More from the Stacks: The Horse, After This, Warlight, The Comfort of Ghosts

 

 

From the Stacks II

 

Here’s more from my literature clean out efforts, with more to come!

 

 

Sometimes fate thrusts a book into your hands you’d probably overlook otherwise. Such a novel is The Horse (2024, 192 pages), a short work from Willy Vlautin. An old musicians’ joke has it that life goes downhill the day you get a guitar. That’s the story of Al Ward, who got one from one of his mother’s boyfriends: a 1958 butterscotch Telecaster. Al wasn’t much for school, but he became a fine picker and composed hundreds of songs, mostly old-style country western, though he wasn’t keen on the genre. Vlautin tells Al’s story with a lot of flashback memories that takes us from the first time he went on the road, inside the truck stop bands that were going nowhere, and gigs with polished outfits that almost made it. In the present he’s living on inherited land in a Nevada ghost town that’s miles from anywhere. He survives on booze, music, Campbell’s soup, old memories, and few old compadres who help out. One day a blind horse wanders onto his property that triggers–see what I did there– memories of heartbreaks and losses. What does a guy who has been mostly reactive, lives as a hermit, and knows nothing about horses do next? It’s a poignant tale that’s by turn poignant, funny, and sad. ★★★★

 

 

 

How I love the literary prose of Alice McDermott. McDermott’s characters embody the broader changes in post-World War II American society. After This (2006, 279 pages)  introduces us to Mary, an Irish-American gal in a Manhattan typing pool with sad sack Pauline. Mary ponders whether she will get married, but by page 19 she is Mrs. John Keane and well on her way to birthing four children: Jacob, Michael, Annie, and Claire. Manhattan gives way to blue-collar life on Long Island. John, a vet, has a limp from the war, but also bearing scars from being older than Mary and discomfort with how fast the world is changing. Jacob is named for one of John’s war comrades but is ridiculed for having a Jewish name and becomes reclusive. Michael, though, is a rambunctious kid with his toy soldiers and a bit of a troublemaker. Annie will be an early adopter of social mores; Claire, the youngest, is pious and saintly. After This takes us from the early 50s through the Nixon years of the 1970s and is full of unexpected surprises. John and Mary struggle to make sense of a life that’s not as they imagined it. I can’t begin to do justice to this amazing book in a capsule review, but suffice it to say that McDermott so expertly captures small details that define the Zeitgeists of the 1950s and 60s that you’ll feel the wax paper crumble, smell the Brylcreem, and experience John’s anxiety over Pauline, his ethnic neighbors, and the moral gap between duty and the Vietnam War. Seldom has the shift from a faith-based to a questioning society been captured with such elegance. ★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Speaking of great stylists, Michael Ondaatje fits that bill. Many readers (and film fans) know him for his Booker Prize-winning The English Patient, but if you’d like to delve into his writing more deeply, Warlight (2018, 285 pages) is a superb novel. It delves into the question of when a war ends. Warlight opens in 1945 after the defeat of Germany and flashes back to the days of the Blitz of London. As you imagine, London and much of Europe are years away from reconstructing what was destroyed by bombs and battles, but that’s not the rubble on the minds of Nathaniel or his older sister, Rachel. During the Blitz, their parents left them in the hands of Walter, whom they call The Moth. The official story is that their father had business in Asia and that their mother went to be with him. That’s untrue, but where did they go and why? Warlight is told mostly from Nathaniel’s point of view. To say that he and his sister had a very unusual path to maturity undersells matters. Warlight has some of the characteristics of a coming of age tale–education, first love, new experiences–but theirs is also a home through which other dodgy people pass, including The Darter, whom they suspect is a criminal. Imagine also misty morning drop-offs along the Thames, people with foreign accents, vague reassurances, trips to smuggle greyhounds to dog tracks, the return of a parent, a death, and Nathaniel’s 12-year-search for the truth. How all of this connects to a kid thatching a roof is yours to discover. ★★★★★

 

 

 

