Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Covering a tragic Olympics

 

   On September 5, 1972, the Palestinian group Black September began its attack on Munich's Olympic Village. By the time the siege ended, 11 Israeli athletes had been murdered; five terrorists were killed, and one German police officer died. 
   Movies have taken note. In 1999, One Day in September won an Oscar for best documentary. In 2005, Steven Spielberg released Munich, which dealt with fallout from the attack.
   Now comes September 5, a movie focused on how ABC covered an event that presented a real-time challenge for a crew that was ready to cover Olympic competition, not a gripping international news event with life-and-death stakes.
    The strength of Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum's approach rests on the recognition that those covering the Olympics were presented with logistical and ethical challenges for which they had no real preparation. 
   How would an exhausted crew handle the first live TV  broadcast of act of terror? Might such coverage jeopardize the hostages? What standards of confirmation would be employed to ensure the accuracy of ABC's reporting?
    At one point during the 15-hour broadcast, the crew received a report that the hostages were safe. ABC broadcast the news and later aired a correction. The report was false. 
    The incident raises a key issue about journalism conducted on the fly: the conflict between the pressure to be first and the responsibility to be right.
    ABC sports chief, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), fought to keep the story away from ABC's news division. He thought his crew was up to the task. John Magaro portrays Geoff Mason, the producer who found himself directing ABC's coverage; it was Mason's first day on the job. 
    Leonie Benesch plays Marianne Gebhardt, a German crew member who became invaluable because none of the others spoke German. Ben Chaplin plays Marvin Bader, the executive in charge of Olympic operations. 
    While tensions ripple through the control room, Arledge finds himself jockeying for satellite time. As questions about competition arise, Arledge must decide whether to give ABC's live feed to CBS when that network takes control of the satellite, which was being shared.
   Looking back on it, the events of September 5 seem more significant than the coverage, but for millions around the world, Munich became inseparable from what they saw on TV. Live coverage already had insinuated itself into news, but Munich ratified it, leaving us with a question we still haven't answered: How much do we need to see when the worst things happen? And who decides? 






    

Thursday, January 9, 2025

A woman of boundless scorn


   Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a major performance in director Mike Leigh's Hard Truths, a piercing drama set in a British working-class milieu as seen through the lens of a Black family with Jamaican roots. Jean-Baptiste, who appeared in Leigh's Secrets & Lies (1999), provides the bitter glue that keeps Hard Truths on track.
  It's a bumpy ride, distinguished by Baptiste Pansy's biting resentment, which turns mean when directed outward. Pansy doesn't conceal her contempt for strangers, supermarket cashiers, salespeople, and, most of all, her husband (David Webber), a hard-working plumber who takes enough abuse from his wife to qualify him for sainthood. 
  Pansy's son (Tuwaine Barrett) fares no better. Addicted to video games, he's unable to kickstart a productive life. Small wonder he's stuck: Mom prefers hectoring to encouragement. 
   Fortunately, Leigh includes a counterbalance to Pansy's intractable sourness. Michele Austin plays Pansy's younger sister Chantelle, a cheerful hairdresser liked by everyone she encounters. Chantelle's two adult daughters (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown) are equally engaging. They represent the branch of the family tree that still knows how to blossom.
   Despite her bitterness, which Leigh never fully explains, Pansy's family tries to stay even-keeled around her. They've had plenty of practice, and we feel their pain, the weight of their abidance.
   Leigh employs his usual method of story development. He invites his actors to invent characters and refines them throughout a lengthy process that results in a shooting script. The style leans heavily on character and emotional truth, overshadowing the importance of plot.
   At one point, Chantelle asks her sister to join her on Mother's Day for a visit to the cemetery where their mother is buried. The trip provides one more occasion for Pansy to rail about how life has short-changed her. 
     It's difficult to play a truly annoying character without alienating an audience. But before the movie ends, Jean-Baptiste has made it clear that Pansy's bitterness consumes her as much as it torments others.
   Like many embittered people, Pansy is driven by pain and fear, and Jean-Baptiste reveals the full measure of both. Pansy's anger is so deeply embedded, she may fear she'd vanish without it. 
    A memorable character, Pansy may remind you of someone in your family, albeit in an intensely magnified way. At least, I hope she's a heightened version of someone you might know.
   If not, you have my sympathy, as well as my respect for your ability to endure.


