“Like a Complete Unknown” – Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan: The genius and the women

The New York bohemian and artist district of Greenwich Village with its bars and clubs has always been presented a bit shabby, but here, in this biopic, which plays in the first half of the 1960s and tells of the early career of the singer and musician Bob Dylan, the district seems noticeable. But what do you want to do: The Times they are a-chatin ‘. And in fact, the film bob-bob-dylan (Timothée Chalamet), which we have here in front of us and who arrived in New York in 1961 as a 19-year-old tram in 1961, always looks a bit slipped and licked. It can smash and naschy as the real Bob Dylan and one cigarette after another smoke (which he does continuously): He remains unmistakable the clean and stylish film-dylan.

The stylists made an effort at all: the film dylan, they probably said, must speak and sing like the real young Dylan, and he has to look like the artist looked a little pretty and with even facial features. After all, we are dealing with a scary conventional biopic that has a completely Hollywood aesthetics. And in one of such, the prevailing ideal of beauty always has priority: the male beatniks must never look too dirty, and the look of women was taken care that despite everything, the barbi puppet always remains dominant.

Nevertheless, somehow important: authenticity simulation. That is why the dylan actor has to wear a brown driver jacket as a worn out as the real dylan wearing it on the cover photo mentioned. Only stains shouldn’t be on it. Or he must have his jacket hanging around his shoulders as you know it from documentary film material about Dylan. Many photos and film recordings from these years were clearly viewed at the production company. And then said: “Yes, here, it has to look. Authentic, everything authentic. Also the bars of early hippies and folkies, these basement cafes with such a half-dark dim light in which this type occurred. Everything is always a bit snapped and ironed and sugar bakers than in reality, that’s important! We don’t want to scare anyone. We also need Budweiser beer cans and bottles from the time with the old closure. Then we can accommodate product placement on a large scale. Two birds with one flap. “

We write the year 1961: The young film dylan wants his great role model to visit the terminal songwriter Woody Guthrie, left folk singer from the very beginning, in the hospital in New Jersey, in which almost nobody seems to be. At least there is only one lonely visitor at the bedside: the left -wing singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) is also chased by the left -wing and stock conservative USA. Great coincidence. When the film dylan, standing at the hospital door, inquires in awe whether he was right here with “Mr. Guthrie”, the first funny dialogue relaxes: “Nobody calls him so far!” The film-seas to the film dylan tells: “I am not the government.” The young film dylan immediately plays one of his songs to the terminally ill and defenseless film Guard, and it is logically enthusiastic. Yes, “a good song can only do good” (W. Guthrie).

In the next scene, our driver, the film dylan, then already at the film Seeger and his family at breakfast, where he immediately around his guitar and composed one of his most famous songs: »If you’Re Traveling in the North Country Fair / WHE WORTS HIT HEAVY ON THE BOFERLINE / REMember me to one who lives / for she once was a true love of mine. “

Shortly thereafter, the career really picks up speed: appearances in small clubs, friendship with Joan Baez, record contract with Columbia Records, Zackzagzack. The early Dylan concert criticism from the “New York Times” from September 1961 is also quoted: “With his angelic face and the dense, adjacent hair, which he partly covered with a black huck-fin cord hat, Dylan looks like a cross between choir boy and beatnik.”

This is a Disney production here, which is why no penis is allowed to dangle into the camera.

In the middle of the Cuban crisis, in 1962, when the world is short of nuclear war, the film dylan and the film Joan-Baez (Monica Barbaro) are of course awake at night and are worried. But our film dylan does not look helpless in the telly like the others, but rather composes a dylan classic again, which he throws towards the evil warmaker and arms producers: “You hide in your mansion / while the young people ‘Blood / Flows Out of Their Bodies / and is Buried in the Mud.”

It is a scene that occurs more often in the film in a varied form: the young poet in the night or in the morning with a naked upper body, plucking around the guitar, smoking thought, pondering, pondering, sunk into his own genius. Yes, that’s how he is, the artist! We see him in all of his clichés that are over the cliché: the creative acoustic guitar troubadour in the studio (dialogue of sound engineers: “Who wrote this song?” – “He here!”); the proud angry young man At the Newport Folk Festival, how he presents his world change anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin ‘” (“Here’s something new”); The headstrong, stubborn artist, who refuses to play his alleys “Blowin ‘in the Wind” on stage in 1965, and his audience flaps that it was not a “dream concert”; The brave, renitated Dogmen driver, who provokes the entire US peace and civil rights movement by showing the Peace & Love Teestubentigbolden how to put a guitar under power. Mythization is the central cinematic procedure here: the genius, art and women.

Of course, a little love story has to be mixed in all of this. But because we are early hippies in the early 1960s, it is of course a love story that a man with several women has: a blonde (that on the record cover), a black woman (nameless) and a black-haired (the film Joan-Baez). Whether blond, whether brown, I love all women. The women in the film do not have as much enigmatic personality as our snuffing sunglasses, which is why they are exhausted to twist or cry their eyes from time to time.

Meanwhile, our film dylan is the rooster in the basket. The great pike with the sensitive artist soul and the cool Mir-Doch-All-Wurscht posture: always a little bit of fabric and muffle, a bit self-righteous, a little toxic masculinity light. “Your songs are like the paintings hanging in dental practices,” he says one morning to the film Baez, his lover, when he was already smoking and is handling his guitar on the ransacked bed.

But also the love stories: smooth, clean, conventionally. Even in the morning, awakening after a wild sex night, the film dylan wears amazingly clean underpants. After all, the film must be released in the cinemas from the age of twelve. This is a Disney production here, which is why no penis is allowed to dangle into the camera. It is very careful that the high -gloss color images and well -lit scenes are not contaminated. Even the neatly fried and tanned film-Johnny-Cash looks like he came straight from the gym, and not at all like the real Johnny Cash, who was a pale, shaky drug wreck at that time.

You can tell hero stories in different ways, even if it is anti-hero stories. In the end, however, a very stubborn hero story in Hollywood always becomes a very stuffed hero. As one like this. In which one always has to endure the horrific song “Blowin ‘in the Wind”.

»Like a complete unknown«, USA 2024. Regie: James Mangold. MIT: Thimothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, she Fanning. 141 min., Start: 27.2.