Tag: Timothee Chalamet

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN – Review

Timothée Chalamet in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Photo by Macall Polay, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Timothee Chalamet stars a young Bob Dylan at the beginning of his career, in director James Mangold’s A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. The biopic begins with the 19-year-old musician newly arrived in New York and visiting Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), hospitalized and rendered mute by his Huntington’s chorea. Guthrie’s friend and fellow social activist folk musician great Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) is there too, visiting Guthrie as he regularly did.

Seeger is polite to the young visitor but, at first, he assumes Dylan is just another fan, paying his respects to the legendary Woody Guthrie. That all changes when Dylan plays a song he wrote for Guthrie, and both Guthrie and Seeger are thunder-struck as they realize they are hearing a brilliant new talent. Seeger sets out to introduce young Bob Dylan to the central forces in the folk music movement in New York, including recording studio owners, and iconic figures like music ethnographer Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), and Dylan’s tough manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). Seeger shepherds Dylan into the top tier of its Greenwich Village inner circle.

The biopic follows Dylan’s rise in the New York’s folk music community, then his leap to fame, and then up to the famous pivotal moment when he split with the folk music movement by going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

The music is one of the most delightful aspects of this top-notch drama. The film lets Bob Dylan fans revisit his music and his story, but the film also introduces that music to another generation, as it recounts the history. We hear all the Bob Dylan early hits, including the song that forms the title.

We meet other musical greats of the era, such as Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), and we get a sampling of their hits as well. The film covers Dylan’s personal life and love life as well as his music, and that includes his romance with Baez. Elle Fanning plays non-musician Sylvie Russo, which whom Timothee Chalamet’s Dylan pursues and then has a long up-and-down affair, in a nice performance. But the one who comes on strongest in the film is Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, already a star when Dylan arrives and the only seemingly not awed by his talent. Her strong-will and independence make her irresistible to Dylan but set up round after round of conflict, giving the film a bit dramatic kick and an unpredictability.

In this warts-and-all biopic, Chalamet is both charming and callous as the talented but sometimes selfish Dylan, but the most impressive performance comes from Edward Norton, who is astonishing as he channels folk legend Pete Seeger. As someone who met the real Pete Seeger late in his life, I was struck by how perfectly Edward Norton captured Seeger’s posture and mannerisms, his speech cadence, and even more his personality, his combination of gentleness, tact and yet total determination that you will do it his way.

The film does a wonderful job evoking that era of folk music and artists in the smokey, underground cafes of Greenwich Village. The folk music movement aimed to spread appreciation of traditional music played on traditional instruments, with a sense of social activism and awareness, with a big pro-union base. Pete Seeger had taken on leadership in that movement, but he and all the folk music supporters were thrilled by the star power and public attention Bob Dylan brought to their cause.

With A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, James Mangold is top of his game, crafting an excellent biopic filled with glorious music and a spot-on, perfect recreation of a vanished time and New York’s folk music community at it’s height.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN opens Wednesday, Dec. 25, in theaters.

RATING: 4 out of 4 stars

BONES AND ALL – Review

(L to R) Taylor Russell as Maren and Mark Rylance as Sully in BONES AND ALL, directed by Luca Guadagnino, a Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures film. Photo Credit: Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures. © 2022 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.

“My Cannibal Romance” or “The Fine Young Cannibals” might be alternate titles for this film except that it suggests comedy rather than the high-concept horror film that BONES AND ALL really is. Starring Timothee Chalamet and Canadian actress Taylor Russell as a very different kind of star-crossed lovers, BONES AND ALL does two surprising things: combining romance with horror in a very different way and creating a new kind of monster beyond the usual vampires, werewolves and zombies. The characters at the center of this tale are born as cannibals, compelled to eat human flesh the same way vampires are compelled to drink blood. However, despite the image that evokes, BONES AND ALL is surprisingly restrained in what it shows on screen. There are bloody scenes, but the like in a film where the gory is the point. That will probably disappoint the torture porn crowd or those looking for buckets-o-blood violence. There are no Jeffrey Dahmer-like bone-cracking or cooking scenes. Instead, these compulsive cannibals are treated more as people with an unfortunate affliction, something they have no say in. The focus is on people living lonely, isolated lives, people who have a compulsion they would rather not have, but something they unfortunately must do, periodically, in order to live. Their only choice is when, and who. That gives this unusual horror story a completely different tone.

