A Complete Unknown (2024)

How Does It Feeeeeeeeeel?
or

The Freewheelin' (Inscrutable) Bob Dylan

 

"Seven simple rules of going into hiding: one, never trust a cop in a raincoat. Two, beware of enthusiasm and of love, both are temporary and quick to sway. Three, if asked if you care about the world's problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will never ask you again. Four, never give your real name. Five, if ever asked to look at yourself, don't. Six, never do anything the person standing in front of you cannot understand. And finally, seven, never create anything--it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life."

Bob Dylan

 

Musicians performing on-stage use something called "foldback speakers" so that they can hear themselves accurately against the wash of sound coming from auditorium reverberation or the cacophony of crowd noise fighting against them—modern musicians use ear-buds to have their music pumped backed to them without any deleterious feed-back from similar music sources competing. 

 

That little bit of insider trivia is what I was thinking about walking out of A Complete Unknown, the new bio-pic of a slice of Bob Dylan's life as he was becoming more known and making a name (and history) for himself prowling around the Greenwich Village clubs, riding a burgeoning folk-music wave and expanding the subject matter of the genre like his heroes, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger into advocacy-folk or what would become known as "protest songs," which formed the soundtrack of the youth movement of the early 1960's.

 

Dylan has been mixed up with movies before—the documentary Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back, various music videos, he wrote the music for and played in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, wrote and starred in Masked and Anonymous, and Renaldo and Clara, and although not mentioned by name is seen through a prism of stories and interpreters in I'm Not There.

Well, this one has his seal of approval, sticks to one actor as Dylan, and covers January 24, 1961 to July 25, 1965 (when Dylan first arrived in New York City at the age of 19 to his controversial performance set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival). And it does a pretty good job of clearing away all the myths about Bob Dylan, his absences from the public eye (hard to believe these days, he's even done commercials), his changing personas more than Madonna or Bono, and just concentrates on that initial section where he became a performer, then The Brand New Thing, then The Highly Exploitable Thing, to The Voice of His Generation, all the while navigating the rigors of performing, the inanities of being a product, and the desire to start breaking things and doing something fresh.

Frankly, that's enough. It was never his mission to be understood, and the movie never tries to psychoanalyze or explain his actions, but merely the context into which he arrived and the way things changed once he started performing. He came in with talent and a poet's way of putting thoughts into words in a way no one had ever done before, inspired by folk music and its tendency towards metaphor. 

That is immediately recognized by practitioners of the art—Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, wonderfully essaying the man as appeaser rather than rebel) and a hospitalized-by-Huntington's Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy, in a non-verbal performance), and he is promoted, signed by a label (Dan Fogler plays Columbia A & R guy Albert Grossman), and starts playing bigger venues, all the while already established folkies like Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) start interpreting his material for the mainstream. The maxim is "it's the singer, not the song" but Dylan's "voice" (as far as his writing) was so distinct, he bobbed up through the commercialization as the Genuine Article quickly and, with his ungussied-up vocal stylings, bereft of soothing harmonies and homogenizing orchestrations.

So...back to that foldback speaker: Imagine you're putting yourself out there, performance after performance, and you're leading the field. Then, you start hearing yourself over and over again and not necessarily your voice. People are singing your songs, and then imitating your songs—Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" begets your "Blowin' In The Wind" and then that begets Phil Ochs' "There But For Fortune"—or imitating your composing-process, and then parroting and parodying your songs and then you're suddenly surrounded by the newest versions of "you" while (as movie-Dylan gripes) "you just want me singing 'Blowin' In The Wind' solo for the rest of my life." It's stifling. It's maddening. It makes you want a change.

But, that's not what your label wants. It's not what your manager wants. It's not what your fans want. They want the rebellion and the "new" sound to be what they're comfortable with...or what they're making money with. You want to create. They want to cash in. Or get their comforting nostalgia. No one gets it.

But it gets creepy. There's a scene in Don't Look Back where Dylan is talking to a fan and the exchange is this:

Fan: I just don't like any of the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" stuff. 

Bob Dylan: Oh, you're that kind - I understand, right now. 

Fan: It's not you. It doesn't sound like you at all! 

Bob Dylan: But, my friends, my friends were playing with me on that song. You know, I have to give some work to my friends too. I mean, you don't mind that, right? Huh? You don't mind them playing with me if they play the guitar and drums and all that stuff, right?

