Timothée Chalamet: A Complete Unknown (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Album Review

It is through Chalamet’s unvarnished performance that the songs are able to speak. When his voice strains, flattens a syllable, or sounds more nasal than Dylan ever did, when he sings through clenched teeth, this does the songbook justice by not over-manicuring anything. If you haven’t seen A complete unknowncan the soundtrack feel like a fun novelty record, Chalamet’s Dylan karaoke, which in some sense it is. But in the context of a generational actor portraying a musician who performed constantly himself, these 23 tracks are more like A complete unknown‘s audio supercut.

Timmy Dylan – and on some tracks, his rolling would-be Hawks – is joined by Monica Barbaro (of Top Gun: Maverick fame) as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Seeger and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, representing the angels and devils on Dylan’s shoulders. These studio recordings were originally intended for use in the film before Chalamet argued for playing everything live instead. Norton sings the interactive Zulu song “Wimoweh,” popularized by Seeger’s blacklisted folk band The Weavers, and clearly chosen to paint him as hokey. Among the three pristine Baez solo tunes is her haunting rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” in which Barbaro’s vibrato mutes an on-screen room as she places her hand over the microphone to sing a capella. The Timmy-Monica duets vividly render “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Girl From the North Country” (although there is no evidence that Dylan and Baez ever sang this together).

Solo, Chalamet is true to Dylan’s acoustic writing, from the sweeping protest poem “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” to his ode to expanded consciousness, “Mr. Tambourine’s Man.” “The Times They Are a-Changing” stands out because it holds in the film’s explosion of cheers from fans and chorus-catching in Newport ’64, a foil for the following year’s failure, as Dylan baits the audience with bars upon bars of ” finger”. -pointing” ’60s idealism that insists those in power “don’t criticize what you can’t understand!” However, the film’s truncations and adjustments to the songs can be confusing, as can the decision to cut the harrowing epic “Masters of War” down to just two minutes (not to mention how the editing accentuates the best line, “Jesus would never forgive what you do”).

One of the joys of Chalamet’s performance is hearing the dizzying, transformative charge of entering Dylan for the first time—like Chalamet, who grew up on the work of Kid Cudi and Lil B. electric” songs with their whirlwind poetry, irreverence incarnate, as “God Says no/ Says Abe what?” biblical bricolage opening of “Highway 61 Revisited.” I wish the soundtrack would have kept the audience taunting and smashing bottles from the film’s “Like a Rolling Stone” scene, blended into the embittered dreamscape along with the infamous “Judas!” yell (although even the most amateur Dylanologist knows that didn’t happen in Newport). But Chalamet personifies the chilling excitement of putting it all together for the first time: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.” Wait… the answer is blowing in the wind! It was supposed to be so much fun. The first “electric” album – which had already been out for four months before Newport – was called Bring it all back homeafter all. The real-life Dylan returned to his first love: playing in a band, as he did as a little Richard-obsessed teenager. “I accept chaos,” Dylan wrote in the album’s liner notes. “I’m not sure if it accepts me.”