The Comfort of Ghosts (2014, 338 pages) is also set in England during and after World War II. Is has been billed as the final installment of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries of author Jacqueline Winspear. You need not have read them all to appreciate this one, though it helps to know that Maisie grew up on an estate where her parents were domestics, was a nurse during World War I, lost her husband, and became a ward/heir of the estate owners. She is also a psychologist and private investigator married to an American diplomat and has oodles of money. As a PI, she’s more like a middle-aged version of Jane Marple than a dashing Sherlock Holmes. After the war quite a few empty or partially destroyed domiciles became home to squatters hoping that owners would not return. A delirious, weakened man makes his way to one and is cared for by a group of fearful street children surviving by theft, subterfuge, and wit. As Maise investigates a sinister wartime plot, she will meet the children and their patient. Winspear takes us inside a wartime program of which very few people know. As in Warlight we see that what comes after a war is over can be as fraught as the war itself. Note, though, that the two books are quite different. There is more grit in Warlight; The Comfort of Ghosts is more genteel. ★★★ ½

Dreaming Walls: Old New York versus the New

 

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (2022)

Directed by Mya Duverdier and Amélie Elmbt

Magnolia Pictures, 80 minutes, not-rated

★★★★

 

Dreaming Walls is billed as a documentary, but it’s also a ghost story. The film looks at both a building and a cavalcade of artists, beatniks, bohemians, counterculture figures, celebrities, misfits, poets, punk rockers, and radicals who lived at or passed through New York City’s Chelsea Hotel. That’s a long list that includes: Dylan (both Bob D. and D. Thomas), Leonard Cohen, Salvador Dali, Jane Fonda, Alan Ginsberg, Ethan Hawke, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning, Janis Joplin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bette Midler, Marilyn Monroe, Phil Ochs, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, and most of his “superstars.” Warhol famously used the hotel as the backdrop for his 1965 underground film Chelsea Girls.

 

Dreaming Walls is all the more a ghost story courtesy of the decision of directors Mya Duverdier and Amélie Elmbt to shoot much of it as “layered” movie with sharp focus present-day footage with shadowy stock film montage of past residents running in the background. The eerie soundtrack of Michael Andrews lends a paranormal feel, as does our discomfort at viewing the remaining fulltime residents of the Chelsea puttering their way around the construction rubble as the old 1883 building is slowly converted into a mid-century modern themed luxury hotel. With few exceptions–like multimedia artist Steve Willis–most of the residents living in rent-controlled spaces are husks of their younger selves whose occupancy will expire as soon as they do. We see artist Bettina Grossman and dancer/choreographer Merle Lister-Levine, who is our voiceover for much of the film, negotiating long detours with their walkers or seeking help with getting their parcels to upper rooms because of out-of-service elevators. Speaking of ghosts, 94-year-old Grossman died in 2022, as did Lister-Levine’s elderly husband. If you need any more ghosts, the Chelsea Hotel is where Sid Vicious was accused of murdering Nancy Spungen.

 

Whether or not you think Sid killed Nancy, the Chelsea Hotel was a dodgy place from the 1970s on. Sex, drugs, wild parties, deferred maintenance, the anarchic views of residents, celebrity tantrums, and a laissez-faire manager turned the Chelsea into something resembling a decaying/decadent commune. Dreaming Walls provides a quick overview of the Chelsea’s  circular path from a Gilded Age luxury hotel in 1883 to a residency hotel in the early 20^th century to a haven for non-conformists from the 1930s into the early 21^st century, and back to a luxury hotel after 2022. Plan on about $600/night if you want to stay there during high season these days. Through all of this old debates rage: old New York versus modern New York, gentrification versus cheap lodging, the morality of displacing long-time residents….

 

Whatever its iteration, it’s easy to see the Chelsea is, as architects say, a building with good bones. Amazing grill work, light fixtures, lounges, and public gathering places have been home to ground floor concerts, restaurants, office spaces, retail shops, and easy access for offbeat New Yorkers who weren’t living in Greenwich Village. 

 

Through it all viewers can’t help but think about the famous question posed by theologian/historian Francis Schaeffer in 1976: How shall we then live? As we hear Grossman speak of hanging original art in the staircase or watch barely mobile Lister pose a dancer draped over a railing, are we experiencing a reminder of how to live in a creative community or the last light of a played out aesthetic?

 

However we come down on such questions, we know the answer to where things are headed. It says volumes to know that this documentary won awards in Europe, but was off the radar screen in the United States. In the showdown between affordability and what the market will bear, counterculture and mainstream culture, and bohemians versus capitalists, on whom/what would you place your bets? Dreaming Walls is a fascinating film in which the final ghost is the Chelsea Hotel itself. The old Chelsea has become an artifact. Depending upon your personal values you can chant “The Chelsea is dead” or Long live the Chelsea.”

