to a New Jersey hospital to visit his ailing hero Woody Guthrie—the radical folk singer-songwriter 29 years his senior—Dylan plays an early original at his bedside.
Dylan repurposes an ambling, bittersweet melody from Guthrie's own "1913 Massacre." The 20-year-old songwriter's ode to his Dust Bowl North Star is an explicit act of carrying history forward, protecting Guthrie's ethos of collectivity through autonomy, telling a previous generation you understand that which could have been unknowable in the future.
Dylan is not yet channeling Ginsberg but 'Song to Woody' is Whitman through and through, transcending time by tracing it backward and forward.
Collection
[
|
...
]