spinofflive
He has the hair, the sunnies, the cigarette and the hands. Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Image: Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures
He has the hair, the sunnies, the cigarette and the hands. Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Image: Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures

Pop CultureJanuary 25, 2025

Timothée Chalamet is some kind of magic: A Complete Unknown, reviewed

He has the hair, the sunnies, the cigarette and the hands. Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Image: Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures
He has the hair, the sunnies, the cigarette and the hands. Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Image: Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures

A Complete Unknown may be fictionalised but it gets the key parts right.

What is biography for? Especially the biopic, in which years and people and facts must be compressed into a mass-audience-friendly, sub-three-hour format. And what does biography do with an artist as immortal, inimitable and unwilling as Bob Dylan? No filmmaker understood the Dylan conundrum as well as Todd Haynes whose film I’m Not There saw multiple actors depicting fictionalised shades of a possible Dylan – the runaway, the liar, the artist, the lover, the evasive interviewee, the ever-evolving musician, the strung-out touring artist – and saw Cate Blanchett emerge as the greatest Dylan mimic of all time. 

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown plays it straight. Sort of. Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, Mangold’s biopic hones in on Dylan’s irresistible origin story: from anonymous to superstar in just a few years. Hollywood fodder in the best sense: the film is a handsome version of Dylan’s ascent with all its romantic possibilities. Mangold wastes no time and drops us into the story as Dylan arrives in the Greenwich village of 1961 and ends the film just after the Newport Folk Festival 1965 where Dylan blew a hole in the folk-legend cage that was clamping down around him by performing an electric set, showing his mentors and fans alike that he did not care to be boxed in. 

Chalamet’s Dylan-stare is spooky (for a real-life version of it, see this amusing and insightful clip from a BBC doco on Dylan from 1986). When he’s gazing at Monica Barbaro’s barefoot Joan Baez singing her vibrato-loaded folk tunes on stage at Newport you can see anger and desire, boredom and calculation churning in his eyeballs. Like Chalamet embodied the unhinged joy of Wonka, so he embodies the scruffy, potent boy-rebel that was early Dylan, harmonica and all. 

The harmonica playing is excellent. Chalamet’s singing – while not Dylan – is a kind of Dylan. Dylan always sounded old even when he was young: the gravel that was to come was always there, a fine sand, right underneath. Chalamet doesn’t have the sand but he is decent on the guitar, and he has the smile, the hair, and the sunglasses; the limbs, the long fingernails, and the hands that splay while fingers pinch a cigarette and he rubs his weary nicotine-stained mouth with his thumb. He mostly wrangles that iconic intonation that seems to fly away and land heavily at the same time. Chalamet’s performance is some kind of magic and is a huge part of why A Complete Unknown is a compelling, watchable, if not honeyed version of Bob Dylan’s legendary path from penniless nobody into full-blown phenomenon. 

But what makes A Complete Unknown sing are the performances that surround Chalamet. Daniel Fogler’s turn as wily music manager Albert Grossman skates too close to stereotype at first – the executive with comedic value in an expensive suit while his latest find more closely resembles New York’s homeless than its future hero – but he soon settles into the role of trying to keep up with his latest goldmine.

Ed Norton’s Pete Seegar is perfection: Norton captures the goodness, the earnestness of the folk-musician-activist and nurturer of Dylan’s early ambitions. When Dylan ignores the pleas of Seegar, and his fellow white-haired board members of the Newport Folk Festival, and plugs in, Norton’s watery-eyed expression is the same brand of kindly heartbreak you see in documentaries of the real Seegar, the one who wanted to pull the cables out to stop Dylan from producing what he heard as a terrible noise. (In the film, Seegar’s wife steps in and stops him. A fictional detail that could be seen as an attempt to insert a strong female character in a film mostly dominated by men.) 

Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez singing with Chalamet’s Dylan. Image: Macall Polay / Searchlight Pictures.

Monica Bartolo is a pithy Joan Baez. As Chalamet’s renditions are not Dylan, Barbaro’s aren’t Baez but she captures the essence, and the look, with breathtaking talent. Particularly for an actor who did not sing or play guitar when she landed the role. Bartolo’s voice carries a Baez-like vibrato and her body and speaking voice are charged with Baez mannerisms; “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” is delivered with a satisfying, Baez-esque tone (seriousness on top, humour underneath). 

Mangold’s success with A Complete Unknown is his ability to deal in broad brushstrokes. It is tedious to point out smudgings of the truth, especially in a Hollywood biopic, but time is toyed with and there is mythmaking upon mythmaking at work. Which doesn’t make it bad. It makes it what it is: a fictionalisation of Dylan’s formative years.

Where the film takes its greatest license is with the character of Sylvie, played by Elle Fanning. Sylvie, for all intents and purposes, is Suzy Rotolo, who was Dylan’s girlfriend between 1961 and 1964 – she’s the one with him on the cover of the 1963 Freewheelin’ album. Dylan credits Rotolo’s artistic interests and involvement in activist organisations with influencing the political direction, and style, of his songwriting that was so celebrated, and that so captivated his first followers. He is on record saying he regrets the song Ballad in Plain D, which is unmistakably vicious – a revenge song about his break up with Rotolo and his feelings about her family (the film depicts Rotolo’s sister, but not mother, who Dylan reportedly did not get along with on account of her not enjoying the way he treated her daughter). It was Dylan himself who requested that Suzy’s real name not be used in the film

Elle Fanning’s Sylvie and Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan. Image: Macall Polay / Searchlight Pictures.

Fanning’s Sylvie is the romantic anchor of the story. The betrayed girlfriend upon which aspects of Dylan’s more magnetic and deceitful nature plays out. His affair with Baez is famous. Rotolo’s hurt over it, famous, too. The film skips over the abortion of Rotolo’s pregnancy to Dylan and at one point seems to direct the audience to make an unnecessary comparison between Dylan’s artistic talent and her own when, at a party, she is heard talking about her painting against a shot of an unremarkable portrait.

Instead of being a particularly three-dimensional character, Sylvie is symbolic: a domestic cocoon that Chalamet’s Dylan both exploits and rebels against. When Sylvie’s eyes fill with tears as she’s watching Dylan and Baez play ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ she, in a way, stands in for all Dylan fans. The ones desperate to know him, get close to him – an impossibility unless you were equally talented, could meet him on his own stage, and even then, as Baez knows, that wasn’t a certainty either. 

A Complete Unknown gives the masses what they want. The Dylan – so young – that pours out miraculous song after miraculous song; the Dylan that was stressed, even endangered, by the fame that grew around him; the Dylan that rides a motorbike like he’s riding a dragon; the Dylan that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be pinned down. A Dylan that was hungry to evolve, experiment, “tread mud on the carpet” as Boyd Holbrook’s scene-stealing Johnny Cash encourages.

While watching A Complete Unknown, Miranda July’s recent novel All Fours sprang to mind. The novel (autofiction, meaning the story draws from July’s real life) documents a semi-famous female artist’s struggle to evolve. It takes a book to figure out how and why she needs to do this. July’s artist labours over her needs, tries to balance those with her family’s needs of her and her of them; works hard to bring her partner into the process. It’s messy and takes time and money to arrive at a place of change. 

Evolution has always been part of Dylan’s enigma and his attractiveness. Dylan’s magic in part is his dogged commitment to his art above fame, his ability to emerge over and over again. While Miranda July openly agonises her way into a new phase, Bob Dylan’s career is marked by a series of artistic and personal shifts. Who’s to know what struggles were involved each time – the songs suggest change wasn’t easy – but the fact is, Dylan consistently puts himself first. He’s never been significantly judged for that in the way you can imagine a woman might be. 

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

Which is not to say that A Complete Unknown doesn’t explore the cost of Dylan’s decisions. Sylvie is hurt. Pete Seegar is hurt. Fans are hurt. Dylan is hurt. Mangold hammers the message of Dylan’s single-mindedness home in the final scene in which Dylan pays what looks like a last visit to his hero and inspiration, folk legend Woody Guthrie who is in hospital wasting away with Huntington’s disease. Dylan sits on the windowsill, distractedly blowing Guthrie’s tune ‘Dusty Old Dust (So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yah)’ in the harmonica that Woody had earlier gifted him (another fictional detail). The song is a tad on the nose; it plays over the opening credits, too – a framing device if ever there was one. When he’s finished playing, Dylan gets up, stares meaningfully into Guthrie’s eyes, hand resting on the sick man’s head, and leaves. 

