James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is okay.
As in, not good, but also not completely terrible. Suffering from a distinct lack of imagination, it hits a lot of the main beats Dylan fans already know, while indulging in a lot of the distracting artifice that biopics – specifically, James Mangold biopics – are known for.
And so it is that Unknown asks us to believe that Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) is unfamiliar with traditional folk song “Scarborough Fair” (in order for Seeger to be blown away by Dylan (Timothée Chalamet)’s interpretation of it), or the laughable fiction that Dylan conceived anti-war protest song “Masters Of War” on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then there’s Unknown’s absurd suggestion that a sort of “Big Folk” conspiracy tried to block Dylan from performing his electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Yes, Newport ‘65 was controversial; no, Pete Seeger did not assemble a shadowy cabal of folkies to intimidate Dylan out of performing.
For what it’s worth, the cast acquits themselves well, Chalamet doing a serviceable Dylan impression, Norton and Monica Barbaro even better as Seeger and Joan Baez, respectively. (All three are Oscar nominated this year.)
A Complete Unknown is hardly the first attempt to capture something of Dylan on-screen, whether we’re talking documentary – D.A. Pennebaker’s excellent Dont Look Back (1967) and Martin Scorsese’s masterful No Direction Home (2005) – or narrative feature, such as Todd Haynes’s semi-experimental I’m Not There (2007) and Dylan’s own Masked and Anonymous (2003), which he co-wrote.
But the best Dylan movie, even as it’s not specifically about Bobby, is the one that made Oscar Isaac a star, even as it went criminally overlooked by the Academy the year it came out.
Much like Dylan himself, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) is funny, it’s dark, it’s rambling — and it’s got a killer soundtrack.
(Spoiler Warning for the remainder of this article.)
The Coen brothers had dabbled in the Dylanesque before Inside Llewyn Davis: “The Man in Me” (from 1970 album New Morning) appears at two key moments in The Big Lebowski, while O Brother Where Art Thou? heavily features traditional song “A Man of Constant Sorrow”, which Dylan covered on his debut album Bob Dylan (1962). There’s an argument to be made that the entire Coen brothers’ filmography is Dylanesque, with its enigmatic, counter-cultural vibes and ever-expanding cast of dark wanderers.
The Coens’ fascination with Dylan reached its peak with Inside Llewyn Davis, a bleakly comic ramble through a handful of very bad days in the life of the fictional Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), loosely based on Dylan’s fellow traveller Dave Van Ronk. Van Ronk, who died in 2002, was a stalwart of the Greenwich Village folk scene, friend and inspiration to a host of future talent including Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Davis isn’t directly about Van Ronk, but it borrows his music and anecdotes from his life for its own tale of a decidedly less popular, ultimately doomed troubadour, the sad-sack Llewyn Davis. Oscar Isaac has never been better than in this role, bringing life to a title character who could best be described as a likeable asshole, one you can’t help but rooting for, even as he continues to make the wrong choices and exasperate all the wrong people.
When Inside Llewyn Davis begins, it doesn’t take long to see our protagonist is already in trouble. It’s 1961, and Davis (Isaac) is on stage at the Gaslight Cafe, the legendary Greenwich Village institution which closed its doors in 1971, performing traditional folk tune “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me”. After wrapping up to fairly generous applause, Davis heads to the back alley where, he’s been told, a “friend” is waiting. Turns out it’s a mysterious stranger, face obscured by shadows, who proceeds to knock Davis out, flat on his back, for reasons which remain unexplained until the film’s final moments.
Things hardly get better from here. In short order, Davis loses his friend’s cat, puts in a dispiriting visit with his agent/producer Mel (Jerry Grayson), and finds out that his friend Jean (Carey Mulligan) is pregnant, possibly with his baby, and needs him to pay for an abortion.
He also, at nearly every possible turn, finds ways to annoy the hell out of the people around him — friends, lovers, colleagues alike. At various points, Llewyn Davis will carry a guitar, a cat, and a box of unsold records on his shoulder, but it’s the chip he has there which will have the most pronounced impact on this film.
While it’s obvious that Davis’s own shortcomings as a musician are a source of frustration, his abrasive behaviour remains difficult to understand until, around the halfway mark, we learn of the suicide of his musical partner Mike Timlin (an unseen, but oft-heard Marcus Mumford) some years earlier. However unhappy Davis may be at his own lot, it’s clear that Mike’s death haunts him at both a personal and professional level: their duet recording of “Fare Thee Well”, a song which Davis performs solo in the film, appears to have been the only real hit of “Timlin & Davis” before Mike killed himself.
Late in Inside Llewyn Davis, there’s a scene – I guess it would count as a climax, in a generally low-key film which resists climaxes – in which Davis auditions for the unimpressed Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham, playing an obvious stand-in for Bob Dylan’s manager Al Grossman).
