Jana J. Monji

Bad Boy Musicians: ‘A Complete Unknown’ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and ‘Better Man’ ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Two films romanticize the bad boys musicians and I wonder if both don’t have the underlying message, “Boys will be boys.” One looks at a specific period in the life of Bob Dylan, “A Complete Unknown.” Another, “Better Man,” looks at the rise and fall into substance abuse of British rock star Robbie Williams before his redemption.

Bob Dylan is not a handsome fellow. His voice is not melodic and I find it irritating. As the title suggestions, the film “A Complete Unknown” takes place long before he won an Academy Award (in 2001 for Best Original Song, “Things Have Changed” from “Wonder Boys”),  a Golden Globe (“Things Have Changed”),  a special Pulitzer Prize citation (2008) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (2016). This is, however, about the time he won his first of ten Grammy Awards (in 1963 for Best Folk Recording” for the album “Bob Dylan”).  He’d win another Grammy for Best Folk Recording”  in 1965 for “The Times They Are a-Changin'” and the film ends before his 1969 Grammy for Best Folk Performance for “John Wesley Harding.”

Based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, “Dylan Goes Electric!,” the film “A Complete Unknown,” begins in 1961 as Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalet) moves to New York to meet his idol Woody Guthrie (1912-1967). Guthrie  (Scoot McNairy) suffers from Huntington’s disease, an incurable hereditary disease and he would pass this on to two of his daughters.

Dylan meets Guthrie(Scoot McNairy) as well as Guthrie’s good friend Pete Seeger (1919-2014) at the hospital.

Seeger’s best-known songs are:

Woody Guthrie listens to a song that Dylan has written for him (“A Song to Woody”).  Both men are impressed and Seeger (Edward Norton) invites Dylan to stay with his family . Seeger married filmmaker Toshi Aline Ohta (1922-2013)  in 1943. Seeger introduces Dylan to New York City’s folk music scene.

Dylan immerses himself in the music scene and meets a woman, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), and they begin a relationship, but soon after Dylan flirts with Joan Baez (Monica Barbara). Dylan also attracts the attention of music manager Albert Grossman (Dan Folger) who takes him on as a client. Although Dylan signs to do an album, his label wants covers and not original work. His first album doesn’t do well, but while Russo (who is likely based on Suze Rotolo) is away, Dylan begins an affair with Baez.

As Dylan finds success he feels constrained by his label and the folk music community. His on-stage partnership with Baez is also troubled. This leads up to him going in a new musical direction. At about this time, Russo realizes that Dylan is having an affair with Baez. Dylan finds both encouragement and opposition to going electric.

Dylan fans will feel a moment of pain as they watch him ride off on a motorcycle. In July 1966, Dylan would be involved in a motorcycle accident. It doesn’t seem to have been disfiguring as the one that Mark Hamill was involved in. The details of Dylan’s motorcycle entanglement are vague. Yet it was supposedly the reason he stopped touring for a couple of years.

Chalamet’s Dylan is a mumbling genius, a singing outlaw. His charm excuses his indiscretions and his genius excuses his determination to keep his past a mystery from Fanning’s infatuated Russo. Chalamet sings and plays both the guitar and harmonica. His phrasing sounds like Dylan yet he is much more attractive and director James Mangold (“Logan” 2017 and “Ford v Ferrari” 2019) takes full advantage of Chalamet’s winsome attractiveness. While we see that Dylan started myth-building early, there’s nothing here in the screenplay by James Mangold and Jay Cocks that tells us why.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul & Mary, Dylan, Joan Baez and musicians who sang these folk songs. The beauty of their voices is what rises above the sound of a guitar. The electric guitar changed music and perhaps took us away from the true vocal sounds, amplified but not modified.

“A Complete Unknown” isn’t history, but is Dylan as a myth and a man whose bad behavior was excusable because of his genius.

Better Man

While I knew who Bob Dylan was, I had no idea who British pop singer Robbie Williams was and is. This film is about and stars Williams, but instead of using CGI to attempt a more youthful version, Williams is portrayed by a CGI-animated anthropomorphized chimpanzee–one that stands and walks with ease on two legs. Williams voices himself although young Robbie is voiced by Carter J. Murphy. Jon Davies is Williams in his chimpanzee form used for motion capture.

The film isn’t completely self-indulgent as it might have been. Under the direction of Michael Gracey (“The Greatest Showman”) with a script written by Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole and Gracey, the self-deprecating humor defuses much but not all of the self-celebratory tone. Williams avatar is that of a chimpanzee because he is “less evolved than other people.”

The film begins innocently enough with a voice over: “Good evening folks. Good evening, slags.” Williams tells us he’s been called “narcissistic, punchable, shit-eating twat,” but we are going to see him as he sees himself.  In this case, a young ape among White kids who find him useless, at least where it counts–street sports.

As a youngster, Williams is humiliated and a bit of an outsider. His grandmother comforts him while his father introduces him to the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra. The turning point is when Williams is in a school play and a minor mishap becomes an inspirational moment. Williams is quick on his feet and turns what could have been an embarrassing moment into a shining turn in the spotlight. Talent isn’t what matters, if one is cheeky enough.

Williams auditions for a boy band and wins a spot as one of the singers of the group Take That which is a good thing since his school grades aren’t good. As the youngest member, he has a lot to prove, but that isn’t helped by his struggles with self-doubt and creative expression under manager Nigel Martin-Smith and increasing addiction to drugs.

Eventually, Williams is dismissed from the band and begins a new romantic partnership with Nicole Appleton and a creative one with songwriter Guy Chambers. Yet he still has his partnership with drugs. While he has fulfilled his father’s dream, his becomes being on the bill of the Knebworth festival.

