DYLAN ME SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG

Belated takes on three December releases I've just recently caught up with, prepping for my 2024 Top Ten list: 

Still in theaters:

A Complete Unknown--Directed by the always-reliable James Mangold, this biopic covers Bob Dylan's breakthrough. We see the arrival of the young prodigy (Timothée Chalamet) in the Village, his pilgrimage to a New Jersey hospital to meet the terminally ill Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), attended there by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who becomes Dylan's mentor and champion, his relationships with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), his rise to stardom, through to his notorious electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

I love Dylan. I saw him perform, sharing the bill with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, at Rich Stadium in Buffalo, New York in 1986; it's high on the list of the best live shows I've ever been to. And "Like a Rolling Stone," from which this film's title is drawn, may be my favorite song; I've often wondered if it shouldn't be our new national anthem. I'm wondering that especially hard this week.

All that said, I'm not remotely enough of a Dylan worshipper or historian to feel proprietary toward him, or to say how accurate this film is or isn't. All I can say is that I enjoyed it. It's full of good acting, rich period detail and, of course, great music.

Chalamet, for whom I've never previously been able to work up much enthusiasm, gives us a human being as opposed to the bad Dylan impression that any of us can do. Dylan has long been reputed, even by his friends and admirers, to be an asshole--a dazzlingly talented asshole, a funny asshole, an influential asshole, but an asshole nonetheless.

The movie doesn't shirk this; the opinion is stated overtly by a character, and Dylan doesn't disagree. But as with most assholes, he isn't just an asshole, and Chalamet makes it possible not only to accept and admire him, but to like him. Also, he sings for him. And Norton sings for Seeger, and Barbaro sings for Baez, and Boyd Holbrook sings for Johnny Cash, and none of them, to my ear, embarrass themselves.

Despite Chalamet's excellence, Norton's performance as Seeger is the real standout here. Even though by the end Seeger is shoved, fairly or not, almost into the role of antagonist, Norton gets across Seeger's tirelessly disarming, near-saintly sweetness, and beneath it, the depth of his passion for music, and for America.

Now streaming:

Queer--The agonies of not quite fully requited love bleed out of Daniel Craig's old-shoe face in this adaptation of my second-favorite William S. Burroughs book (after Junky), first published in 1985 but written decades earlier. The setting is Mexico City in the '50s, where Craig's "William Lee " is a dissolute expat, drinking too much and engaging in one night stands with local pretty boys.

William is smitten when he gets a load of Allerton (Drew Starkey), a beautiful young American Navy vet. He eventually gets the guy into bed, and later talks him into traveling to Ecuador with him in search of yagé, a hallucinogenic plant he believes will give him telepathic powers (he's already restarted his heroin habit at this point). But Allerton is just along for the ride, literally and emotionally.

Craig is outstanding; the nakedness of his pain is hard to watch at times. And the movie, directed by Luca Guadagnino of Challengers from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, starts off very well. But as it dives deeper into drug-fueled visions (some of them reminded me of those in Ken Russell's 1980 Altered States), it loses dramatic momentum. It's visually arresting, but Guadagnino finds no equivalent to the charge that Burroughs generates in the best riffing passages of his prose.

Also, meaning no moral judgement--I hardly could judge, given my own relationship to junk food--I've never been able to find the glamor that so many filmmakers seem to find in drug addiction. Maybe I would if I understood it first-hand, but if so, I'll pass.

Now streaming, and still playing in the Valley at this writing at Harkins Shea:

A Real Pain--Close friends in their youths, 40-something cousins Dave and Benji have a more complicated relationship now. The quiet, mild-mannered Dave (Jesse Eisenberg) is a successful New York digital ad salesman, while Benji (Kieran Culkin), though cheerful and charismatic, is unemployed, troubled, seemingly directionless, and given to delivering his nervy opinions at distressingly inappropriate times and volumes.

Nonetheless, Dave adores him, and the two travel together from New York to Poland on a legacy left them by their mutually adored grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. They join a "Holocaust tour" led by a non-Jewish Brit (Will Sharpe), starting at Warsaw and working their way toward Lublin, where the cousins will break away to visit the grandmother's home. They smoke weed with each other and interact with the other oddballs on the tour, among them Jennifer Grey as a divorcee and Kurt Egyiawan as a Rwandan who survived the genocide in his country before converting to Judaism.

Written and directed by Eisenberg, this modest movie is genuinely original--very funny, very poignant, very believable, painfully uncomfortable to watch at times but ultimately a gem. Culkin is terrific, but  Eisenberg is no less so in his less showy role; his love and worry for his cousin, and his protective mortification at his behavior, make up the pain at the dramatic core of A Real Pain.

You can also check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Nickel Boys and the Universal/Blumhouse "reboot" Wolf Man.

RACKETEERS

Now in the multiplexes:

Challengers--Two rising teenage tennis stars meet a third at the U.S. Open Juniors, beginning a triangle that defines not only their careers but their lives. That's the premise of this tempestuous sports drama from Italian director Luca Guadagnino.

At the top of the triangle is Tashi, played by the elegant, long-limbed Zendaya, understandably worshipped at first sight by both Al (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O'Connor), inseparable friends and doubles partners since childhood. Their passion for her is on different levels, however. Patrick is fascinated by her ferocious physicality; Al suffers true love.

Those who dislike nonlinear storytelling may find Challengers a bit, well, challenging. Even Quentin Tarantino's movies don't usually have timelines this scrambled. The story wanders around over thirteen years, as Tashi has relationships with both Al and Patrick, as estrangements and injuries bedevil the trio, as Al becomes a superstar under Tashi's coaching, as Patrick's career slides to the level of declined credit cards and sleeping in his car. We get subtitles like "13 YEARS EARLIER" or "THREE DAYS LATER" or "MIDNIGHT," but sometimes it's mostly variations in facial hair that help us keep track of where we are in the narrative.

It's worth the effort, though. Challengers starts a little slow, but Guadagnino, working from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, unfolds the story in convincing scenes that gradually accrue emotional punch. There are some risqué passages which, unlike most such sequences, actually forward the story.

The three leads--the rest of the actors here are basically bit players--have charm, which softens how unpleasantly the characters behave at times. The core of the film, of course, is the remarkable Zendaya, a Disney Channel veteran who, after a turn as a pop singer--my wife and I took our kid to see her at the Arizona State Fair more than a decade ago--has carved out a niche as a serious actor in stuff like Euphoria and the Spider-Man and Dune flicks. In Challengers her lissome beauty is balanced by a slouchy, imperious pugnacity. It's a true star turn.

The recurrent thumping techno music on the soundtrack verges on the unintentionally comedic at times. And Guadagnino allows the movie to get a bit operatic in the homestretch, with tortured scenes played out against wild windstorms and scandalous revelations telegraphed across the net before crucial serves in tournament play. But this feels right for a story about how our long-haul lives are shaped by the feverish melodramas we get caught up in as adolescents.