After telling Davis “I don’t see a lot of money here”, Grossman offers an alternative: join a trio he’s putting together, so long as he’s “comfortable with harmonies”. Davis declines, but admits he used to have a partner once. Grossman’s deadpan reply – “well that makes sense” – is simultaneously the funniest and saddest line in the film: Davis is just talented enough, but also just unlikeable enough, that a solo career was never really in the cards. But he’s too hard-headed, and probably also too traumatized by his partner’s death, to seize a second chance when it’s presented to him. (Grossman’s trio is clearly meant to be Peter, Paul, and Mary.)
The music in Davis is all wonderful, albeit requiring a certain predisposition to classic folk tunes. (Some audiences find the soundtrack just as irritating as Davis’s personality.) Isaac performs “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me”, “Green, Green Rocky Road”, “The Death of Queen Jane”, and two different versions of “Fare Thee Well” (the “Mike Timlin”, aka Marcus Mumford, duet, clearly the superior version), while Justin Timberlake(!), Carey Mulligan, and Stark Sands deliver probably my favourite rendition of “Five Hundred Miles“. At one point, Adam Driver shows up for five minutes to record a truly ridiculous novelty song with Davis and Jim, the character played by Timberlake. The non-diegetic soundtrack includes Van Ronk’s version of “Green, Green Rocky Road”.
This being a Coens film, Inside Llewyn Davis often plays more like incident and anecdote than a rigorously structured narrative. Davis’s misadventures with the cat – tellingly named Ulysses – take up a large chunk of the film, which also finds time for a miserable dinner party, Davis’s failed audition, and a weird interlude featuring an even more abrasive John Goodman as an unpleasant jazz musician who Davis carpools with on a road trip to Chicago.
It’s all much funnier than this description suggests, although, on first viewing, it can be hard to tell where all this (blackly funny) unpleasantness is heading. That is, until we arrive at Inside Llewyn Davis’s final moments, when – mega spoilers follow – we discover what this film has been about all along.
With about ten minutes left in Inside Llewyn Davis, we return to the Gaslight Cafe, for a repeat of the opening scene. In fact, it’s the same opening scene, the Coens revealing to the audience that what we saw at the start was in fact a flash-forward.
But the scene plays out longer this time, revealing what happened before Davis’s confrontation in the alleyway: after wrapping up “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me”, Davis plays one final number, “Fare Thee Well”, the song he recorded as a duet with the late Mike. We’ve heard this song before, earlier in the film, but its performance now takes on added meaning, the absence of Mike (Mumford)’s harmonies sorely felt.
We also know, thanks to the preceding scene, that Davis only took tonight’s gig to earn the money to purchase his seaman’s licence – he’s shipping out with the Merchant Marines in the morning. (Incidentally, this is also when we learn the identity of the mysterious stranger from the opening: it’s the husband of a singer who Davis drunkenly heckled.)
But what really matters in this scene is not so much what we see, but rather what we’re about to hear. As the camera follows Davis out the door and into the alley, we catch a glimpse of the next act tuning up: he’s young, curly-haired, and possessed of a distinctive nasally voice.
We don’t actually see the young Bob Dylan perform in Inside Llewyn Davis, but we do hear him, as he opens his set with his own, vastly superior, version of “Fare Thee Well”. It’s an extremely uncool – but very Dylan – flex aimed at the outgoing Llewyn Davis. It’s also, as it happens, a stunt Dylan pulled in real life, infamously mocking Donovan with a similar bit of musical one-upmanship in a moment captured in Dont Look Back.
The problem – for Donovan and Llewyn Davis alike – is that Dylan’s ego was absolutely matched by his prodigious musical talent. Dylan really was – whether in 1961 at the Gaslight or 1965 on tour in England – just that much better, more interesting, and more innovative than anyone around him. It’s very, very sad for Llewyn Davis, already headed to the Merchant Marines, to be so overshadowed on the night of his final performance. But it’s also very, very funny that, after struggling so hard for so long, all it takes is the first few chords of Dylan’s “Farewell” to usher this poor loser out the door. It’s a twist ending of sorts, the Coens finally delivering the thesis statement that’s been present along: once Dylan arrived, everything changed.
In the space of ten minutes, Inside Llewyn Davis says more about Bob Dylan and the 60s folk revival than A Complete Unknown manages in all two-and-a-half of its pedestrian biopic’ing. It’s an exceptional film, one of the Coens’ best (it matches Fargo in my books), and a must-see for Dylan fans.
Cat lovers, brace yourselves.
***
Inside Llewyn Davis is available for rent on Criterion BluRay and DVD at Bay Street Video. You can also watch it, with commercial interruption, on CBC Gem.