 

Rob Weir

No Hard Feelings? I Have a Few

 

 

 

 

 

No Hard Feelings (2023)

Directed by Gene Stupnitsky

Sony Pictures Releasing, 103 minutes, R (nudity, sexuality, language)

★★

 

No Hard Feelings is the kind of film that Hollywood critics too young to remember that good comedy has barbs not just dumb situations, label “charming.” Oh dear. Let me state from the get-go that the premise of this film is that 19-year-old Percy Beckman (Andrew Barth Feldman) spends a lot of the movie saying he does not want to have sex with Jennifer Lawrence. Now there’s a statement no man, woman, Vogon, or inanimate object would say–ever!

 

This is a coming of age film that riffs off American Pie, Risky Business, The Breakfast Club, and Clueless without the raunch of the first, the laughs of the second, the coolness factor of the third, or a (yes) a clue like the fourth. Director Gene Stupnitsky cowrote No Hard Feelings with John Phillips. It’s your standard boy-needs-to-lose-his-virginity movie whose only twist is that this is his parents’ point of view, not Percy’s. He is a smart but unpopular loner who stays in his room a lot and still considers his nanny a friend. Mom Allison (Laura Benanti) and dad Laird Beckman (Matthew Broderick) think that Percy needs to date and have sex before attending Princeton in the fall and are willing to give a car to a woman in her 20s who will school him in the birds and bees.

 

Stupnitsky and Phillips aver that this was an actual ad on Craigslist, which is a sad commentary on American society. Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, whose own car is about to be impounded by the ex-boyfriend she ghosted. Her traffic fines and lack of registration are among the many bills she owns as she tries to hold onto her deceased mother’s home in Montauk. This forces her to roller blade across town to the Beckmans’ upscale home and talk her way into the assignment, though she’s 32, not in her twenties. She first meets Percy at his job in an animal shelter–Chekov’s gun alert!–(barely) dressed in a skintight dress, heels, and straps that “accidentally” fall down to expose a breast. How “smart” can Percy be if he still thinks Maddie wants to adopt a dog?

 

At heart this is a movie about a cougar stalking her prey for purely materialistic reasons. The question of “Will they or won’t they?” could be seen as a big striptease, except that this happens much earlier in the film when Maddie browbeats Percy into going skinny dipping if she promises not to try to have sex with him. Huh? Call the White Cane Program! To sustain what The Mikado called “a bald and unconvincing narrative,” No Hard Feelings stretches matters by stitching in all manner of  threads: spitting out Long Island Iced Tea, getting sick at a graduation party, the contrast in date formal wear, Maddie’s friends who, like her, can’t afford to live in Montauk–shades of Mystic Pizza–and premature ejaculation. Are you doubled over with laughter yet? There’s also a wrecked car scenario cribbed from, yes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I could almost hear Matthew Broderick thinking, “How in the name of Zeus, Odin, and Ahura-Mazda did I get so freaking old that my career has come to this?”

 

I should say, however, that both Feldman and Lawrence did well with what the script asked them to do. Feldman is the vacillator and Lawrence the vixen. Lawrence was praised for her physical comedy, which you can take with a small grain of salt given that the film and Lawrence also got Golden Globe nominations. One wonders, though, about tiny cameos for Zahn McClarnon (Native American), Hasan Minhaj (South Asian American), and Amalia Yoo (Korean/Puerto Rican American), which are color props to tick PC boxes. I’ll also give the film credit for introducing to me an unfamiliar term. Several reviewers blasted the film for “sexual grooming.” I guess that’s a known thing, but I had to look it up. (I also don’t think it applies as 19-year-olds are not minors under the law.)

 

Still, the DVD box sports a cover with the word “Pretty” over Lawrence’s head and “Awkward” over that of Feldman. If you wanted a two-word review, “pretty awkward” would suffice. Another short judgment might be: who would go through this for a used Buick?

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Green Border Resonates

 

 

 

Green Border (2024)

Directed by Agnieszka Holland

Kino Films, 152 minutes, Not rated

In Polish, Arabic, French, English

★★★★★

 

Does this sound familiar? A group of immigrants hope for asylum and better lives. After great difficulty and payoffs to third parties they arrive full of hope, only to find themselves stopped at the border. They sneak across, are arrested, sent back, and cross again, and again, and….

 

This time, though, we’re talking about the Belarus/ Poland border and instead of Latinos, Afghans, Syrians, Moroccans, and Somalians are involved. Each are so many pawns in a wretched geopolitical struggle between a nation still locked into the Soviet bloc–Belarus under the autocrat Alexsandr Lukashenko–and Poland, whose Border Guard hasn’t gotten the message that the Iron Curtain has fallen. The Guardian has called Green Border an “angry and urgent masterpiece,” and I concur.

 

The film is mostly in black and white, but the title derives from the opening aerial shot of what looks like a tableau of meadows and sylvan forest. The latter, though, is actually a thicky wooded and treacherous landscape filled with marshes, hidden ponds, and unfriendly guards. Green Border is told in four “chapters,” the first of which shows Afghanis filled with hope and planning to join a relative in Sweden. That hope is dashed after they land in Minsk and board a van for Poland. The van is stopped at the border, where Belarussian soldiers force everyone to get out. They run through the bleak landscape toward Poland. We follow an Afghani teacher Leila (Behi DjanatiAtai) and an extended Muslim family headed by Mohamad Al Rashdi. His son Bashir (Jalal Altawil) tries to guide his wife and their children through the woods, but imagine their sorrow when the Border Guard rounds them up, drives back to the border, and in the dark of night, cut through the razor wire and force them back into Belarus. They are detained in an improvised outdoor holding area. Days later, Belarusian troops drive them to the Polish border and reverse the process. What ensues is a nightmarish game of déjà vu. Imagine literally tossing a pregnant woman over a concertina fence.

 

Chapter two takes us inside the Border Guards via Janek (Tomas Wlosok), a father-to-be. His is the classic dilemma of job versus morality. As rumors fly of the brutality of Polish guards, his wife badgers him to quit the guard. Jan, though, feels deep comradery with fellow troops and sees himself as protecting Poland. He tells his wife the immigrants are “bullets," not people. (Shades of the dehumanization of Mexican “criminals.”) Will Jan ever understand that there is little difference between the Polish and Belarusian soldiers? One might have thought Poles, who were brutally targeted by the Nazis, would remember that orders do not excuse inhumane acts.

 

In a bold stroke director Agnieszka Holland turns her attention to the humanitarian workers. They are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. They are allowed to operate, as long as they break no laws! The can provide medical field treatment and give advice, but they cannot transport them or direct them to sanctuaries. They do such things, of course, but they risk arrest and imprisonment if they do. (Do  you recall American directives making it illegal to give immigrants any water?)

 

The final chapter follows Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a Polish psychologist, who is willing to take direct action. One beautiful scene shows a group of smuggled African youngsters rapping the same song with the son of a Polish sanctuary family. If this doesn’t drive home common humanity, schedule a heart transplant. But, again, people like Julia literally put their lives and dignity in jeopardy.

 

Green Border has caused an uproar in Poland that only subsided a bit when Poland allowed over a million Ukrainians to immigrate. Many Poles remain outraged, though, and have accused Holland of slandering the military. One angry official said only “pigs” go to the movies, a deliberately provocative inference with fascist overtones, and a London Times reviewer called it “misery porn.” Poles also review bombed sites to drive down audience ratings and make it seem as if Green Border is a bad movie no one should see.

 

That’s rubbish. It pulls at your heartstrings, but not in made-up ways. It could well be the most important film you can watch in 2025. It’s available on numerous streaming platforms.

 

Rob Weir

 

Clear: A Crowd-Pleaser

 

 

 

Clear (2024)

By Carys Davies

Scribner, 193 pages

★★★ ½

 

Clear has been a surprise hit among readers. Carys Davies, best known as a short story writer, is Welsh, but her novel is about a small Scottish island (probably in the Shetlands) about two characters who, at first, can’t communicate. The title can be taken in several metaphorical ways, but mostly references the Highland (and Islands) Clearances.