   

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

A bold refresh of a familiar genre


 Like many Americans, I knew little about Robbie Williams, a British pop star who began his ascent as a member of Take That, a boy band that scored big during the 1990s. In 1995, Williams set out on his own, scoring again as a solo act. Along the way, there were bouts with alcohol, drugs, and pop-star self-destruction.
   On the surface, Better Man -- a biopic about Williams's turbulent life -- seems depressingly generic. A driven young man is nearly ruined by fame but eventually rights his ship. So much for a story arc. 
  But Better Man does something novel to refresh a  familiar biopic approach. Evidently inspired by an acerbic Williams, who once described himself as a performing monkey, the movie depicts Williams as chimp. Ah, the burdens of being rich and famous.
   Director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) employs a CGI chimpanzee, dropping the effect into a world populated by fully human actors who never react to the chimp as if there were anything unusual about him. The CGI chimp holds his own as a compelling performer, massive screw-up, and bubbling well of insecurity. (Jonno Davies does motion-capture work and dialogue. Williams does the movie's voice-over narration.)
   A four-part documentary series on Netflix offers a look at Williams in the flesh, but Better Man provides a good idea about Williams's turbulent life.
   Gracey includes lots of music and production numbers -- an extravagant performance of the number Rock DJ on London's Regent Street, for example, and another in which Williams hangs upside down over an audience. Well-staged, the musical numbers bristle with sugar-high energy.
   The movie's human cast (yes, it's a strange thing to say) includes Steve Pemberton as Williams's father, an aspiring singer who abandoned his family to pursue a career in show business. Despite some bitterness, Robbie seeks Dad's approval, never quite shedding his insecurities as a working-class kid from Stoke-on-Trent.
    Raechelle Banno portrays Nicole Appleton, a singer who steals Willams's heart. He's smitten, but problems disrupt the relationship. Appleton has an abortion, after her record company applies pressure. Motherhood evidently didn't mesh with Appleton's girl-band image.
    The movie makes no attempt to paper over Williams's bad-boy flaws, but wears them defiantly, as if patting itself on the back for honesty. 
    Before it's done Better Man goes full showbiz cornball, but it has plenty of verve and a gimmick that comes close to concealing the movie's cliches. Moreover, the movie's chimp-based ploy likely will remain unique. Can you imagine A Complete Unknown with a chimp version of Dylan? Didn't think so.
    Did the movie make me want to know more about Williams or listen to more of his music? Nah, but it made for a brisk two hours and 15 minutes, and Gracey and Williams certainly took a major risk by monkeying around with a well-worn formula. Sorry, I couldn't resist.



     

Monday, December 30, 2024

When second thoughts nag

   