Fan: It just doesn't sound like you at all. It sounds like you're having a good ole laugh. 

Bob Dylan: Well, don't you like to have a good ole laugh once in awhile? Isn't that all right with you?

 

"That's not you." How the "homesick blues" does he know? Because he attended a concert? Because he bought himself a record? It's no wonder that at one point Dylan just blurted "Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything." See it as ingratitude if you must or see it as not "playing the game" but "you gotta do you" because "you" is what got you there in the first place. All artists go through this. Some have even rebelled. Some have got away with it. Some have not. Some have walked the tight-rope of practicality where you're either an "artist" or you pay the bills (you know...like we non-artists do).

A Complete Unknown is wonderful in every way for putting you not in Dylan's head but in his head-space. And if the man is still an enigma after you see it, you can, at least, understand why. If I have anything negative to say about it, it's that Ricky Nelson said the same thing in just over three minutes.* That's efficient.

Now, I've gotta pay the bills, do what's expected of me: how is Chalamet? Spot on. Pretty amazing, actually, but I've never ever been disappointed by a Chalamet performance. Of course, he's prettier than Dylan, but, like Joaquin Phoenix did with Johnny Cash in director Mangold's previous music bio-pic I Walk the Line, he suggests Dylan rather than does a full-on imitation. He has a less-is-more approach which is entirely appropriate for the subject, but there's a nice touch that he brings to his Dylan which is lovely—a defiant, almost predatory stare, observing, analyzing, like a biding-his-time hawk. And, considering his vocal talents in Wonka, of course he can do a dead-on imitation of Dylan's singing style. You have to listen very closely to tell the difference between Chalamet's versions of Dylan's songs and the memories of the real deal.

I mean, the real "real deal."

"I'm not angry. I'm delightful."

Bob Dylan 

*

 

Top Gun: Maverick

Almost There. Al-most Theeere....

or 

"What Were You THINKING?" "But, You TOLD Me Not To Think!!" 

Controversial yet factual opinion: Anthony Edwards is hotter than Tom Cruise in Top Gun. First of all, the mustache? WORKS. Second of all, he's fun! Third of all, Maverick is such a desperate, narcissistic, posturing, alienating, twerpy little prince that I find myself disorientingly at odds with a former self who long ago considered Tom Cruise to be attractive. Who was she? That woman who could look at a picture of young Tom and not flash immediately to this jittery rat terrier with a barely contained rage problem, a monomaniacal fixation on personal glory at the expense of the safety of everyone around him, and an approach to women that can charitably be described as Biff-esque? I don't know her.* Fourth of all, Maverick's hair is bad! It needs to be EITHER SHORTER OR LONGER.

Maverick is the villain of Top Gun.

 

* Paradoxically, I do think that Tom Cruise is an excellent movie star, and I also enjoy his movies!

Lindy West

"I'd Prefer a Highway Away from the Danger Zone, but Okay"

"Shit, Actually"

copyright 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

I can see why there would be a sequel to Top Gun thirty six years after the first film, beyond economic gains. The original was a recruitment poster for the military, and right now there is a shortage of airline pilots creating disruptions of flights. What is interesting about that shortage is that it is due to a changing military. Airline pilots usually came from a military flying background. But, there are less of those pilots being trained now because we're training more drone pilots than military pilots.

 

Plus, Tom Cruise needs a hit. His two big franchises that bring in money are Mission: Impossible and Top Gun—probably his biggest hit. Nobody went to see The Mummy (killing Universal's proposed "Monsterverse" series) and American Made. Jack Reacher is now a streaming TV series. Tom needs a hit.

But, as Lindy West pointed out in her idiosyncratic review of the first film, Tom Cruise's Pete Mitchell was, if anything, the villain of Top Gun. Narcissistic, cocky, heedless, and anti-authoritarian, Mitchell was the military's nightmare—the hot-head not broken by basic training. His actions killed his wing-man, "Goose" and 

I've thought—not very often—that if Mitchell wasn't killed in subsequent flying, he would have become the protagonist of American Made, a pilot for nefarious purposes. I mean, rules are made to be broken, right?

So, this is the guy the Navy wants to train fighter pilots?