 

History accords more ink to the Irish potato famine, which is understandable given that over a half million people died and another several million were forced to emigrate. Scotland’s Highland Clearances were, though, unspeakably cruel. The battle for the Scottish throne convulsed Scotland during the 18^th century. In 1707, Scotland (and Ireland) were officially incorporated into Great Britain, which theoretically solved a centuries-old dispute. In reality, Scots in the Highlands and Islands remained loyal to the Stuart dynasty, which was Catholic. The defeat of the Jacobites* at the 1746 Battle of Culloden forcibly solidified a Protestant Great Britain and imposed a harsh crackdown in Scotland (with hangings and deportations).

 

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the “lairds” (lords) who controlled the land and clans were often English or loyalists. During the early Industrial Revolution lairds saw economic opportunity in throwing rent-paying crofters (farmers) off the land, burning their homes, and converting the fields to sheep grazing for the growing textile industry. At least 70,000–some sources say closer to 200,000–were forced to emigrate. Collectively these are called the Clearances (1750-1860).

 

Clear takes place toward the end of the Clearances, probably around 1846 during Scotland’s own potato famine. The remote Orkneys and Shetlands were among the last places for evictions. The Rev. John Ferguson is approached by an agent for a laird to sail north and dislodge the last resident from his island home. John is opposed to this but is so poor that when his wife Mary lost her front teeth, they were replaced by vulcanized rubber to save money. John is a man of principle, but because he is a Free Church** minister opposed to the Church of Scotland, he is in a doubly precarious situation.

 

Over Mary’s objection he sails north; she to follow later. John arrives and promptly falls off a cliff into the raging surf below. At some time later, Ivar spies debris floating in the water and intends to salvage it. There is also a body inside a “swimming belt” (life preserver), which to his surprise is barely alive. Ivar carries the man and random items to his cottage. The man is insensible so Ivar pokes around in his belongings and finds a picture of Mary. He hides it and falls in love with Mary’s image.

 

If you think you know where this is going, you’re probably wrong. John will slowly regain his wits but he and Ivar can’t understand each other for some time as Ivar only speaks Norn, which is neither Celtic nor English, rather a dying Germanic/Viking tongue whose last native speaker will die in 1850. Imagine trying to teach each other enough vocabulary to clear up why Ivar has Mary’s picture inside his shirt. Clear ultimately becomes a tale of self-discovery, one’s true nature, and an indirect critique of the Clearances and religious zealotry. What would be the harm of leaving Ivar alone with his goat, a blind cow, a small boat, and a hidden teapot?

 

Davies claims the island is fictional and she doesn’t identify its model.*** Clear is a quick read that many have found deeply moving. For me, the book’s ending is too abrupt and opaque. To nitpick, the big Comrie earthquake alluded to in the novel occurred in 1893, but since Comrie is considered the earthquake center of Scotland, Davies might have extrapolated for effect.

 

Rob Weir

 

* Jacobite is Latin for follower of James Stuart, whose Catholic followers remained loyal to the deposed James VII.

 

**The Free Church of Scotland grew out of the 1843 Great Disruption. In simplest terms, it was an argument over whether church ministers should be chosen by Parliament (Church of Scotland) or by parishioners (Free Church). Both are Presbyterians and both are found across Scotland. These days, though, more than half of Scots claim no religious affiliation.

 

*** There are numerous sparsely populated islands in both the Shetlands and Orkney and many have no residents. One of my favorites, the Isle of Hoy (Orkney) has 419 people, less than half of its 1800 population.

Music: Caleb Klauder/Reeb Wiilms; Effie Zilch; Michael Des Barres; Les Arrivants; Kylie Fox

Once upon a time country music was a cross between cornpone and old-time hill music. Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms take us back to those days on Gold in Your Pocket. “He’s Gone” is a flat-picked song with splashes of old time fiddle full of guitar breakouts and 1950s ambience. “Shame Shame Shame” is straight out the Wheeling Jamboree with walking bass and some rapid-fire mandolin. Klauder and Willms hail from Washington State and now live in Portland, Oregon, but songs like “Too FarGone” have a decided Appalachian vibe. Check out the pedal steel and the lyrics of “Gold in Your Pocket” and you’ll know right away that these artists draw more from the past than the stadium rock with a twang that is today’s country music. They do it well, but is this what country audiences want these days? I can say for sure, but Klauder and Willms are a nice change of pace.

