Two weeks ago (11.26) I posted a Twitter reaction to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (Searchlight, 12.25). I was free this morning to post a longer review but I couldn’t get into it. I felt I’d already said what was important in concise form, and that expanding with more words and sentences wasn’t full necessary on this particular day. Maybe tomorrow.

A Complete Unknown has at least three great scenes (more actually) so it definitely meets the Howard Hawks test. The first knockout is when Dylan sings “Song for Woody” to Woody Guthrie in his hospital room. The second is Dylan trying out a half-writt4n song before Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and his family. The third is Dylan playing “Blowing in the Wind” to Joan Baez in his or her Manhattan apartment, which is preceded by her “you’re kind of an asshole” line. The fourth is when the chorus of boos and howls greet Dylan and his electric bandmates at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival. I could go on.

I like this passage from Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review:

“A Complete Unknown is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. Yet the feel — the effect — is that of a musical. You’d assume that might be true of any classic rock biopic, but in this case the film, with its beautifully haphazard song-cycle structure, truly is about Dylan and his music, and how the music changed everything.

“Each new song is a dramatic episode, whether it’s Dylan performing ‘Masters of War’ in the Gaslight Cafe just after the Cuban Missile Crisis or trying out ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with Baez in [her] living room or singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ at Newport, where the audience, by the end, sings along as if it was a song they always knew.”

This morning a friendo shared the excitement conveyed in Gleiberman’s rave. I asked him “what say ye to the pisshounds who are calling it a folkie jukebox musical or a lounge-act movie?”

Friendo response: “I only know that I loved watching it and am haunted by it. I haven’t read any of the other Complete Unknown reviews, but here’s what what the pisshounds are saying — they’re saying that boomer culture must be bashed, and that white-male rock culture must be bashed — we must take this all down a peg. So they’ll find a reason.”

My pre-Thanksgiving reaction was that I felt compelled to forgive its primarily structural, non-lethal shortcomings. I certainly felt an urge to brush them aside while chatting with a smattering of the AMC Lincoln Square cool kidz (including the Hoboken-residing twin Oscar Expert bruhs) while outside theatre #7.

The tail end of the final sentence should read “so much of Unknown is spot–on, the real thing, a bell ringer. I was sorta kinda emotionally melting during the first half hour or so — literally on the verge of tears. Yes, I’ve been deeply invested in Dylan my entire life so I’m especially susceptible but still…