Two familiar genres with diverse themes top the Christmas week programming as motion picture players begin to ramp up their serious jockeying for next year’s Academy Awards. A musical biopic — this one about the legendary Bob Dylan — and a serious drama about the risks of office sexual politics are tempting film fans, who like to celebrate their love of moviegoing in theaters.
Timothee Chalamet for “A Complete Unknown” and Nicole Kidman for “Babygirl” are probable acting Oscar nominees, with their respective movies also likely to score some additional nominations in key categories.
“A Complete Unknown” follows a young Dylan, who presents himself as a mythical visitor with a mysterious past as he arrives in New York City from Minnesota in January 1961 and becomes a mainstay of the Greenwich Village folk music scene. His first major task is to visit his idol, an ailing 48-year-old Woody Guthrie. The beloved singer was a patient at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. It’s here that Dylan also begins his musical relationship with folk music icon Pete Seeger.
The breezy story tracks Dylan’s early rise as a musician up to the point where he decides to use an electric instead of an acoustic guitar at the Newport Folk Festival on Sunday, July 25, 1965, to play and sing “Like a Rolling Stone,” much to the chagrin of devoted concert attendees, most of whom are seriously ardent folk music followers. For them, rock and folk didn’t mix.
The men running Newport aren’t happy either and chaos reigns in a series of cleverly crafted scenes that edify moviegoers about the times in which the folkies were a-living. The build-up to and depiction of the freewheeling Dylan changing his musical messaging is well-directed by James Mangold, who has created a tightly focused film that hits the highlights of the start of the singer’s fame. Those wanting a deeper understanding of the importance of Dylan and his songs might be disappointed.
However, Mangold, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jay Cocks, lets savvy moviegoers know immediately what to expect because he’s based his film on Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric!” The movie also features Scoot McNairy as Guthrie, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, and Elle Fanning as Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie Russo, a fictional character based on his then-real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo.
There’s not a weak performance from anyone, including an outstanding Edward Norton as Seeger. A supporting actor Academy Award nomination is in the cards for Norton. Chalamet is terrific. He looks like a young Dylan, who was 19 when he showed up on the Manhattan music scene, and he sings and sounds like Dylan. Chalamet doesn’t do an impression of the icon, rather, he delivers a remarkable incarnation.
In a social media post, Dylan himself wrote this: “There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!) Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.”
Take note of Dylan’s use of the word “fiasco” to describe what went down at Newport. He has been involved in the film’s making. Mangold sat down with him numerous times, and the songwriter gave him notes on the script. Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen is a producer.
“A Complete Unknown” is a worthwhile addition to the field of biographical musical dramas. The exceptional soundtrack includes such cultural anthems as “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”
The movie examines Dylan’s friendships and sexual relationships smartly, and serves to inform, even if it doesn’t deeply delve into and explain Dylan’s life and career. I appreciated its storytelling style and learned things from the information it does impart. I also found the film to be immensely entertaining.
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“Babygirl” is a powerful drama that examines the complex dynamics within a professional setting in Manhattan, when high-ranking CEO Romy Mathis (Kidman) participates in a forbidden romance with an alluring office intern named Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who is many years younger than she is. The boldly adult story is about sexual expression and the use of a dangerous male-female relationship as a possible game of repression.
The movie is relentless in its exploration of sex as a means of domination. Additionally, Mathis is married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), and the risk of discovery is intensely ever-present. Ah yes, the games some people are willing to play.
Writer-director Halina Reijn has created a markedly graphic erotic psychological thriller that allows her to explore modern attitudes about what used to be known quaintly as an “office romance.” If there’s an upside, which is the blissful comfort of a human connection, then it’s mitigated by the downside – discovery and disgrace.
Interestingly, this is the second movie of the awards season – the other is “Queer – in which a young adult male is not only the object of someone’s affection but also plays a game of ethereal aloofness. Samuel meet Eugene.
Filmmakers have long studied the effects of obsessive behavior in relationships, most famously perhaps in “Fatal Attraction” from 1987. In 2023, another female writer-director, Chloe Domont, delivered the underrated “Fair Play,” an exceptional feature that tackles the subject of a sexual relationship that also involves the underpinnings of office advancement.
Reijn’s screenplay is a remarkable framework for her robustly adult goals, and she’s gotten standout performances from Kidman and Dickinson that result in a perfect pairing of unequals in an office but equals in terms of performers understanding their characters.
What is the desire to be with another person – perhaps to control and manipulate them to the extreme – that causes people to risk everything because of passion? See “Babygirl” for the answer.