Director James Mangold’s mesmerizing depiction of Bob Dylan’s early years is laden with electrifying moments.
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| Early on, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is the self-assured, veteran stage performer, and Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) is just a nervous kid ... but that dynamic changes quickly, and quite dramatically. |
It’s January 1961: a quietly intimate moment in the hospital room where Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) has long been under care for Huntington’s disease (for which there was no treatment, at the time). His frequent visitor is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who has learned how to understand his longtime friend’s mostly unintelligible attempts at speech. Young Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) appears in the doorway; Seeger invites him inside.
Guthrie spots the guitar slung against Dylan’s back, and gestures for a song.
The young man obliges.
Like ... wow.
Movie magic at its finest.
A similarly powerful scene comes much later; it involves a cigarette passed between two people standing on opposite sides of a chain-link fence: unexpectedly sweet, intimate ... and sad.
Mangold and co-scripter Jay Cocks based their film on Elijah Wood’s 2015 non-fiction book, Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties. The result is rigorously authentic to actual events — warts and all — allowing for occasional fabrications for dramatic purposes. The time frame is brief, from early 1961 to the galvanic, game-changing evening of July 25, 1965, during Dylan’s closing set at that year’s Newport Folk Festival.
To say that Chalamet fully inhabits this performance is the worst of understatements. It isn’t merely an uncanny replication of Dylan’s look, posture, mannerisms and the cadence of his mumbled, almost whispered speaking voice. Chalamet also sings and performs more than 40 songs during the course of this rhapsodic film, often sounding more like Dylan than the man himself.
The dramatic arc here will be familiar to those who’ve followed the careers of artists who burst explosively onto the scene, and then become pigeon-holed. Some are content to stay in such boxes, cheerfully riding the money machine; others — the genuinely talented — chafe at public expectations.
The resulting weight can be crippling. What, if anything, does an artist owe his public?
It quickly becomes clear, during Mangold’s first act, that Dylan is extraordinarily gifted; emotionally powerful tunes emerge almost spontaneously.
Ironically, this makes him emotionally inaccessible; nobody can compete with his muse. This eventually becomes clear to the three people who circle Dylan’s orbit, like distant planets: sometimes closely, briefly, but unable to remain in his gravity for long. They are:
• Seeger, who comes to view Dylan as the modern gatekeeper of the then-popular folk movement;
• Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who frequently shares the stage with the young man, soon making them an irresistible double act, and who also shares his bed, on and off; and
• Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), the artist and early soul mate who kindles Dylan’s involvement in the civil rights movement, the Greenwich Village culture and the fraught political times, and encourages him to write songs that meansomething, and — to her regret, ultimately — who falls in love with him.
(Sylvie is a thinly disguised version of Suze Rotolo, the artist who was Dylan’s girlfriend from 1961 to ’64.)
All three are as radiant as Chalamet’s handling of Dylan. Barbaro is similarly astonishing; she doesn’t sound quite like Baez, but her vocal chops are amazing in their own right. She also nails Dylan’s selfish behavior early on.
The accusation is accurate; he’s an aloof, self-absorbed jerk. (That said, many young twentysomethings are jerks; throw instant fame into the mix, and it’d be near impossible not to become insufferable.)
Even so — even when Baez is furious with Dylan — she cannot deny the magnetism that erupts when they share a stage microphone. That’s another great moment, during one of the later festival performances, when the initially angry Baez succumbs again to Dylan’s allure; the moment between Chalamet and Barbaro is akin to making love on stage.
We grieve for Sylvie. Fanning makes her intelligent, artistically gifted, and self-assured. Early on, she’s just as crucial as Seeger, in terms of helping Dylan channel his emerging talent and social awareness. She and Dylan share a fondness for old movies; a scene from 1942’s Now, Voyager becomes a recurring connection between the two.
And there comes a moment — one of Chalamet’s stand-out scenes (of which there are many) — when Dylan realizes that he does love Sylvie, to the best of his ability ... and also recognizes that it’ll never be sufficient.
Norton’s Seeger is kind, loyal and quietly amiable; he also misses nothing. Watch how his eyes light up, listening to Dylan’s shy performance, during the aforementioned hospital scene. But Seeger makes the mistake of assuming that this kid will remain a conventional folk prodigy; ultimately, Norton’s regretful gaze is even more heartbreaking than Fanning’s.
Incidental details, along the way, are fascinating ... starting with the fact that famously tough manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) initially insists that Dylan cover songs by other writers, rather than recording his own material. Boyd Holbrook has a terrific supporting role as Johnny Cash, who becomes an avid admirer (and yes, he and Dylan really were pen pals).
Eriko Hatsune is memorable as Seeger’s gentle, perceptive wife Toshi; Will Harrison pops up in the third act as Bobby Neuwirth, who becomes Dylan’s close friend and road manager. Numerous other familiar individuals wander in and out of the action: Peter Yarrow, Jimmy Dean, Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. Big Bill Morganfield steals his brief scenes as (fictitious) bluesman Jesse Moffette.
Other memorable moments involve the emergence of Dylan’s career-changing songs, and Mangold doesn’t disappoint. 1962’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” — so soon, when so young! — lights a match, but the on-stage debut of 1964’s “The Times They Are a-Changing” is breathtaking: clearly a “star is born” moment.
Actually, this entire film is breathtaking: the best 141 minutes I’ve spent in quite awhile.
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