   I've been having an argument with myself, and I'm inviting you to listen in. I don't second-guess a lot of things, but I make an exception when it comes to my work.
  Let me clarify: I've been thinking about director Pedro Almodovar -- not the person whom I've never met and have only seen once in person when both he and I were much younger and Almodovar was making his first big wave on the festival circuit with 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
   In the early 1980s, Almodovar, now 75, gained bad-boy notoriety for the gay tilt of his movies, which could seem shocking even as his native Spain shed the oppressive strictures of Franco rigidity. But Almodovar always has been too talented to be pushed into one more genre ghetto.
    Visually robust and thematically provocative, Almodovar has established himself as a significant  presence in the “art film” world. The auteur theory isn't talked about much anymore, but Almodovar qualifies as a bona fide auteur.
  I mention this because I just finished writing a negative review of Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, an adaptation of a 2020 novel by Ingrid Nunez. I’ve read Nunez, but not What Are You Going Through, the novel on which The Room Next Door is based and which I’ve learned is more discursive than Almodovar’s film. 
   Sadly, I found The Room Next Door surprisingly uninvolving. I seldom felt as if I were encountering a film in which style and story merged in vivifying ways. Offering only trace elements of the director's capacious talent, The Room Next Door isn't a typical Almodovar film. 
     The Room Next Door is also Almodovar's first English-language feature, but I didn’t dwell on the impact that might have had on the movie. Lingual landscape is also cultural landscape, but thoughts about something else have been nagging at me: how to think about potential shifts in an artist's approach.
     Almodovar tells the story of a terminally ill war correspondent (Tilda Swinton) who asks an old friend (Julianne Moore) to share a rented house in upstate New York. There, she plans to end her life by taking a pill she obtained on the dark web. 
     Why didn't a foray into such emotionally charged territory seem more grounded in the messy business of dying? 
     I’ve seen too many people die of cancer. None of them looked as well-kempt as Swinton for their date with the reaper. They may have been brave and composed on their deathbeds, but their bodies were being destroyed. It's difficult fully to understand the word “ravaged” until you’ve seen a body under malignant siege.
       So, there was that. At the same time, I wondered if I weren't being too rigid. Why must every Almodovar movie conform to my idea of what an Almodovar movie should be? At the same time, I saw no reason Almodovar couldn’t deal squarely with death while keeping his voice at full throttle. (For examples, see Almodovar's Volver (2006) and Pain and Glory (2019), movies in which death plays a role.)
        Questions and more questions kept tugging at my sleeve. Could Almodovar's decision to make a film in English have signaled his need to take a break from being the Almodovar of expectation? Should an artist be admired for trying to expand his or her range? Is it possible for a filmmaker to exhaust a particular style or, at minimum, need a refresh? Shouldn't such transformative efforts be supported? Or perhaps, I wondered, was the style of The Room Next Door not transformative enough?
       I haven't resolved these questions, nor do I want to recant my review. To check myself, I watched The Room Next Door twice and concluded that it might represent a mismatch between Almodovar and the movie's source material. Still, when serious filmmakers don't seem to be working at peak levels, they deserve more consideration than might be given to less ambitious efforts.
     To take another recent example, director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Northman, and The Lighthouse) brings distinctive atmospheric artistry to horror. I don’t think Nosferatu, Eggers' latest, totally succeeded, but as a work of undeniable aspiration, it shouldn't be casually dismissed.
      Francis Ford Coppola couldn't have wanted to spend his life making Godfather movies. He’s always insisted on going his own way. But Megalopolis? In Coppola's case and in the case of some other filmmakers, one isn't just reviewing a single film but trying to understand where that film fits (or doesn't) into a career based on vision, acuity, and the ability to get under the skin and stay there.
      In his way, Almodovar may have been advocating for everyone being able to choose death if faced with an incurable illness that promises nothing but pain. I’ve known people, who, facing such illnesses, proceeded bravely and with resolve. Enough, as the saying goes, is enough.
        And, so, too, with this essay. Enough.
       Maybe I've misread Almodovar's movie, or perhaps the director has landed in the midst of a transition period, the kind of artistic purgatory where one keeps working while waiting for the heavenly call of renewal to sound. That’s what artists do. They work.
      As I said at the outset, I'm arguing with myself, turning my thoughts this way and that while living with the unavoidable prospect of never sticking a perfect landing. 


      

Friday, December 27, 2024

A woman opens death's door


     The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodovar's adaptation of author Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through, marks the Spanish director’s first English-language feature. Almodovar,  best known for his long career in Spanish film,  previously made two short films in English. 
      Language aside, I’ve generally counted on Almodovar to refresh my eye. I don't consider this a small matter in the age of Marvel, CGI, and mega-make-up. Almodovar’s bold use of colors, his ability to build stories around distinctive faces, and his skill at spicing his movies with tension, eroticism, and melodrama have made him an internationally known auteur.
     Serious and emotionally measured, The Room Next Door comes across as an anemic helping of  Almodovar, a modest drama about death that flirts with a major idea about climate disaster as it searches for a human approach to the doom that awaits every individual.
  Tilda Swinton, who has worked with Almodovar beforeplays Martha, a well-known war correspondent who has witnessed her share of battlefield death. Julianne Moore portrays Ingrida prominent author who early on learns that Martha has been hospitalized with terminal cancer. Once close, the two haven't seen each other in years.
    Ingrid visits Martha in the hospital, and their friendship renews -- albeit under extreme circumstances. Whatever relationship the two develop must end with grief.
    Whispers of plot emerge when an experimental treatment fails to halt the advance of Martha’s stage three cervical cancer. After exploring the dark web, Martha obtains a pill that will end her life. She's done with suffering.
     Martha asks Ingrid to join her in a sleek modern home in upstate New York where she’ll spend her remaining days. She doesn’t want Ingrid by her side when she dies, but she wants someone nearby, a person who’ll know that she's gone. 
      The screenplay leans on exposition to explain how Ingrid will escape criminal liability for Martha’s death. She faces exposure because New York has not yet legalized assisted death. Ingrid will also bring news of Martha's death to the daughter from whom the dying journalist has become estranged.
       The Room Next Door may be less stylish than other Almodovar films, but don't get the impression that Almodovar drains it of all color. The characters wear vividly colored clothes, and Almodovar doesn't neglect the film's interiors. Martha's design-oriented hospital room looks impervious to the smell of antiseptic, and Almodovar seldom meets a wall from which a painting can't be hung.
     But these touches don’t feel nearly as pleasurable as they have in previous Almodovar work; they're like footprints, reminders of the director’s presence rather than a fully realized expression of it.
       Mostly, The Room Next Door involves conversations between Martha and Ingrid, although at one point, a flashback reveals a memorable experience Martha had while covering the war in Iraq. Another scene, possibly the movie's most vivid, explains what happened to the father of Martha’s daughter, a Vietnam veteran who suffered from PTSD. 
       And, then, there's the film's thematic reach — or possibly its overreach. While looking after Martha, Ingrid meets with a writer (John Turturro) who lectures on the inevitability of climate-related catastrophe. Both Martha and Ingrid once had affairs with Turturro's character, who has become annoyingly stern. 
       Turturro’s appearance may be meant to highlight the gap between the prospect of global doom and the solitary death of one woman, but the horrors of climate change seem tacked on to an intimately told story about two women who share a profound experience.
      Appearing gaunt and pallid, Swinton makes Martha's death feel a bit abstract. Not her fault. Almodovar focuses on a woman who’s managing the messiness out of her death -- and perhaps out of the movie, as well. Moore makes Ingrid's openness apparent; she's uncertain about Martha's decision to end her life, but she's devoted to her friend.
     A thriller-like score by Alberto Iglesias vibrates beneath the movie's surface, but the music feels misplaced. I took that as a clue. Maybe this is a case of a mismatch between director and material. The Room Next Door didn't seem to give Almodovar or the story he tells enough room to breathe.


Monday, December 23, 2024

A CEO struggles with her sexual desires


   Nicole Kidman has never been timid about her acting choices. She has worked with directors who know how to push limits, notably Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), Lars von Trier (Dogville), and Yorgos Lanthimos, The Killing of the Sacred Deer
   Kidman takes another risk in Babygirl, an erotic thriller about a highly successful woman who has spent most of her life suppressing her darker sexual desires (her description not mine).    
    Long before we meet her, Kidman's Romy has climbed to the top of the corporate ladder: She's the CEO of Tensile, a company that makes robots that replace human laborers in the nation's warehouses. She's won the trifecta of contemporary happiness: corporate power, a loving husband (Antonio Banderas), and two great daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly). 
    So where's the risk in what sounds like a showcase for affluence and achievement? Romy’s bedroom life has stagnated; she may dominate in the boardroom but she wants to be dominated in the bedroom. 
   We know that Romy is sexually unfulfilled because the movie begins with a prologue in which she has sex with her husband, whose tastes are ... well .... conventional. They finish. He falls asleep. She races to another room to masturbate while watching porn on her laptop. She muffles sounds of ecstasy, but what's sex without the danger of discovery?
    Such is the beginning of a story that revolves around Romy's improbable affair with an obnoxiously confident intern (Harris Dickinson) at her company. Exposure could derail Romy's career, ruin her marriage, and alienate her daughters, precisely the sense of danger she needs to charge her psycho-sexual batteries. 
   Kidman captures Romy’s uneasiness about surrendering to Samuel's demands. She fights a battle with herself, unsure how far she wants to go with a brash young control freak.
   And, yes, it's difficult to believe that a corporate leader would tolerate Samuel’s aggressively inappropriate office behavior. 
   Romy first notices Samuel when he calms a wild dog during a street encounter in front of Romy's office building. What better sexual partner than someone who knows how to control unruly animal impulses? 
    For his part, Dickenon's Samuel is happy to boss the boss around in scenes that include ordering a naked Romy to kneel on fall fours, lick milk from a saucer, and other things that you may not want to try at home.
    While you're attempting to understand Romy, consider Samuel. What makes this guy tick? He talks about needing consent before proceeding in a sexual relationship with Romy, but he often comes across as a manipulative jerk. Maybe he exists only to trigger Romy's sexual revolution. 
     Dutch-born writer/director Halina Rejin gives her movie a high-gloss veneer that allows her to slide across issues of power, age difference, and the desires Romy has avoided, perhaps because she considers it unbecoming for a summa cum laude graduate of Yale with an impeccable resume.
   For quite a while, Babygirl plays like a movie that may have drawn inspiration from predecessors such as Fatal Attraction, but Rejin charts a cause in which Romy must learn to accept herself, "dark" eroticism included. It may sound glib, but Babygirl's story arc might hinge on Romy's transition from faked orgasms to the real thing.
    Put another way, the movie seems less interested in psychological depth than situational tension, putting Romy in a position some will see as more demeaning than liberating. The screenplay takes a sober turn in its third act, but, at least for me, Babygirl already had sacrificed too much credibility to dig its way out.
   And for all its supposed daring, Babygirl can’t transcend a contrived, soft-core feel. Put another way, this isn't Last Tango in the Boardroom.
     Rejin’s choice of jobs for Romy proves telling. Making her a CEO may have been influenced by the need to show her as a woman with power. Can an acclaimed executive wield power in the daytime while abandoning it at night? That might have been more intriguing had Rejin’s movie been less surface-oriented. 
     Initially, Romy meets Samuel in a hotel of his choosing; it’s too down-scale for her tastes. She may be willing to submit to his sexual orders. but damn if she doesn’t pick a better hotel for their future assignations. Perhaps one has limits, after all.
 
     

