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.

   

Motherhood is no picnic in ‘Nightbitch’

  Judging by its title, you’d half expect Nightbitch to revolve around a woman gangster who terrorizes her male counterparts with cunning and fury. 

  Director Marielle Heller takes a different tack, directing Amy Adams in what seems intended as an archly comic  look at a woman who realizes that four years of unrelieved motherhood is pinching the life out of her.  

   Her career as an artist? Lost? Sleep? Gone. Sanity? Almost drained. Help from her husband? There's not much of that either. 

  Scoot McNairy plays the clueless husband who travels a lot for business. He's not an ogre, just an average guy who has no idea about the amount of work it takes to be a mom. Additionally, he deludes himself about how much he shares the load.

   As part of her numbing routine, Adam's character also meets with other suburban moms (Zoe Chao, Archana Rajan, and Mary Holland). They gather for story hours for toddlers at the local library. Adams’s character initially disdains what she views as their mindless child-centered lives, but she eventually learns that her compatriots share similar frustrations.

   Is there a way out of this trap? Known only as "Mother,'' Adams' character asks the local librarian (Jessica Harper) to recommend books about magical transformations. Mother's request is prompted by her belief that she's transforming into a dog, a four-legged creature that runs free at night in the company of other dogs.

    And, yes, the movie takes this metaphor literally. Mother's physical transformation begins roughly midway through. Mother notices whiskers and fur growing on her body. Her full dip into doghood requires an effects boost.

    As Mother discovers her inner animal, she also remembers her relationship with her mother, a preview of coming attractions when viewed in retrospect. 

    Based on a novel by Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch isn't subtle -- no need for that when dealing with simmering rage, but the set-up is amusing, and Adams, who put on weight and shed make-up for the role, givers her performance some bite.

    Too bad the movie concludes with a copout that comes close to undermining the story that precedes it. Before her movie's done, Heller files away the movie's sharpest edges, sending us out of the theater disappointed rather than stimulated by the story's satirical sting.

'Speak No Evil' thrives on anxiety

 The first thing to know about the horror film Speak No Evil is that it’s a remake of a nasty 2022 Danish thriller directed by Christian Tafdrup. The second thing: Writer/director James Watkins (The Woman in Black, Eden Lake) softens the film’s edges while sustaining the heightened level of discomfort such pictures need.

 James McAvoy provides the film’s major performance as the brash, intimidating Paddy, owner of a remote British farm where he and his wife (Aisling Franciosi) are raising their young son (Dan Hough), a kid, whom we’re told, can’t speak because of a congenital defect that affected his tongue.

  The movie opens with a scenic Italian vacation during which Paddy and his wife befriend an American couple (Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis) who's  traveling with their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler). 

  A troubled marriage between McNairy's Ben and Davis' Louise and the anxieties of a 12-year-old daughter who’s about to leave childhood, give the story a bit of psychological texture.

  You’d have to never have seen a movie to miss the signs that Paddy and his wife are hiding menace behind facades of amiability.

   Watkins delivers numerous forebodings. That's part of the point. We know what's happening, but, for reasons that eventually become clear, Ben and Louise ignore or minimize obvious warnings.

   Watkins adds a woman-power spin, showcasing Louise’s increasing assertiveness in the face of Ben’s chronic ineffectuality. But it's McAvoy who revs the movie's engine: He takes a big bite out of his role, loading up on gleefully expressed aggression.

    Both young actors are good, and McNairy and Davis, who worked together on TV's Halt and Catch Fire, hit the right notes.

    At various points, the screenplay demands healthy suspensions of disbelief, and the ending probably will disappoint fans of the original, which offered a different kind of shock. Otherwise, Speak No Evil builds enough suspense and anxiety to support McAvoy’s performance as the screen’s latest charismatic lunatic.

A little kid and some very big questions

    C'mon C'mon speaks its own language, a movie about questions that can't be answered and the man and boy who are stuck trying to deal with them.

    Director Mike Mills introduces us to Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a disheveled, preoccupied man who volunteers to help his sister (Gaby Hoffmann), a woman who's struggling to take care of her nine-year-old son (Woody Norman). Hoffmann's Viv also is trying to keep her bipolar husband (Scoot McNairy) from totally derailing during one of his crises.

   Mills (20th Century Women, Beginners) seems less interested in  mental illness than in how adults and children communicate. How does one talk to a nine year old who raises the subject of abortion and who wants to know why his uncle isn't married?

   Given its focus on the adult/child relationship, C'mon C'mon easily could have been overwhelmed by sentiment. It's not. Credit Phoenix who may be constitutionally unable to do warm and cuddly. He makes it clear that Johnny might be as lost as his nephew. 

    Throughout the film, Johnny can be seen working on what appears to be a radio project. He asks a diverse variety of children what they think the future will be like and records their answers. He also records his reactions to their answers.

    Shooting in black and white, Mills punctuates his story with unexpected views of the cities in which Johnny finds himself, principally Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and New Orleans. 

    Johnny, who hasn't seen his nephew Jesse in more than a year because of a conflict with his sister, first meets the boy in Los Angeles, where the boy's harried mother faces numerous challenges. 

    Mom leaves Jesse in Johnny’s care when she travels to San Francisco to seek help for her husband. When Johnny has to return to New York for work, he proposes taking Jesse with him. 

   Viv initially resists but she has little choice but to allow Johnny to travel to New York where Jesse helps him record the natural sounds of the city. He's opening the boy to the larger world, but also maintaining a distance from Jesse. Johnny doesn't try to shape everything that Jesse encounters.

    Not surprisingly, Johnny must convince Jesse that he's safe with an uncle he hardly knows. To complicate matters, Jesse has ways of getting on adult nerves, launching ceaseless barrages of questions and observations.

    Mills places Johnny’s interviews with kids throughout the movie. He dedicates to "D-Man" Bryant, a nine year old who Johnny interviews and who later was killed. The kids are real and give the movie a documentary flavor.

   With unruly hair and a bit of a gut, Phoenix conveys the confusion of a man who seems to be turning to children to find answers that have eluded him, and in the end, the story gets under your skin with its  collection of awkward conversations, adult anxiety, and testing behaviors from a kid whose world has been shaken.

    The film owes much of its success to cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who gets close to the film's children without intruding on them. He creates a world that feels both naturalistic and unfamiliar, just the right laboratory for this kind of cinematic experiment.

    Norman gives one of those kid performances that makes you wonder how Mills obtained it. Jesse seems entirely unaffected -- even when he's being self-consciously shrewd. And like most kids, he can be both endearing and, yes, annoying.  Jesse has yet to learn the art of self-censorship.

   The brief encounter between Johnny and Jesse captures the kind of intimate breakthrough that's possible when crisis strikes and a great gap of vulnerability opens, presenting itself as a possible moment of  grace -- at least when viewed in retrospect.

Another foray into gangster rot

It's pungent, but Killing Them Softly feels weary and familiar.

Given the mall-culture perkiness that dominates so much of American culture, it's hardly surprising that filmmakers are attracted to downbeat stories about criminals and crime. Working in the criminal milieu can relieve filmmakers of the pressure to make moral judgments about characters -- or even to fret about how vicious they might become.

In Killing Them Softly, director Andrew Dominik looks for nourishment in the low-life world created by the late George V. Higgins, a novelist who specialized in Boston-based tales from the low end. Director Peter Yates adapted Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle for the big-screen in 1973, giving the great Robert Mitchum one his best roles -- and that's saying something.

Now, Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) has updated Cogan's Trade, a 1974 novel by Higgins. Setting the story at the tail-end of the 2008 presidential campaign and in the middle of the fiscal meltdown that's still shaking the economy, Dominik moves Higgins's characters to the shabbiest parts of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Dominik's adaptation also tries to mount a critique of American capitalism, complete with a riff about the hypocrisy of a slave-owning Thomas Jefferson and the audacity of politicians (in this case, President Obama and John McCain) who try to portray the U.S. as a community of folks pulling together in common cause.

Bullshit, says Dominik's movie -- and it says it loudly.

In fact, Dominik delivers the message so directly that watching the movie might put you in mind of reading a book that's already been underlined by the time you get hold of it.

Hey, I'm as open to capitalism bashing as the next guy, but Domink's attempts to link the fiscal crisis to mob mores -- or the lack of them -- struck me as simplistic and hollow. The idea, I suppose, is to find some sort of equivalence between the big-time mainstream economy and the brutal shadow economy in which small-time criminals operate.

Drably shot and evoking the storytelling structure of Quentin Tarantino (particularly Pulp Fiction), Killing Them Softly punctuates its gangster talkfest with bursts of violence as the various characters betray one another in plot twists based as much on how people perceive reality as on what's actually real, another theme the movie explicitly states.

Stories such as this don't really need much by way of stylistic embellishment, but Dominik puts his stamp on the material anyway. A slow-motion assassination is set to the strains of Love Letter Straight From the Heart, not the last time that music is used to create an ironic counterpoint to the action. Same goes for a steady stream of TV and radio newscasts that become as monotonous and annoying as yellowing wallpaper in a cheap hotel room.

The story begins when a former felon (Vincent Curatola who played Johnny Sac in HBO's The Sopranos) devises a scheme in which a couple of dim-witted thugs (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) are asked to rob a card game run by Markie Trottman (Ray Liotta). Markie once arranged to have one of his own games robbed, but made the mistake of boasting about it. Curatola's Johnny Amato believes that Markie automatically will be blamed for the heist, thus providing a risk-free opportunity for enrichment.

The robbery -- one of the slowest and most protracted I've seen on screen -- sets off a string of gangster machinations that center around a white-collar mob rep (Richard Jenkins) who asks a cunning hit man (Brad Pitt) to clean up a variety of messes caused by the robbery.

Pitt's Jackie Cogan decides he can't do all the dirty work by himself, so he calls for help in the person of Mickey (James Gandolfini), a hit man who's not at the top of his game. Instead of taking care of business, Mickey spends his time drinking and whoring or telling stories about problems with the wife who keeps serving him with divorce papers.

There are funny, pungent touches here, including a bit about dognapping. Too bad, that oddball crime turned up earlier this year in Seven Psychopaths, but still...
Look, Pitt has de-glamorized himself before. Gandolfini has a nifty monologue, but putting him in any mob movie can't help but evoke memories of Tony Soprano. In general, the actors seem committed in a dreary sort of way that fits the movie's bleak settings.

Although Higgins arrived early on the low-life scene, his successors have made this kind downbeat approach a little too familiar, and it might have been nice had Dominik generated a little suspense about what was going to happen next.

From the moment Johnny Amato proposes robbing Markie's card game, it's apparent that nothing good is likely to result. And by the time, Pitt's character delivers the final bit of dialogue -- the bitter pill the movie has been waiting for us to swallow -- it feels more like a punchline than a dramatic conclusion.