Apparently so. Well, not precisely. The Navy doesn't want him. An Admiral in the Navy wants him, that Admiral being Tom "Iceman" Kazansky (Val Kilmer), from the first film. It's easy to get movie-sentimental about that, but it made me think that it was because of an Old Boys Network that got this flame-out back in the cock-pit with any kind of authority. This is wrong thinking. In fact, Top Gun: Maverick doesn't want me to think...at all.

That got me into trouble immediately with this sequel that repeats the first movie's opening minutes with Harold Faltermeyer's theme starting over the same opening text from the first film, then transitions into Kenny Loggin's "Danger Zone" over a "thumbs-up and launch" montage, which reminds people that there are aircraft carriers and take-offs from the flight-deck and that the Navy—for their cooperation in helping make the movie—needed some footage that involved them and not Tom Cruise.

Cruise's Pete Mitchell has been shopping himself out as a test-pilot to an aerospace firm—a very small one, it seems—that has a contract with the navy to supply a hyper-sonic fighter and today is the test to push it to Mach 9. The thing is the Navy brass (in the form of Ed Harris) want the thing to perform at Mach 10. So, what does Maverick do? First, he takes the thing out early—even before Harris' Admiral (who also showed up earlier than scheduled)—and buzzes the guy before taking it to Mach 9. But, no, that's not good enough: Maverick takes it to Mach 10. Okay. Then, he takes it Mach 10.3 before the plane breaks up from the stress and disintegrates.

At this point, I believe, Top Gun: Maverick continues as a dream sequence because...no. No way does Mitchell walk away from this. But, he does in the movie. It's a bit of a mis-step because the flying sequences are CGI (the plane prototype does not exist) and it kind of undercuts the impressive in-camera work done by the flyers and actors in the later F/A-18 sequences. But, it also shows the Maverick hasn't changed that much, pushing everything to the limit until he breaks something, leaving his employers with going back to the drawing board. He's admonished by Harris' Admiral, but then informed that he's been picked to train a class in the Top Gun school for a seemingly impossible mission.

That mission is to take four F/A-18 Super Hornets into forbidden air-space—in a safely-unidentified country, but it probably ends with an "A-N"—flying under any sort of radar detection that would launch SAM attacks, fly up a steep escarpment, take out a uranium enrichment plant nestled in the valley then climb an even steeper escarpment (with heavy G-force consequences) where they may be met by "fifth generation" fighters, if they haven't already been neutralized by the two F/A-18's trailing them to destroy a nearby air-base. 

So, it's basically, the Star Wars "Death Star" trench run (which, admittedly, is a crowd-pleaser) but Star Wars wasn't a two hour film about training for it. Here, the complications are: one of the pilots-in-training is "Rooster" (Miles Teller) Bradshaw, son of "Goose" (from the earlier film), which places Maverick in a position of responsibility and guilt, a re-kindled romance with an Admiral's daughter (Jennifer Connelly) "from the old days"—it's like nothing happened between the first film and this one (No attachments? No kids? Is there some psychological "thing" about this guy?), and the mystery of why Kazansky picked Maverick—of all people—to do this job.

That scene—with Kilmer unable to talk due to his battle with throat cancer—is (apart from the the admittedly well-executed flight scenes) the highlight of the film. Kilmer doesn't have to do much to eke out any audience sympathy, but there's an old sageness to his performance (done with just knowing looks) that's hard to resist, and Cruise pulls off one of those moments where he stops being a movie star and crumples into acting. Nice to see, and that, more than anything, made me want to salute.

The acting is all good. From the by-the-book sourness of Harris, Jon Hamm and Charles Parnell to Connelly's "sure-it's-a-'Girlfriend'-role-but I'm-still-gonna-'Girlfriend'-this-guy-right-off-the-screen" spunkiness. But, ultimately it comes down to that mission—top secret because it isn't sanctioned and probably illegal under international law—where two "miracles" have to happen to pull it off (I counted six) and where the best advice Maverick can offer is "don't think...DO." It is this mantra that saturates and permeates the entire movie, further embedding it in Star Wars mythos, right down to evoking a spirit for guidance at a critical time. At least they had the grace to make a joke about the inanity of that advice and its genuinely funny and well-played.

But, oh boy, it sure apples to this movie. Yeah, it's a good time, and 'gung-ho' and propels itself along at a good clip and the shots in the cock-pits are so amazing, it doesn't matter that the actors are in the back-seats. It delivers the payload and gets away clean without having to answer for anything just like the mission parameters.

 

As long as you don't think about it.