The last we see of Dylan is him roaring away on his motorbike leaving Guthrie to stare after him out the window. It’s a moving scene, it does its job, but it is laid on pretty thick (especially Guthrie peering out the window – an image that veers toward cliché). There’s sadness, and respect, as much as there is a coldness, a need to cut and run just like the men who “come with the dust and are gone with the wind” in Dylan’s ‘Song to Woody’ (which Chalamet performs very well). The drifting troubadour of folk legend is a particularly masculine stereotype and it is made very clear – because of Mangold’s placement of it in the film – that Dylan extracted a path to some semblance of artistic freedom because of that example. Not a new observation. But with July still resonating in my head, the film did make me see that female artists don’t have such a well-embedded role model (until All Fours, perhaps, which is now spawning something of a revolution).

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures

What everyone wants to know of great artists is how. Where does the talent come from? The ideas? “They ask me where the songs come from. But what they really mean is why don’t they come to them,” says Chalamet’s Dylan. It’s the perfect response to a question that has always plagued artists. Thankfully, A Complete Unknown doesn’t try to answer that question by unraveling Dylan, by poking into the vague family years in Minnesota, or by trying to expose any interior artistic process. Instead we look at Dylan the way he’s always been looked at: as someone who came out of nowhere and had the talent, the guts, the work ethic, the arrogance, and the wisdom not to play the game of pleasing the crowd.

Dylan is indisputably one of the greatest chroniclers of our times. Predictably unpredictable, he is the white whale, he is Ahab and he’s Ishmael. Existing Dylan fans won’t find anything new in A Complete Unknown and purists will find plenty of discrepancies to quibble with. But for those not so familiar or concerned with biography-pure, Chalamet’s Dylan is beautiful, entertaining and will surely turn a whole new generation of fans onto the music, just like Guthrie did for Dylan, which is the most important part after all, eh Bob.

A Complete Unknown is now playing in cinemas across Aotearoa.

Keep going!
Sam Wills as Tape Face. Image: Supplied
Sam Wills as Tape Face. Image: Supplied

Pop CultureJanuary 25, 2025

Who is the man behind the world-renowned Tape Face?

Sam Wills as Tape Face. Image: Supplied
Sam Wills as Tape Face. Image: Supplied

Following his headline act in the Christchurch Buskers Festival, Alex Casey chats to Sam Wills about spending two decades as the elusive Tape Face. 

It’s a Thursday night at The Isaac Theatre Royal in Ōtautahi, and the fly swats, rubbish bags, and coat hangers littered across the stage make it seem like someone is holding an impromptu garage sale. But not long after Tape Face dawdles out, eyes rimmed with heavy kohl, hair spiked to the heights of mid-2000s emo, and mouth concealed behind black duct tape, do these humble household objects quickly become the stars of the show. 

Soon enough, an old pair of loafers takes on a new life as one of the Jackson 5, oven gloves morph into star-crossed lovers, and an audience member who looks like your uncle brings the house down with one simple dance move. Tape Face’s audience-inclusive mime comedy has been transforming the inane into the magical around the world for two decades. But what does the person behind the tape have to say about being our most successful silent export? 

These days he performs a six-nights-a-week residency in Las Vegas, but Sam Wills’ performance origins go way back to 1980s Timaru. After receiving a magic kit at the age of 12, he honed his showmanship by “stalking” Jaffa, the only professional clown in town. “I followed him around and watched his shows over and over,” Wills laughs over Zoom from his home in Vegas. “I found out where he lived, knocked on his door, and auditioned myself on his doorstep.” 

Working for Jaffa on the weekends as a teenager, Wills then moved to Christchurch to study circus arts just as the Buskers Festival was its infancy. “When I was a young student, I would just be in awe of these incredible performers from all around the world and I would just watch them over and over and over,” he recalls. His first show was in the Buskers Festival in 1999, a “really bad” act that involved “four fire clubs and two dozen raw eggs”. 

After a few years of “freak show stunts” including hammering nails up his nose and eating lightbulbs, Wills moved to Auckland and started doing stand-up comedy. In 2005, his show about his time as a street performer – Dance Monkey Dance – won him the Billy T Award. “I think everyone had that expectation that I would just keep doing more of the same, so I just tried to do the opposite and found a silent character that had no tricks at all.”


