It’s A Complete Unknown week, in which one film has finally united two of the most powerful stan armies on Earth—Timothée Chalamet fans, and the various fogeys of all ages who are similarly irrational in their devotion to Bob Dylan. If you’ve missed GQ’s wall-to-wall coverage of our increasingly Bob-sessed cultural moment, grab your jewels and binoculars and hit these links.
Ian Grant, co-proprietor of the excellent and Bob-minded if no longer Bob-specific music podcast Jokermen, investigated the ever-protean Dylan’s latest incarnation—as Bob Dylan, X.com power user. Is it weird that the man who wrote “Masters of War” now writes, y’know, Tweets, just like the rest of us? Sure it is. But as Grant points out, Bob’s intermittently chatty takes on film and music and the New Orleans fine-dining scene are precedented in his work by stuff like his Theme Time satellite-radio show and his rock-critical foray The Philosophy of Modern Song: “Bob has always been more willing to offer commentary on the world he observes than the world within.”
A Complete Unknown is another piece of a puzzle we’ll probably never “solve”; Bob Dylan has walked down too many roads for any one movie to sum him up. This week, writer Elizabeth Nelson revisited a whole film fest’s worth of (pre-Chalamet) Dylan films and documentaries, from the essential, defining doc Don’t Look Back to Dylan’s baffling auteur(ish) efforts Renaldo and Clara and Masked and Anonymous to Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, in which among other things we got Christian Bale lip-syncing John Doe’s version of Dylan’s Christian-era “Pressing On,” and “channel[ing] the endlessly contradictory impulses of a man who has no contradiction at all because he doesn’t even exist, or at least that’s what he wants you to think.” (Nelson also wrote a liner-note essay for The 1974 Live Recordings, a recent, monumental boxed set of Bob’s hard-charging mid-’70s reunion tour with The Band; as it happens, GQ published an excerpt of that essay back in September, which you can read here.)
So how do you learn to play harmonica like a man who doesn’t exist? Turns out Chalamet got coached by two different harmonica experts, the second being Rob Paparozzi, a 72-year-old pro harp player and blues singer who’s contributed to recordings by Whitney Houston and Cyndi Lauper and toured with Dolly Parton. Paparozzi admitted to Gabriella Paiella that he’d never seen a Timothée Chalamet movie, not even Little Women, but described Chalamet as a dedicated student who “didn’t want to fudge his way through it.” And just like that, another Timothée stan is born. —AP
