A Complete Unknown (R)

Timothée Chalamet is Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, a biography of Mr. Robert Zimmerman from his 1961 arrival in New York through 1965 when he “goes electric” at the Newport Folk Festival

This is an extremely straight-down-the-middle look at Dylan as he comes to New York City, befriends an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and buddy Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), becomes a big noise in the folk music community and then itches against the fame and the expectation that he stay in a strict musical lane. Along the way he meets and has relationships with (fictional) folk music fan/artist Sylvie (Elle Fanning) and with fellow folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) — both women who the movie doesn’t do a lot for in terms of fleshing them out and making them more than reaction shots to whatever Dylan is doing. (Baez as a character feels particularly underserved.) Bob enjoys the money and to some degree the fame but he doesn’t like the getting-chased-out-of-bars side of fame or the part where people basically just want more “Blowin’ in the Wind” from him.

There are some nice elements to this movie that has the heavy lift of “introducing” Bob Dylan even though if you are inclined to see this movie you probably have your own built-in opinions of the man and his music. We get a bunch of standard biopic-rooted-in-time stuff, like Walter Cronkite delivering the news flash that JFK has been killed and snippets of the civil rights movement. And there is a fair amount of reaction to the news of the day that feels overly earnest. But I think generally the movie’s presentation of Dylan and his role in the capital S Sixties works — before he was Mr. Nobel Prize for Literature, Bob Dylan was just a talented, ambitious, annoying 20something trying to make it in the music business and also figure out his role in the culture, which was much more “mono-” than it is now. I also like the way the movie dips into the struggle between “old” folk and the “new” folk of the 1960s and how record companies were trying to bring in the kids but also keep whatever the old audience was with covers of classic folk songs. Folk can’t just be all Dust Bowl music, Sylvie argues, which helps inspire Dylan to write more about the Now (1960s). It’s a nice if stagey way to illustrate how today’s urgent issues become tomorrow’s nostalgia and helps to put us back there with Dylan in the 1960s headspace. At some point this tips into what basically becomes an argument about folk authenticity — “electric guitars!?!” — which is the same bummer to wade through as any argument about authenticity. And it feels like more of a stall in the movie’s energy than a lead-up to a dramatic climax. But overall I think the movie (and the Chalamet of it all) does do a good job of showing how Dylan’s lyrics and unpretty voice felt fresh for the time. B Available in theaters.

The Brutalist (R)

Adrian Brody gives a solid performance in The Brutalist, a movie with a three-hour-and-34-minute runtime.

There is a 15-minute intermission, which is either thoughtful of the movie or exhausting, depending on how you feel about what you’re watching and how much Coca-Cola Freestyle you drank in the movie’s first two-hour-ish chunk.

We meet Hungarian Lázló Tóth (Brody) as he arrives in America in 1947. Once a well-regarded architect of the Bauhaus school, Lázló survived the Holocaust with basically nothing, only finding out that his wife Erzébet (Felicity Jones) has also survived when he arrives in Philadelphia. There he meets up with long-ago-immigrated-to-America cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), whose last name is now Miller and who has a Catholic wife and has himself converted or something — adding a layer of tension to the relationship between the cousins. Lázló lives in a small back room at their furniture shop and is meant to help up the design game of the shop while working to get Erzébet and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) out of what is now a Soviet-controlled country.

Lázló arrives in the U.S. with not just the psychological trauma of all he’s experienced but also a broken nose that has left him with severe pain — all of which leads him to eventually turn to heroin for relief. When we finally meet Erzébet and Zsófia, they also carry around the scars of their ordeal. Erzébet’s long starvation has left her unable to walk and she uses a wheelchair when she first arrives. She also takes pills for pain in her legs that, when it strikes, leaves her screaming. Zsófia, who we first see in the movie’s opening scenes being interrogated by the Soviets and who was a child when Lázló last saw her, has been so traumatized she doesn’t speak.

And then Lázló meets rich psychopath Harrison Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) and his terrible son Harry Jr. (Joe Alwyn). Harry hires Lázló and Attila to turn his father’s messy study into a proper library for his fancy first editions. What Lázló creates is such a modernist piece of art that it eventually gets a feature in Life magazine, but Van Buren’s initial reaction is just to yell at everybody and refuse to pay. Eventually Van Buren realizes that he has stumbled on a genius and ensnares Lázló into building this ridiculous community center that will serve as a monument to Van Buren’s dead mother. It is immediately clear that Van Buren is very much a not-good guy but his lawyer, Michael (Peter Polycarpou), offers to help Lázló bring over his wife and niece and Van Buren offers Lázló a chance at regaining some of his past life as an architect, so Lázló begins the project that we see become an obsession for nearly a decade.

I realize it is deeply unsophisticated to complain about a well-made movie being too long — as though you’re admitting that your baby brain has been so TikTok broken it can’t hold complex thoughts. And, maybe, but also at some point the tonnage of a movie gets in the way of all the things a movie can accomplish. And The Brutalist — which really feels at least 40 minutes not just too long but too long without good reason — does attempt some interesting things. The production design and cinematography (both of which received Oscar nominations in this 10-nomination-receiving movie, including for Best Picture) are excellent, really putting the emotion on screen via colors and shapes and the way stone and shadow play such a big role in what we’re watching.

There is also a narrative that we’re used to in this kind of movie — where the refugee from the horrors of World War II comes to America and then just buckles down on the making of a new life and more or less assimilates — that this movie brilliantly argues with. In The Brutalist Lázló suffers in a way that feels more messy and genuine, can’t just close the door on the past and, as we eventually learn, works out some of his suffering through his architecture. And no amount of American hustle changes the fact that he was once a big deal with a full life of his own and is now at the mercy of the increasing awfulness of the racist, classist Van Buren to claw a little bit of that back. Likewise, Erzébet was a professional woman with a career as a foreign correspondent and isn’t here for everything’s-great-now housewife. Strong performances all around (even to a degree from Jones, I guess, saddled with another thin and thankless wife role) help break these people out of what you expect of them and give you something horrific but real. B In theaters.

Featured Image: A Complete Unknown (R)