... was catching
A Complete Unknown at the theater this afternoon.
Tamara had other things to do today that didn't really involve me, and didn't feel like she needed to see it 1) on the big screen or 2) as soon as it came out, so I hopped on the motorcycle and whizzed over to one of the three Regal Cinemas in Gainesville.
It's the oldest and least modern of the three, but I always notice that the staff there are particularly friendly and helpful to e.g. old guys who have trouble finding the tickets on their damn phones.
This isn't the kind of movie that needs one of my "fairly short and hopefully spoiler-free" reviews. If you're both an adult and haven't heard of Bob Dylan and picked up at least a fuzzy notion of the trajectory of his career, you've got zero reason to go see the film. You're either into his music, etc. or you aren't. If you are, nothing I could say would stop you from seeing it; if you aren't, nothing I could say would make you feel like you needed to see it.
So I'll just say I liked it, and riff a little on how impressive I found the acting.
To me, one mark of a good actor is his or her ability, in a film about a well-known, non-fictional person, to make you feel like you're watching that well-known. non-fictional person rather than just an actor pretending to be that well-known, non-fictional person.
For me it's easier to mentally agree that Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark / Iron Man or Ben Stiller is Derek Zoolander than that, say, Tommy Lee Jones is Douglas MacArthur or Renée Zellweger is Judy Garland (I picked two really good actors who IMO did good jobs for that comparison).
Timothée Chalamet (Bob Dylan), Edward Norton (Pete Seeger), Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez), and Boyd Holbrook (Johnny Cash) all nailed that difficult task.
I'm sure others in the film did, too, but those four in particular are "characters" I've known about and followed the work of to at least some degree for pretty much as long as I've been interested in music, which is pretty much since I remember anything at all (my first well-retained memory is of my third birthday -- I received a drum, and remember knowing, on that day, that my dad played guitar).
I consider myself a long-time fan of three of those four "characters," and at least an admirer of, if not quite a fan of, the fourth (that would be Baez -- I've always wanted to be a fan of her music, but it's always felt just a little too formal for me to quite get there with it).
Being asked to "play" any of the four, especially Dylan, had to be intimidating as hell ... and they all pulled it off.
Honorable mention to Scoot McNairy, who played Woody Guthrie. I don't know whether he pulled it off or not because I've never e.g. seen footage of Woody in the hospital dying of Huntington's chorea. I think he did a great job, but he wasn't playing the Woody I'm familiar with.
So there you have it -- my non-review of A Complete Unknown.