Set in the upper South and Midwest of the mid-’80s,Maren (Taylor Russell) is a lonely high school senior living with her dad (Andre Holland), who is “the new girl: who doesn’t fit in at her new high school – again. The father and daughter have moved around a bit but Maren longs for friends, and here she is finally forming some tentative friendships. Yet we get a sense she is hiding something, although it might just be that she is living a trailer park, unlike her new friends.

Her dad sets strict rules for her, including no nights out, but one night she sneaks out anyway, to go hang out at her new friend’s sleep-over. All goes well as first, until it doesn’t. What happens sends daughter and dad on the run.

In her new rundown rental home, she wakes one day to find dad gone, but an envelop of money and a tape and recorder left behind. Dad’s tape answers some questions about why she is different, while leaving others unanswered. Maren decides to seek those answers by finding the family of the mother she never knew.

Already you see the parallels to any young person who is different in some way, where bi-racial (as she is) or from a different country or religion, or born with a “condition” although not likely to be like her particular affliction. On the road, she is surprised to meet others like her, such as Sully (Mark Rylance, in another striking performance), an oddball, colorfully dressed man with a Southern drawl, and later another young person with the same affliction, Lee (Timothee Chalamet).

It’s Timothee Chalamet, so of course, they will fall in love, although it takes awhile. Also in the fine cast are Michael Stuhlberg, Chloe Sevigny, Jessica Harper, Jake Horowitz and David Gordon Green. Director Luca Guadagnino’s impressively varied credits include CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, SUSPIRIA, A BIGGER SPLASH and I AM LOVE. Here, the director shows a firm hand and fills scenes with tension, sadness, yearning, and a sense of the tragic by turns, always making the most of his fine cast.

Like all horror films, realism and the plausible are not priorities. The acting is the film’s standout strength, but the concept deserves credit. as a fresh way to show people who exist on the fringes of society, as these people, as well as a new horror creation. By making these characters into people rather than monsters, the film turns the usual horror film structure on its head. Other than their compulsion and “dietary needs,” and how that forces them to live, they are completely ordinary people, who would rather not do want they must. They are filled with revulsion by encountering an ordinary human turned cannibal, as they do at one point. The young couple try to create something like a normal life for themselves, with starry-eyed dreams of avoiding their need to eat, as they inevitably must.

It makes for an unexpectedly heartbreaking story, and the film is in many way more a tragic romance of star-crossed lovers than a horror film. Timothee Chalamet and Taylor… as the star-crossed lovers, who are what they are without choice, give marvelous performances. The two develop a convincing chemistry, and their shared problem

But the most unforgettable performance is Mark Rylance’s. The already lauded British actor, who some may recall from BRIDGE OF SPIES, is having quite a year – with wide ranging performances. He plays a charming British eccentric, a sparkling comic role, like the delightful PHANTOM OF THE OPEN, and a shy unassuming tailor bullied by gangsters in the twisty mystery thriller THE OUTFIT. Here, Rylance plays Sully, whose smooth Southern accent and mix of menace and loneliness sets us on edge in very scene, and a performance that sears its way into our memory. Whenever he is on screen, we are uneasy, even though what he says is often pitiful. When he pops up unexpectedly, “stalker” is the word that comes to mind.

Any film that makes these kinds of bold choices deserves credit for creativity and courage, even while the film’s subject is inevitably squirm-inducing. There is blood and blood-covered faces, and we know that these folks are doing, but it is less about that, about gory effects, than the complicated characters at the center who were born with this awful curse. That makes for a fresh kind of horror film, one that invites thought about something more that how they did that effect.

BONES AND ALL opens Wednesday, Nov. 23, in select theaters.

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars