Producers: Fred Berger, James Mangold, Alex Heineman, Bob Bookman, Peter Jaysen, Alan Gasmer, Jeff Rosen and Timothée Chalamet   Director: James Mangold    Screenplay: James Mangold and Jay Cocks Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz, Scoot McNairy, Will Harrison, P.J. Byrne, Eriko Hatsune, Big Bill Morganfield, Charlie Tahan and Michael Chernus   Distributor: Searchlight Pictures

Grade: B+

Every biographical movie, especially if it’s about a real person, is confronted by the “Rosebud” problem, the expectation that it will posit an explanation of what really made its subject tick.  James Mangold has decided to address it with a pre-emptive strike by titling his biopic about celebrated singer-songwriter Bob Dylan with an implicit admission that he doesn’t have the answer.  And he confirms it by ignoring Dylan’s “formative” years to concentrate on just one slice of Dylan’s life, though admittedly a significant one in his artistic evolution—the time between his arrival in New York in January, 1961, and his famous (to some at the time, infamous) performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, when his use of electric instruments caused a scandal among folk music devotees. 

The limited timeframe points up the fact that Mangold isn’t trying to provide an explanation of the enigmatic persona that Dylan, with his inspired lyrics and gnomic utterances, has cultivated over the decades; not for him the sort of multifaceted portrait that Todd Haynes attempted—none too successfully—by having Dylan played by no fewer than six actors in his experimental, episodic “I’m Not There” (2207).  Rather the film uses a single actor, who doesn’t have to alter his appearance drastically over the four-year period.  While managing an exceptional feat of impersonation, down to doing his own singing, Timothée Chalamet does, however, suggest the more subtle alterations in attitude that Dylan exhibited as he rose from small-time newcomer to established star on the folk music scene, and then outraged purists by moving into rock.  Yet at the film’s close Dylan remains, as he was at the beginning, an opaque figure, no longer the unknown he was in 1961, to be sure, but still elusive as a person.   

There are, however, facets that Mangold and his co-writer veteran Jay Cocks, using Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties” as a basic source, latch onto.  Perhaps the most obvious is Dylan’s propensity for self-invention, already clear when the nineteen-year old arrives in New York having hitched a ride from Minnesota.  His actual name was Robert Zimmerman, but he’d already adopted the pseudonym under which he’d become famous; and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a version of Suze Rotolo, with whom he lived in Greenwich Village, is shocked when she happens on some documents that reveal his real identity.   

Before encountering Russo, though, he’s accomplished what he came to New York for—meeting his idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who’s in the hospital, incapacitated by the Huntington’s Disease that would eventually kill him.  Dylan’s introduced by Guthrie’s friend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who, impressed by the song Dylan sings in Guthrie’s honor, invites him to stay with his family and arranges for his first public performances at venues in the Village.  There, among others, he meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), with whom he develops a relationship both personal and professional.

Dylan’s rise can legitimately be called meteoric, due not only to his on-stage charisma and extraordinary song-writing ability but—as Russo and Baez both note—his ambition.  He quickly gains an aggressive manager in Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), who gets him a lucrative record contract in an era when folk music was all the rage.  And he becomes a voice of protest with his own songs, which become anthems for activists in the early sixties and make him a certified celebrity.

But Dylan becomes disenchanted with the established folk scene that Seeger, and the Newport Folk Festival, represent.  A chance meeting with Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison) leads him to add electric instruments to his act, and friendship with Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) encourages his rebellious streak.  By 1965, the transformation from cocky upstart to smoldering icon is well advanced, and his insistence on performing at Newport in a way that defies pure folk tradition causes a rift with the festival’s organizers, led by Alan Lomax (Norbert Lee Butz), as well as with Seeger and many in the crowd.

Such is the trajectory of Mangold’s film, a tale of a storybook rise and a temporary hiccup which proves only a blip on a continuing upward path.  Within that broader context, however, the film makes another point about Dylan—that he is, or at least was at this time, what Baez refers to at one point as an asshole, confident in his talent and, as a result, often demeaning of others.  Even when he sees Baez onstage for the first time he remarks that her music is “pretty—perhaps too pretty.”  And as his star rises he treats many of those who have helped him along the way badly, most notably Seeger, whom Norton plays with a touching aura of wide-eyed idealism that makes it especially painful when he feels Dylan has disrespected, even betrayed him.  (There’s an especially telling scene in which Seeger is hosting a local TV program and Dylan enters unexpectedly after initially begging off; what follows is a niftily-written, and revealing, scene in which the two are joined by Big Bill Morganfield as fictional bluesman Jesse Moffette, whom Seeger has enlisted as an emergency replacement.)

Norton, like Chalamet, does his own singing here, and in a most credible voice.  Both men give performances, in fact, that are of award caliber, nuanced and compelling within an admittedly limited range.  Barbaro goes that route as well, and makes Baez the formidable figure she was both on and off the stage; her duets with Chalamet are very convincing recreations.  Among the four leads only Fanning disappoints, and that’s more the result of her character than her acting; by the last reel she has little to do but look stricken as Dylan moves on and she feels them growing further apart as his fame grows. The supporting cast is a strong one, though Holbrook isn’t the most convincing Johnny Cash one can imagine.   

Though shot in New Jersey, with Jersey City standing in, not always comfortably, for New York City, “A Complete Unknown” is visually evocative, with Phedon Papamichael’s darkly burnished cinematography expertly setting off the period feel of François Audouy’s production design and Arianne Phillips’ costumes.  Editors Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris manage the transitions efficiently in covering the four-year span and the changes of Dylan’s personality within it.  They also allow the great swaths of music to infuse the narrative, the musical numbers not truncated or chopped to pieces.          

Dylan’s legions of obsessive admirers, of course, may stew over what’s been left out or altered for dramatic effect by Mangold.  But while it’s neither perfect as history nor even particularly revelatory about its subject, Mangold’s well-crafted film, with another striking performance by Chalamet, proves a worthy addition to the cornucopia of existing tomes and documentaries about a still enigmatic artist.    

Producers: Alex Coco, Samantha Quan and Sean Baker  Director: Sean Baker   Screenplay: Sean Baker    Cast: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Darya Ekamasova, Aleksey Serebryakov, Lindsey Normington, Ivy Wolk, Luna Sofia Miranda, Alena Gurevich, Sebastian Conelli and Ella Rubin  Distributor: Neon   

Grade: B+

The classic screwball comedies were a bit naughty, even mildly risqué.  Sean Baker’s modern take on the genre leaves any hint of restraint in the dust.  “Anora” is extravagantly sexy, foul-mouthed and, up to the closing few minutes, utterly cynical about romance.  It’s replete with drug humor, violence and the most sordid goings-on.  It’s also structurally a mess: it repeats the same beats over and over again, at inordinate length, and individual sequences are so shapeless and meandering that they often feel like sloppy, poorly edited improvisations. 

But despite the manifest flaws in execution and the avalanche of raunchiness, “Anora” is lively and fun.  It’s actually formulaic, but has a vibrancy that makes it seem fresh.  Unlike most comedies today, it has real verve and spirit.  It’s overlong—a great 100-minute movie trapped in a very good 140-minute one—but still compulsively watchable.    

And it has a breakthrough lead performance by Mikey Madison as Anora “Ani” Mikheeva, a pole dancer/escort at a Manhattan strip club who lives in a nothing flat with a roommate (Ella Rubin).  She has friends at work, like fellow dancer Lulu (Luna Sofía Miranda), but also enemies, particularly Diamond (Lindsey Normington), who accuses her of poaching her clients.     

Ani is pragmatic, offering her services freely to the customers by inviting them to one of the private rooms for a personal session.  It’s while doing that one night that she meets Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), a wealthy young Russian with apparently insatiable appetites, the very embodiment of the unbridled ID.  She’s steered to him by the boss because she knows some Russian, learned from the grandma she lived with. 

They click, and after a couple of sessions Vanya offers Ani a proposition: come and stay with him for a week, and he’ll pay her ten grand.  After getting him to increase the sum to fifteen, she shows up at his magnificent Brooklyn estate, where they settle into a routine of sultry sex—very explicitly shown—raucous parties, and lots of drugs and alcohol.  When she asks him where his money comes from, he first jokes that he’s a drug lord, but then admits he’s the son of a powerful oligarch, and when Ani googles the name, she’s astonished. 

