Music as activism and community development through the star of Timothée Chalamet A complete stranger in which he played the enigmatic Bob Dylan during the first 10 years of his dazzling career. From Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) to Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) to Dylan, there is a legacy of passing the narrative through song from one troubadour to another. Equally important but peripheral to Dylan’s story is the activist with the singular soprano, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), and another of his muses and friends, the artist Sylvie Russo, Elle Fanning playing a version from Dylan’s girlfriend at the time, Suze. Rotolo.
“I think (Baez) deserves to have his own biopic, a limited series, all that. And I hope that in that, I hope that if people don’t know Joan, I hope that they will see this film and become more interested and learn about everything that she has done , because they only have a short amount of time to tell the stories of all the other characters. “, says Barbaro The lawyer. Although the documentary on Baez will be released in 2023, Joan Baez: I am a noise, dove into her music, her art, her protest history and pointed out that she was open about an affair with a woman at a time when people weren’t out there, there’s more to learn about the singer who often played with Dylan in his early days.
“Her first protest, I think she was about 16,” said the Top Gun : Mavericksaid the star. “It was important for me to understand all of that about him and then try to find the moments where I could sort of nod to that, maybe in scenes or just where his understanding would be present in a scene. »
Pour A complete strangerChalamet and Barbaro sang and played guitar themselves, capturing the essence of the folk heroes they embodied. The traditional folk song “The Water Is Wide” helped Barbaro get into Baez.
“She sings in such a beautiful register, and it really has this angelic quality. And so sometimes in warmups I was kind of playing with that on my own. It’s a pretty heartbreaking song, and I really connected with it,” Barbaro says. “It was one of the first songs I heard from her that went into my whole body. And I think that was kind of an entry point for me. And it was good that it wasn’t in the movie because he also wasn’t really attached to any kind of performance expectation at the end. I kind of had my own relationship with that song.
Beyond the music, Chalamet was drawn to Dylan’s often brash and cool persona on camera in the 1960s.
“When (this) project approached me, it was these first press conferences. I think when I got the email about the project, I watched Bob Dylan on YouTube. The first thing that came up was this San Francisco press conference in 1965 and interviews like this,” says Chalamet. He shares that his earliest memories of Dylan were from a friend of his father’s who had “these striking pictures of Dylan on the wall.”
“I had my own share of public facing things, and I was so fascinated by the way Bob carried himself and the way he was, in a sense, but very subtly, so subtle that the journalists couldn’t not even really telling sometimes if he was confrontational.
Early in the film, Dylan the Traveler visits Guthrie in the hospital where the elder statesman of folk music was incarcerated for years with Huntington’s disease. There, Dylan de Chalamet finds Seeger, the community builder.
Norton remembers a rich history of folk music in his home growing up.
“My mother in particular really liked Joan Baez and Judy Collins and a lot of female singers from that era. And I probably, like many, heard Pete Seeger’s songs first through Peter Paul and Mary,” Norton says. “Some of their biggest hits were “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have all the Flowers Gone,” written by Pete Seeger. »
Of his character, who first introduced Dylan to the folk clubs of Greenwich Village, Norton says, “I think he saw music first and foremost as a way to bring people together and to uplift them and to communicate, to communicating the stories of workers, that’s where its roots lay in the socialist labor movement of the 1930s.
“And then, through the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the environmental movement, he brought people together around ideas,” Norton says. “I think of him as radical, not necessarily in his artistic innovation, but rather in the idea of the power with which he believed he could unite people around a common cause through music. »
It’s in a community based around music that Fanning’s Dylan and Russo meet – during an all-day nanny at a church. A young woman with modern ideas and an accomplished visual artist in her own right, Russo was an influence in young Dylan’s life even as she put aside her own achievements for a time.
“She’s very politically active, very grounded and strong, and I wanted to check in on her inner life because she’s this kind of pillar of strength for Bob. He keeps coming back to her. But you just have to show someone who’s in a relationship with someone that they’re not on the same page,” Fanning says. “He goes off into the stratosphere and she’s not necessarily left behind, but she wants something from him that she knows she can’t have because, and she doesn’t necessarily have it. It’s like she wants him, but she also knows that he’s a genius and this artist and she wants him to be able to fly. »
A complete stranger is in the cinema.
