Yesterday, Handel; today, Dylan

Don't expect something more of the life of Bob Dylan than you're going to get--or that you would like to. A Complete Unknown opens up just four years of the man's life, but covers the thematic essentials--the immense regard he has for his own creative talent and his willingness to sacrifice anything else for his muse. 

In the theater I attended, wheelchair people like me get stuck front and center--not my favorite seat. But I could go again this afternoon and roll up even closer. I really and honestly loved A Complete Unknown. It's a concert. If it's playing in a theater near me, you can bet a half-dozen quality guitar pics it'll be somewhere close by in yours.

Timothée Chalamet plays a young and innocent Dylan, who believes--honestly believes!--that he can get off a train in New York City, find a dying Woody Guthrie and a wonderfully warm-hearted Pete Seeger, pull his guitar out, pluck out a tune or two and simply, then and there, be inducted into the then wildly popular world of folk music. He does, and it works. 

Just exactly how many young singer-songwriters once upon a time saw that technicolor dream--and then crashed all over the back forty? But we're talking about a cultural icon here, a kid millions of people never really understood or liked, a man with gravel in his almost guttural voice, but a man whose individual cuts long ago canonized themselves in American music.

Chalamet is wonderful as the young Dylan, and Edward Norton is absolutely beloved as Pete Seeger, the adoring father figure. But the casting genius award in this sweet little epic film is Ellie Fanning, who plays Dylan's earliest love, a left-winger who looks like she just stepped off the stage at the Minnesota State Fair with a blue-ribbon apple pie. She's Italian, a thorough-going New Yorker, but in every way--dress, hair style, political interests--the directors make sure she be a girl from Lake Woebegone--or even Hibbing, where Dylan was a boy.

It's interesting that the film-makers never mentioned Dylan's boyhood, his experience up north in Minnesota; but then Dylan himself has never gone back because of his treatment in and by a community unused to boys and girls with his level of talent. Still, traditional ways are here in the film for the asking, but Dylan--in reality as well as this "biopic*," just can't bring himself to hold on to the one force in his life that would or could stabilize. But then stabilize is but another word for restrain, and this kid's creative genius cannot be restrained, whether he or any of his loves would like to be held back.

It's a wonderful film, even if you aren't a Bob Dylan aficionado. I'm not, but that hasn't stopped me from spilling love all over this page.

It doesn't hurt, I suppose, if somewhere back in the vault you've used the word 
"hootenanny," or attended one. Let's put it this way: it doesn't hurt if you're 70 years old or so, which doesn't imply it's a flick for the community room in the Home. Great American music is at the heart of everything here, lots of it. 

Like I said, I could go again this afternoon. 

I can't help thinking that juxtaposed here in Stuff is George Frederic Handel (yesterday) and Bobbie Dylan (today)--"The Hallelujah Chorus" (yesterday) and "Blowin' in the Wind" (today). 

I stand by every word :).

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*If you're wondering about biopic, so did I. Here's an answer:  A biopic is a movie that dramatizes the life of a real, non-fictional individual. Short for “biographical motion picture,” a biopic can cover a person’s entire life or one specific moment in their history. Topics for biopics are nearly endless, with famous figures from history, along with popular celebrities of late, being covered.