But by this time it’s become clear than Ani isn’t just a mercenary; she’s also a bit of a romantic, and when Vanya suggests that they and his crew take an impromptu trip to Las Vegas, she agrees.  And when he proposes to her there, she accepts and gets a marriage license and four-carat ring in the process.  The whole thing feels like a flashy, sexy modern Cinderella story—or maybe a hotter contemporary version of “Pretty Woman.”  And it’s made exciting by director-editor Baker’s rowdy, hyper-energetic style and the glitziness of the locations used by production designer Stephen Phelps and shot by Drew Daniels in gritty, color-splashed tones.

But things change when they return to the New York mansion and are visited by a couple of thuggish enforcers, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov), who have been assigned to ensure that Vanya doesn’t get in to too much trouble.  When they find out that he’s married a sex worker, matters get out of control, and Vanya flees while the duo hold Ani prisoner and call their boss Toros (Karren Karagulian), whom they interrupt in the middle of a family event.  Storming over to the house, he tries to calm the situation down—by this time Ani has been trussed up and is screaming rape—and enlists her in helping them track down her husband.  Toros also has the unpleasant task of notifying his employer, Vanya’s father Nikolai (Aleksey Serebryakov) of what’s happened, and the oligarch and his domineering wife Galina (Darya Ekamasova) quickly hop aboard a plane in Moscow to come to the States.

Meanwhile it’s Toros’ task to get the marriage annulled despite Ani’s protestations.  But to do so, he must first find Vanya, which occasions visits to various clubs and other places—like the Coney Island candy shop where Ani’s friend Crystal (Ivy Wolk) covers the cash register—to search for him.  Finally they do, but an effort to secure the annulment in a compliant New York court unravels because of Vanya’s inebriated condition—and the fact that the ceremony occurred in Nevada.

This second act of the film has the feel of a Hollywood fable about comic gangsters—“Pocketful of Miracles,” say—turned darker, with bursts of bleak humor infusing prolonged action that’s not far from sexual brutality, a long night’s odyssey through a demimonde of desperate pleasure-seeking, and a courtroom sequence that almost goes off the rails.  It’s here that “Anora” feels most padded and repetitious, and where some judicious pruning would have helped.  Yet there are moments one would hate to do without—an altercation with a tow-truck driver (Sebastian Conelli), for instance, or a tantrum in which Toros berates a table of dismissive young men in a diner for their lack of a proper work ethic.

The final reel turns the Cinderella story on its head when Nikolai and Galina arrive and Vanya proves a submissive kid totally in his mother’s thrall.  Ani gets a payoff, and the pleasure of standing up to the nasty Galina—which amuses Nikolai to no end—but the dream of a happy marriage she actually embraced is destroyed.  Baker doesn’t let matters end on such a completely sour note, though: a closing farewell between Ani and the sensitive Igor suggests that something more might be in the offing.

“Anora” isn’t entirely successful in blending its various tones, and it does feel overstuffed, with digressions suggesting that Baker was reluctant to abandon any of his inspirations, or leave anything on the cutting-room floor.  But the lead performances are terrific.  Madison is hard-boiled, seductive or sad, as the occasion demands, and Borisov makes Igor a soulful fellow forced to do things he’d rather not.  And Eydelshteyn encapsulates first the uninhibited hedonism of a privileged youngster freed of parental control, and later the pathetic weakness of a kid cowed by his harridan of a mother.  Then there’s Karagulian’s frantic Toros, a guy raging with self-pity over how his minions have failed him.  Among the others Tovmasyan has some nice moments as a guy who gets no respect, Ekamasova is the very image of an arrogant, entitled wife and mother, and Serebryakov exudes the weariness of a man as exhausted by his wife’s dominance as her son is.

“Anora” isn’t perfect, but its exuberance and willingness to take risks make for a gleefully tough, and ultimately rather poignant, portrait of a young woman seduced and abandoned.