Like a Rollling Stone...
- Independent Ink
- Sep 23
- 2 min read
What makes a man, or, a woman, weep?
By Amartya Acharya
What makes a man, or, a woman, weep?
What strings and chords and reedy voices and robust ideology breaks through a human's defenses and strike the chord of emotionality, leading forth a barrage of tears?
Does it matter if James Mangold's A Complete Unknown is essentially four complete music performances, with narrative sprinkled in? I suppose not, but isn't it ironic that for a man as unconventional as Bob Dylan, whose passion for "going electric" is inadvertently tied to him breaking the draconian shackles of expectation and conventionality, has to be depicted in a movie which is self-imposed in its own conventionality?
Perhaps the subversion itself is the sprinkling of narrative zooming and swerving in and out of the musical numbers and the performances. Criticism is warranted perhaps, but at times Dylan's lyricism is critic proof.
Blowing in the Wind breaks me, Times they are a changin' makes me shed a tear.
If connectivity with a character on screen requires micro-changes within Dylan's face upon realising that the audience essentially is chanting and singing along to an anti-war song like a populist folk ditty, and thus anger stems from rebellion -- the movie perhaps can make me understand Bob Dylan.
It's all in that ‘perhaps’, and thus we needed more. We didn't need Dylan depicted as ‘A Complete Unknown’. Rather we needed to understand the mindset that makes him Like A Rolling Stone.
However, how can I deny the song and it's impact on me - so potent in its musicality that even recreations of such is impactful?
Masters of War broke my heart, but that's not due to Chalamet's performance. But the duet of Blowin the Wind is reverent, because of Monica Barbaro's performance as Joan Baez.
Subversion is in depicting Dylan as essentially being tracked through the eyes of Guthrie, Seeger, Sylvie, Baez, Cash and the rest in the vicinity. It's the distance that bothers the viewer as well as Dylan himself, the discomfort in not understanding the singer as much as the discomfiture he himself feels upon being boxed into genre and purity.
The movie itself in its structure is further boxing him in, in its conventionality.
Like Dylan, the only time it breaks through is in those musical performances. And that can't be the credit of the film, but Dylan himself.
Chalamet is good, but conflating that performance to the musical numbers is a fool's errand. At the very least, A Complete Unknown should be the gateway to Dylan. After all music like this needs to be shared, creativity like this is inspiring. even if the substrate to exhibit creativity is mediocre.
Amartya Acharya is a reluctant engineer from the town of Jalpaiguri, nestled in North Bengal, and a scientist and teacher. Inwardly a cinephile, an armour of film critic hiding the romantic expectations of good stories in every form of media consumption.