 

 Effie Zilch is the name of a San Francisco-based collaboration between Evanne Barcenas and Grammy-winning songwriter/producer Steve Wreyman. On their seven-track EP Multitudes they evoke quite a few other acts, most notably Delaney and Bonnie and JJ Cale. Barcenas has a strong, smoky voice as you can hear on the blues-influenced “Prayin’ Amos.” “One Hundred Years” is quiet and folky, but she airs it out on “Only Fools” like a soul queen and Wryeman lets it rip on guitar. I don’t know their back catalogue, but I note they are often billed as a “rock” band. To my ear, though, Multitudes is more bluesy. Plus, their song “Carousel” would be at home in a honkytonk bar.

 

 

If you really want some rock n’ roll, check out the new record from English actor/musician Michael Des Barres. Its title might sound familiar: It’s Only Rock n’ Roll (But I Like It). It is, of course, the title of a 1974 hit from The Rolling Stones. Des Barres' new project is of 1970s cover songs. Baby Boomers have the new Bob Dylan film, so it’s only fair that Gen X gets its own nostalgia trip. Des Barres shreds some chords on “Search and Destroy” (The Stooges). You’ll also hear “Love is the Drug” (Roxy Music), though Des Barres’ voice bottoms out in a few places, and David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes.” He’s better on Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen.” Des Barres can still cut wood with his axe but, he’s 76, not 18 and not a young dude. He can shout it out and has a remarkable amount of power for doing so, but he resorts to spectacle and showmanship when he slips out of mid-range tones. That said, he’s probably better at singing 70s’ songs that aging Xers singing along to their car radios to the golden oldies.

 

 

The band Yarn formed in Brooklyn and is now based in North Carolina. It’s a collection of hardworking road warriors who play 170 gigs a year, have 11 albums, yet somehow are relatively unknown. On Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive Yarn play country, rock out, and sometimes venture into folk music. Yarn’s lineup is both stable and fluid. It is the brainchild of vocalist/guitarist Blake Christiana and includes drummer Robert Bonhomme, and bassist Rick Bugel. Yet is also includes a rotation of electric guitarists, including Andy Falco (Infamous Stringdusters), Matteo Joseph Recchio (Heavy Peace), and Joel Timmons (Sol Driven Train). The album’s title is embedded in the song “These Words,” a sort of country-meets-rock song about being down and out–I lost everything when I lost my mind–and makes an appeal to heaven in the way country songs are prone to do. Christiana has a soothing voice, but the band can bring it. “Turn Off the News” is somewhat evocative of a chill Allman Brothers. It’s probably good that Yarn is now in North Carolina, as they currently have a Southern rock vibe. But they retain a bit of Brooklyn ‘tude.”Play Freebird” is a serious song, but one can’t help but think there’s a bit of satire aimed at the drunken idiots who yell out for a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover at concerts. There might be too much midrange music on this album, but Yarn is a band worth knowing.

 

 

Les Arrivants are a Montreal trio that play classical Arabic and Persian music plus Argentine tango. In keeping with Montreal’s vibrant world music and jazz scenes, the band–Abdul-Wahab Kayyali (oud), Amichai Ben Shalev (concertina-like bandoneon and Hamin Honari (percussion)–are more into precision than attempts at middlebrow arrangements. This is evident in the title track of Toward the Light. The same is true of tangos such as “Bagelissimo,” or on up-tempo compositions such as “City of Ashes.” If you’ve never heard an oud, listen to the last composition. The oud seems as if it was invented to render introspective and melancholy music. Search for some of the trio’s live performances to experience their focus and musicianship in context.

 

 

Kylie Fox draws Joni Mitchell analogies because she’s Canadian and has a jazz soul. She also gets compared to Kate Bush because she’s prone to being unorthodox. Mainly there’s a lot going on inside her musical canvas. As you can see in her official video of “Brandi Baby,” Fox is filled with youthful insouciance and, as you can hear, she has a serious set of pipes. If you’re not convinced, try her title track "Sequoia” It’s an odd hybrid that could be a paean to nature, a warning to preserve it, a backdoor love song, or all three, but there’s no question of Fox’s command of it. “Alberta” is another tree song and why not, young folks these days have a far healthier view of the environment than most of their elders. Besides, I kind of like a singer who can sing about Alberta and an “Armadillo” on the same record. Plus, there’s got to be some synchronicity going on; Joni Mitchell grew up in Saskatchewan and Neal Young in Manitoba. That’s all three prairie provinces folks. And, yep, it’s also a forced analogy! Watch for Kylie Fox; I have a feeling we will be hearing from her.   

