A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024) • Page 8

I'm Not There is great too, really bold and refreshing take(s) on Dylan

 

The Jokermen haaaaate I’m Not There. I haven’t seen it yet

 

I think I saw it again a few years after it came out. The Gere portion isn't as good but it is trying a lot more than the wax museum movie.

 

come on

 

It's not a bad movie and I can't fault something that gets more people to listen to Bob Dylan.

Biopics remind me a lot of VH1's Behind the Music, where they tried to add a rise-and-fall-and-rise story to bands whether or not they really fit. Ending the film just before Highway 61 Revisited is kind of flat because we know that Blonde on Blonde was an even bigger push and then we don't even get the traditional drama of the motorcycle crash. The love triangle also feels forced. We didn't even get to the first wife part of biopics.

 

I’m glad it focused on the small period of time that it did

 

His career got so much weirder though. The drifting into country and weirdness with Self Portrait, then the comeback, then the pivot to religious music and bad 80's instrumentation, to the second comeback in the Nineties. He is like a chameleon but the film limits the dimensions. Dewey Cox covered more genres in a short movie.

 

yeah but Dewey Cox is fictional, if they covered all that with this film I don’t think it works as well as it did and it becomes the VH1 doc that you talked about. This is just him becoming Bob Dylan which I think was the correct decision.

 

Is that the real Bob Dylan, or the most famous one? He was really only that Dylan for two and a half albums. He was making country music before the Sixties ended.

 

I am not blaming the movie or the director as much as I am the subject. The inevitable Kurt Cobain movie has a clear three-act structure. A Beatles movie has a clear three-act structure. Dylan is too slippery.

 

wasn't there an unofficial kurt cobain movie already about the last few days of his life

 

yeah but courtney blocked gus van sant from using any specifics

it's pretty good. the songs Michael Pitt recorded from the album wouldn't make the b-sides of incesticide but there are much worse original songs for music movies

 

Segment of time biopics are great. Imagining seeing Lincoln and being like "wait they skipped over Gettysburg!!"

Or like Love & Mercy going back and forth between Pet Sounds/Smile producer era Brian Wilson and 80's recluse era Brian Wilson is a great one too.

 

Love and Mercy is definitely one of the best of these films that I’ve seen

 

I wouldn't mind seeing Mangold do a Woody Guthrie biopic as a sort of "prequel" to this.

 

Pretty formulaic for such an interesting man. There’s a coldness, an emptiness in a lot of scenes here. The setups for the big songs almost border on parody, but the performances (acting from the leads and music) are great and save this from being downright bad.

 

Need A Real Pain film of Bob and Van wandering around Greece

 

on hulu a week from today

 

Yeah that would suck for most of my friends. Tiktok already blows up the lifestyle enough. Just read you can't win by jack black if you want to know about traveling

 

Streaming on Hulu. Watched a bit on Disney+