Fighting her way toward recognition


     Before watching The Fire Inside, I hadn't heard of Claressa Sheilds. That's because I know nothing about women's boxing. I probably should have. Shields, the movie's principal character, won back-to-back Olympic medals in 2021 and 2016. She has held middleweight titles, and has boxed in multiple weight classes.
   Gifted cinematographer Rachel Morrison makes her feature debut with a movie that celebrates Shields's accomplishments, telling her story with welcome efficiency, heart, and drive.
   Written by Barry Jenkins, who wrote and directed Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, The Fire Inside focuses on a fiercely determined young woman (Ryan Destiny) who punches her way into the world of boxing. 
    Early on, an insistent Claressa captures the attention of Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry), a trainer who initially resists coaching a woman but who becomes her staunchest ally and advocate.
    Morrison's multi-layered sports drama deals with family issues, the difficulties faced by female athletes who deserve to capitalize on their success, and the determination it takes to transcend the hardscrabble confines of Flint, Michigan.
    Destiny's performance matches the movie's tough-minded intentions; she imbues Claressa with grit that transcends cliche.  Claressa wants more than ring success; she's making an emphatic statement about her presence in the world.
    Henry brings compassion and conviction to his role as a trainer. When Claressa's life gets rocky, Crutchfield takes her into his home. He lacks sufficient funds to travel to China for the Olympics and doesn't have the necessary accreditation to participate at ringside. But even when their relationship hits a bump, we know he'll be there for her. Sometimes, it works for a movie to fulfill its genre commitments.
   Additional strong performances add authenticity, notably from Olunike Adeliyi as Claressa's neglectful mother.   
   Family dynamics, a no-nonsense aesthetic, and dedicated performances keep Fire Inside burning. Shields, by the way, is scheduled to fight in 2025. Her professional record: 15 wins, no losses, and no draws. 



Thursday, December 19, 2024

An architect's fight for integrity


   Few filmmakers -- Paul Thomas Anderson may be one -- make movies that seem to live and breathe in worlds of their own. The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet's three-hour and 15-minute foray into the life of a fictional Jewish Hungarian architect qualifies as such a movie. Like the architectural style for which it's named, The Brutalist can be raw and abrasive, a story blanched of sentiment.
   A movie as ambitious as The Brutalist puts a tremendous burden on the actor (Adrien Brody) who'll play architect László Toth, a refugee who arrives in the US in 1947 after being separated from his wife (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece (Raffey Cassidy).
    Stuck in an immigration limbo, Toth's wife and niece still languish in Europe, but Toth perseveres in the face of a displacement the movie makes clear with his arrival in New York City. A cockeyed shot of the Statue of Liberty signals that neither Toth nor we have reached a mythic land of liberty and justice. 
     But Toth’s not arriving in the America of historical realism, either. He lands in the world Corbet and his co-writer,  Mona Fastvoid, create, a world full of striving and duplicity, as well as opportunities for reinvention. 
     The movie, which shows with a 15-minute intermission, divides into two acts and an epilogue that allow Corbet steadily to open thematic doors. Among them:  capitalism’s inevitable perversion of art, the fierce individuality needed to protect artistic integrity, and the abiding agony of surviving events that never can be left behind. 
       Early on, Toth moves in with a cousin (Alessandro Nivola) who lives in Pennsylvania with his American wife (Emma Laird). Nivola's Attila seems to have shed his Old Country past, even converting to Catholicism. Toth designs furniture for the shop Attila owns, a dim connection to his previous life but still a creative endeavor.
     The story shifts gears when the cheerfully opportunistic Attila puts Laszlo in touch with Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn), the son of a wealthy tycoon (Guy Pearce). Harry wants to surprise his father by renovating the library where Dad houses his rare book collection.
   Laszlo makes the library into a design-oriented space that takes the rarity of the books into account. He designs shelves that turn to shield the books from the sun. 
    When he arrives home, Pearce's character -- an infuriated Harrison Lee Van Buren — tosses Laszlo and Attila out of his home. He hates the library, which, for him, has one only purpose: to  display his taste and purported erudition. 
    A reporter for Look magazine discovers the library and proclaims it as the masterwork of a genius whose career was disrupted by war and the Holocaust. Van Buren recants. He pays Laszlo for his work, and invites him to design a community-oriented art and spiritual center for the suburban town of Doylestown, Pa.
    The plot's density increases. Laszlo moves into quarters on Van Buren's estate. His wife and niece return to him. He continues a heroin addiction that began as a way to cope with an injury, and his relationship with Van Buren wobbles, leading to a jarring and metaphorically strained act of sexual violence during a trip the men make to Carrara to select marble for the chapel's altar. 
    I’m not sure that The Brutalist makes groundbreaking statements about art, America, or the incorporation of new populations into the American tapestry. Toth’s Judaism remains, but isn't deeply explored. Corbet introduces a Black character (Isaach De Bankole) who becomes part of Toth's orbit, but whose story proves minimal.
      Limitations aside, Corbet's characters are among the year's most vividly realized and distinctive, offering Brody, Pearce, and Jones opportunities for  major performances. Together, director and cast create moments that prove provocative, fresh, and artfully imagined. 
       You may remember the movie as if it were dream, not entirely graspable but notable for its lingering power.