Soon after, he started playing with the character of Tape Face, a wide-eyed mime with a satchel of surprises. “In Auckland, at that time especially, there was a whole bunch of comedians doing traditional stand up, on a stage, with a red curtain behind them,” he says. “Then I would come out and I could see the audience go ‘what hell is this?’. I still love those moments of confusion, where the audience goes ‘how can this be a thing’ and then slowly start to understand it.” 

As for the persona itself, Wills says that Tape Face is essentially himself as a young boy. “There’s a sort of inquisitiveness to it and silliness and play. I think the main word that I always latch onto is play – to just get up there and just interact and play with people.” The eyeliner and hair is a hangover from his time as a goth in the 90s, and Tim Burton was also a large creative influence. Surprisingly, he didn’t get into silent comedy stars until after Tape Face was born. 

“A lot of people think I must really like Charlie Chaplin but, to be honest, I can’t stand him,” he laughs. “I much prefer Buster Keaton because he was always the underdog and he was a wee bit cooler than Chaplin. Buster Keaton is also known as stone face – he had that no expression thing going on. I definitely picked that up from him for Tape Face because, if you just do a long blank stare at people, you can always find a lot of comedy that way.” 

Buster Keaton had a huge influence on Tape Face

In 2007 he returned to Christchurch, and the Buskers Festival, but this time as Tape Face (then known as The Boy With Tape on His Face) and won the people’s choice award. “It’s pretty cool because, with that prize money, I was actually able to fund going to the Melbourne Comedy Festival which got me spotted and started a bit of a reputation – I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that without Christchurch and that iron chicken award.” 

Wills spent a decade in the UK touring and honing his act at the Edinburgh Fringe, before America’s Got Talent came calling. “Something people don’t realise is that shows like AGT have talent scouts who spend all their time looking for people. They had actually been after us for a number of years, but the timing never worked out.” In 2016, the schedules aligned, and Tape Face entered the “bananas” machine of America’s Got Talent. 

In his first “audition” on the show, he unleashed his now-famous pair of amorous oven gloves to a standing ovation from the audience and judges alike. “I like the fact that we don’t know who you are or what you are going to do,” said Simon Cowell. “Simple, clever, unique, funny – brilliant.” Heidi Klum thought he was “creepy” at first, “but then I really, truly loved it.” Howie Mandel put it plainly – and accurately: “I think your life has changed tonight.” 

After that first video went up on Youtube, Wills says things did change pretty quickly, and his dream of a Vegas residency finally seemed like a possibility. “My goal was to try and stick around for as long as you could. You never want to win these type of shows, because you’re then stuck in a terrible contract for the rest of your life. But in America, television is still the be all and end all – if you are on TV, you are famous. In New Zealand, I feel like it’s not as huge of a deal.” 

Tape Face didn’t win America’s Got Talent, but he didn’t have to. He landed his first Vegas residency in 2017, and has been a mainstay in Sin City ever since. “The whole thing was bananas. It’s so not normal,” he laughs. “I’m still recovering from it.” Now with a “relentless” six-nights-a-week residency at the MGM Grand, the Tape Face multiverse appears to be ever expanding, sometimes even with other people stepping into the role (to mixed reception). 

And when he’s not sloughing off eyeliner and playing vintage Mario Brothers to unwind, Wills is continuing to dream up new directions for Tape Face. “I’m playing with the idea of turning myself into a firework, which I think is pretty funny,” he says. Whatever he takes to the stage, he’ll likely debut it in front of a home crowd. “I always write new things with the intention of showing it in New Zealand first, because Kiwi audiences are always so damn honest.” 

Back at the Isaac Theatre Royal, after taking us through a fierce Jedi battle, a 1970s dance floor, and the last hole of a PGA final, Tape Face’s Buskers Festival show ended on Thursday night with one last spectacle that had the whole theatre jumping out of their seats and shrieking like little kids. But as the lights went up and we quietly filed out into the unseasonal cold of the real world, that damn understated Kiwi honesty Wills mentioned wasn’t far away. 

“Well,” said one woman to her friend, “that was a bit different, eh?” 

The World Buskers Festival is on in Ōtautahi from Jan 24 until Feb 4.

But wait there's more!