 Rob Weir

 

 

A Complete Unknown: Ok Film, Wonderful Performances

 

 

 

 

A Complete Unknown (2024/25)

Directed by James Mangold

Searchlight Pictures, 141 minutes, R (language, smoking, adult situations)

★★★

 

Your hair is probably standing up from the buzz surrounding A Complete Unknown, the new biopic about Bob Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame. In 1961, he was indeed a complete unknown. He hit New York City after dropping out of college, dumping his birthname (Robert Zimmerman), and leaving Minnesota behind. In legend, he chose Dylan as his surname because his favorite poet was Dylan Thomas. The film implies this happened when he first hit the Big Apple, but records say it occurred in 1962.

 

At 19, though, Dylan’s real muse was Woody Guthrie. The film depicts Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) meeting Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in a New York City hospital–Woody suffered from Huntington’s chorea, a horrifying neurological disorder*–but  director James Mangold fudged timelines a bit. He showed Dylan meeting Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) at Guthrie’s bedside, which wasn’t so. These are among several small changes Mangold and screenplay writer Jay Cocks made when adapting Elijah Wald’s superb Dylan Goes Electric for the screen. Nonetheless, the story you see is mostly accurate.

 

Dylan burned through the Greenwich Village folk scene like a forest fire. Seeger saw Dylan as the savior of the fading folk revival movement who would make acoustic songs the voice of bohemians and the American working class. Dylan did transform American music, but not the way Pete and his wife Toshi (Erika Hatsune) had hoped. His album of traditional songs tanked, but Dylan’s next three releases and protest singles established him as the icon of a new generation. Much of Dylan’s political education came via his romance with Suze Rotolo, the redhead on the cover of The Freewheelin’  Bob Dylan. At Dylan’s request, she is called Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) in the film. I’m not sure why, given that just about everyone who follows Dylan knows that Sylvie is Suze in all but name. She was a Red Diaper Baby–her parents were communists in the 1930s–who awakened Dylan’s conscience to issues such as racial injustice, poverty, and repression; in essence, Rotolo was Dylan’s personal Port Huron Statement.

 

There is no question, though, that words and rhymes flew out of Dylan’s head at lightening speed. As we watch him pull nicotine-fueled all-nighters, those scenes reminded me of how director Milos Foreman presented Mozart’s feverish production in Amadeus. To continue that thought, Mangold’s Salieri was Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) with whom Dylan had an affair while living with Rotolo. Baez seldom wrote her own songs when she, not Dylan, was the brightest star on the stage. Their affair was both tempestuous and a clash of two egos.**

 

The movie has several dominant subthemes, the first being that young Dylan was a jerk who used people. He especially treated Sylvie/Suze shabbily, as he did Pete and Toshi–two elders who could have helped him grow up. Instead, if we believe the film, he fell in with bad boy Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) and into deep brooding. The denouement occurs at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where Dylan famously/infamously plugged in. That year he released Bringing It All Back Home, his shift away from folk music. Some of this is exaggerated. Not everyone was appalled by Dylan’s performance and, to this day, there are conflicting tales about Seeger attempting to cut Dylan’s sound cable. Another tale of a harmonica is pure Hollywood imagination. So is the film’s R rating.

 

Movies routinely resort to fantasy, elision, and simplification. You get only the barest glimpse of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, hence you won’t learn much about key players like Barbara Bane, Theo Bikel, Mike Bloomfield, Joe Boyd, John Hammond,  Al Kooper, Maria Muldaur, or Dave Van Ronk.  Albert Grossman and Harold Leventhal are more caricatures than characters. Luckily there’s nothing hokey about the four principals. Chalamet, Norton, and Barbaro do their own singing and playing and they are amazingly good. The film and actors have already picked up awards and I suspect many more are in the offing. My vote for Best Supporting Actor goes to Norton. He knew Seeger and captures his essence to the point of inhabiting the role. I’ll leave it to you to determine if the enigmatic Dylan remains a complete unknown.

 

Rob Weir

 

*Huntington’s is a vicious disease. Like dementia it’s progressive but inconsistent. Guthrie was sometimes coherent, unlike the grunting figure shown in the film.  

 

**Baez got revenge in her composition “Diamonds and Rust.”