   


Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Rolling into Bob Dylan's early days


 Timothee Chalamet does his own singing in A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold's lively look at the years Bob Dylan transformed from a folk music prophet into an electrified and electrifying musician who defied classification.
  Although his voice isn't quite as gritty as Dylan's, Chalamet comes close enough to keep the movie credible, and Mangold, who told Johnny Cash's story in Walk the Line (2005), adds enough rising-star power to make for a captivating entertainment.
  Chalamet and Mangold meet Dylan on his terms or their idea of Dylan's terms. A Complete Unknown isn't an interpretation of Dylan's work or life. It's a cultural chronology that begins in 1961 when Dylan -- formerly Bobby Zimmerman -- arrives in New York City. He was 19.
   Dylan has a mission: He wants to visit folk legend Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) who by then was hospitalized in New Jersey with Huntington's disease. He also catches the eye (and ear) of Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton in a smartly shaded performance. 
    Seeger recognizes Dylan as more than a wannabe trying to worm his way into an already established milieu. That may have been partly true, but Dylan had the chops and imagination to pay his own way.
    Tagged as an original, Dylan also came to the attention of Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), an established folks star. Their musical and personal relationship seemed to mean more to her than to him.
     The movie also depicts Dylan's relationship with Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning), an artist based on Suze Rotolo, a former Dylan girlfriend who passed way in 2011, long after the movie concludes at the fabled Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
    Dylan's shift from folk to rock causes a stir at Newport. Seeger struggles to persuade Dylan to use his star status to keep folk music in the forefront. Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) upholds the opposite view, urging Dylan to follow his gut.
   Norbert Leo Butz plays Alan Lomax, the staunchest of Dylan's opponents, a folk purist who tries to keep Dylan's band off the Newport stage.
   The movie includes 40 songs, many of them Dylan favorites that are fun to revisit, even if they're not sung by Dylan. Whatever you think of Chalamet's singing, it never sounds like he's serving up cheap covers of classic Dylan tunes.
   I suppose it's arguable that Chalamet is impersonating Dylan, but that insults his effort. It's quite a feat, playing an enigmatic genius, imp, poet, and artist.
  The screenplay for A Complete Unknown was written by Mangold and Jay Cocks based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald; Dylan fans may know where fact leaves off and fiction begins. In interviews, Wald has called the movie "poetically accurate."
   As it happens, I witnessed Dylan's moment of transition. As a young reporter, I covered a concert Dylan gave at a Syracuse, NY arena then known as the Onondaga War Memorial. During the first half of the concert, Dylan appeared alone on stage and sang the songs that had breathed new life into folk music.
    In the concert's second half, Dylan was joined on stage by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Half the crowd cheered; the other half screamed its disapproval, "Bring back the real Bob Dylan," I remember hearing someone yell.
   Dylan pressed on, like, say, a rolling stone.
   I don't know if Bob Dylan, who's now 83, ever has been knowable. Mangold suggests he was ambitious, difficult, and creative, cruel at times, and caring, at other times. If Dylan's career is about anything, it's about resisting definition. 
   Maybe that's why Mangold can't and probably didn't want to offer a definitive portrait. Instead, he highlights touchstones in a career that produced the only songwriter ever to win a Nobel Prize for literature. 
  Mangold, Chalamet, and the rest of the cast bring what could have been a dusty time capsule of a movie to life. That was more than enough for me.