The Knebworth Festival is an open-air rock and pop concert held in Knebworth, England with the first one featuring The Allman Brothers Band and The Doobie Brothers in 1974. That concert attracted about 60,000 people.  It seems the festival wasn’t put on every year. According to the Knebworth House website, there was a concert in 2001 which featured Ministry of Sound.

Robbie Williams was the headliner at Knebworth in 2003 when the festival lasted for three days.

As this film shows, Williams will survive it all and upon the death of his grandmother, commit to being a better man. The film ends with Williams at Royal Albert Hall performing Frank Sinatra’s signature song, “My Way.”

No one in the film comments on Williams’ simian appearance and we’ll see Williams facing his younger selves, all in chimp form. The CGI anthropomorphized ape is a gimmicky way of keeping Williams’ character at the center of our attention.

Before his performance, he glances at photos of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. taped to the mirror of his dressing room. As the movie ends, it becomes clear that Williams had only a superficial understanding of who and what Sinatra was. In 2024, it’s easy to think that Sinatra and Martin were White and accepted as White, but that wasn’t the case.

Sinatra (1915-1998) was born at a time when prejudice against Italians was not unusual.  Dino Paul Crocetti changed his name to Dean Martin (1917-1995). Anthony Dominick Benedetto changed his name to Tony Bennett (1926–2023). Yet Sinatra kept his Italian surname.

Sinatra was a supporter of diversity. He raised monies for Israel. Sinatra not only included Sammy Davis Jr. in his Rat Pack, but he also pressured Nevada hotels and casinos to desegregate. When Sinatra was the Chairman of the Board, the Rat Pack included Dean Martin (Italian and Catholic like Sinatra), Sammy Davis Jr. (African American and Jewish), Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop (born Joseph Gottlieb and Jewish). Sinatra performed at a benefit to raise money for Martin Luther King Jr. in 1961 at Carnegie Hall. The bill included Sammy Davis Jr, Sinatra, Dean Martin and Joey Bishop.

His only directorial effort was a 1965 Japan-US anti-war film, “None but the Brave” (勇者のみ). For me, personally, seeing the film years later on television gave me hope that anti-Japanese sentiments had or would abate. Critic Robert Horton wrote: “The film bears the influence of ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ with a little ‘Mister Robert’s thrown in, but it has a bitterness about war that goes all the way through to the forceful final title, a reflection of Sinatra’s liberal views at the time. Clint Eastwood got a lot of credit for making two films that showed WWII from the American and the Japanese sides, ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Letters from Iwo Jima,’ but in a way Sinatra had already done it, and in one movie. It’s not a major film, but an honorable effort, and it predates the rash of anti-war counterculture movies by a few years.”

This was all after he revived his career in 1953 with his film “From Here to Eternity” and with teaming up with musical conductor Nelson Riddle at Capitol Records.

Thus, when Sinatra sang “My Way” in 1969,  the song that Paul Anka bought and reworked just for him, he had promoted diversity for Jewish Americans, African Americans and even Asian Americans at a time when it wasn’t particularly popular. Moreover, his performing friends, the Rat Pack, represented diversity. When Williams sings “My Way,” it seems more like self-aggrandization.

The utter whiteness of the Robbie Williams story raises some other issues, particularly since he launched his solo career in 1996. While Margaret Thatcher had in 1978 infamously said “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in,” Hong Kong was handed over to China in 1997 and there was heated debated in the UK about the fate of the Hong Kong Chinese. That’s apparently no concern to Williams.

Moreover, “Better Man” as a Robbie Williams celebratory fest is essentially a display of White male privilege. Consider if the protagonist was female or an ethnic minority: The implications of using a CGI chimpanzee as an alter ego would be different.  African Americans, Blacks or Filipinos have been equated to apes and monkeys with the clear message that they are, as a people, less evolved. In 2009, a New York Post political cartoon raised eyebrows when this type of racism seemed to be referenced.

A Broadway musical and Oscar-winning movie used both the less evolved and ugly concept in the song “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes.”  The last line reveals that it isn’t because his beloved is a female gorilla and not beautiful by human standards, but because she is Jewish. John Kander who composed the song with his lyricist partner Fred Ebb was Jewish American.

“Better Man” is a slick, gimmicky musical which will doubtlessly make Robbie Williams better known. From Wikipedia, I learned that Williams does doe charitable work such as charity football matches to raise funds for UNICEF UK and that he has been a patron to a children’s charity (Donna Louise Trust). These all seem to be very safe moves, nothing as daring as what Sinatra did even as he was sometimes hindered by both his volatile temper and his reported mobster connections. There should be more to being a better man than what we see in the film. Williams was a White man in a White society that felt inferior to other White people, but never reached out to others who were suffering more, from White Irish Catholics to people of ethnic minorities who were often seen and treated as less evolved.  Sinatra’s “My Way” was about a gutsy life, lived large with great kindness and humanity and with enormous cultural influences. This film doesn’t show that Williams learned those lessons from Sinatra. The film is like being offered a plastic banana. It looks good, but has no nutritional value and yet will probably last forever.

Directed by Michael Gracey  and written by Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole and Gracey, the film had its premiere at Telluride Film Festival on 30 August 2024 and was released on 25 December 2024 in the US.

Listening to the music of both Robbie Williams and Bob Dylan, it’s Bob Dylan’s verses and the artists of the folk music scene who touch my heart although Williams has a better voice (and dance moves) than Dylan. I hope that “A Complete Unknown” will help generations of filmgoers become acquainted with the music of Dylan, Seeger and Guthrie. Yet I also hope that upon seeing “Better Man,” generations will look to Sinatra and find better ways to be a better man.

On my YouTube channel, I made some shorts of “My Way,” although some are blocked in certain regions due to copyright agreements.

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