The Current Cinema - Rod Bishop's memories of Bob Dylan triggered - A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (James Mangold, USA, 2024)

I never expected to see this Beginner’s Guide to Dylan, let alone write about such a film or ever listen to these songs through a state-of-the-art cinema sound system. 

Dylan’s four years in A Complete Unknown, 1961 to 1965, were this writer’s formative teenage years: 13 to 17-years-old. The first Dylan songs I ever heard were in a suburban Melbourne pop-up folk club, sung by a visiting American folk singer who - like Pete Seeger - spoke of Dylan in breathless, near-religious terms. My friend and I sat in embarrassed awe, in a circle around the singer. Angst-ridden, hormone-driven by puberty, we stared into our cups of black coffee, hoping no-one would suspect our ages.

These tumultuous four years covered Kennedy’s assassination, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, civil rights in the USA, right-wing politics in Australia - particularly the DLP - and my suburban parents whose lives were governed by a pathological cultural conservatism and by child rearing practices consisting solely of treating their children as “units to be controlled”. 

The political events ticked off in A Complete Unknown, were the staple material of the “finger-pointing” folk singers we heard at the time. By contrast Bob Dylan’s songs - “finger-pointing” or otherwise - were delivered with such an intense, poetic ferocity, the effect was revelatory, particularly on young teenagers. He was seriously charismatic and prolific beyond anybody’s reasonable expectation. The songs were not only significantly divergent from each other, but also showed a rapidly developing maturation. They spoke to us on a whole other level. His songs and his trajectory through these four years, like the political events swirling around in our daily soup, became life-defining for us.

Watching A Complete Unknown was an alternating experience of revisiting my teenage years while trying to fact-check what appeared on screen. Timothée Chalamet covers most of it – voice, dress, looks, body language. He can’t quite nail Dylans’s intensity and facial expressions. For this, check out Dylan’s Newport performances in Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror. But when Chalamet soars, like he does with Dylan’s premiere performance of The Times They Are a-Changin’ at Newport or Masters of War in a Greenwich Village club, it feels almost like the real thing. Only disappointment was the closing Newport song It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Dylan’s heartfelt goodbye to the folk scene forever. See The Other Side of the Mirror for this. Watching all his performances recorded by Murray Lerner from Newport 1963-1965 you wonder if you’ve ever heard Dylan sing any better live. 

Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Timothée Chalamet  as Bob Dylan

Ed Norton gives a decent account of Pete Seeger and is also in good voice. If his performance feels one-note, then maybe that was just the way Seeger wanted to present himself publicly. Monica Barbaro also comes very close to reproducing Baez’s voice as does Boyd Holbrook with Johnny Cash’s pipes.

If you took all the songs out of A Complete Unknown, I’m not sure what you’d be left with. The romantic triangle of Dylan, Baez and Russo would be even more sketchy and limited than it is, and the machinations between Grossman, Lomax and the Newport Folk committee would appear even more slapstick.

Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo

Mangold with co-writer Jay Cocks worked with Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!and along the way there’s considerable time fudging; some completely invented characters such as bluesman Jesse Moffette and a black Brit ‘companion’ of Dylan’s called Becka; Phil Ochs is missing entirely – a serious omission; Bob Neuwirth is given far more screentime than his appearances in Wald’s book; only one of Peter, Paul and Mary appears and then in an organizational role, despite this highly successful group’s work with many Dylan songs. The New Yorker once called them “two beards and a doll”. There’s no mention of The Byrds at all, a group who had a huge hit with an electric version of Mr Tambourine Man and electric versions of other Dylan songs. And, apart from the alcohol, there no drugs. Ridiculous.

I remember three things from the Melbourne concert in April 1966. A third of the audience walked out during the electric set. The acoustic set contained a memorable 11-minute version of Visions of Johanna, sung so slowly I thought Dylan might fall asleep from some sort of opioid consumption. And somewhere in that audience that fateful night was my future life partner. We hadn’t met and didn’t meet for another five years. We’ve been together now for 55 years. 

 

At the Jewish International Film Festival and streaming on DocPlay - Tom Ryan reviews the film Netanyahu doesn't want you to see THE BIBI FILES (Alexis Bloom, USA, 2024)

 

If The Bibi Files has it right, Israel’s democracy – like America’s – is at risk because of the proclivities of its political leader. The latest documentary from producer Alex Gibney’s esteemed and prolific Jigsaw Productions proposes that Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, the 75-year-old former special forces captain who has spent 17 years as its Prime Minister, is at least partially responsible for the troubled circumstances in which the country currently finds itself. 

 

The film offers a strong case concerning the reasons for Netanyahu’s ongoing resistance to any lasting peace deals with Palestine. Yet, despite the significance of its subject matter, it hasn’t been easy to see anywhere in the world.

 

Dependent on which news sources you rely on, the actual information that it contains is already available. However, there’s a compelling difference between reading words on page outlining why he’s currently on trial for bribery, fraud and corruption and watching actual footage of him attempting to fend off his official accusers.

 

Explosive in its implications, the film is directed by Emmy-nominated South African Alexis Bloom (Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes), who grew up Jewish. Its chief coup is its access to the thousands of hours of police interrogation videos that landed in Gibney’s inbox a couple of years ago and that place Netanyahu and his supporters in the cross hairs. 

 

The footage speaks for itself as Netanyahu responds to the charges. His angry reactions speak eloquently of his sense of entitlement: “You’re asking me delusional questions… This is preposterous and insane… You’re trying to incriminate the Prime Minister on nonsense…” And the cutting between various other testimonies to the police about the extraordinary precision of Netanyahu’s memory and his repeated refrain to his interrogators of “I don’t remember” guides viewers towards an obvious conclusion. 

 

He frequently appears shifty, refusing to give direct answers, as his belief in his invincibility gradually crumbles in the face of seemingly irrefutable evidence of his abuse of power. Seated at his office desk, surrounded by the paraphernalia of his working life – rather than at a police station like the other witnesses – he's clearly conscious of the camera throughout the interviews. He’s both giving a performance for it, akin to the ones he’s shown delivering so forcefully elsewhere in his public life, and uneasy about the possibility that a surprise question or revelation could bring him undone. Which is what happens, repeatedly.

 

In a telling scene, he’s confronted by documentation proving that he had – via Qatar, because the Israeli banks refused to cooperate – channelled monthly payments of $35 million to Hamas in order to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. By way of justification, he turns to a fictional gangster, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974), for a rationale: “You need to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” 

 

And while Bloom’s interviewees are hardly impartial regarding what they see as Netanyahu’s betrayals, none seem unreasonable in their criticisms of his policies and leadership style. Among those who appear are respected Israeli investigative journalist and longtime Netanyahu critic, Raviv Drucker (who also produced the film with Gibney and Bloom), former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert (2006 – 2009), Nimrod Novik, who was a chief advisor to PM Shimon Peres, journalist Nir Efetz, once a spin doctor for Netanyahu, and former housekeepers at the Prime Ministerial residence. 

 

It’s not without justification that Novik describes Netanyahu as “the one who fed the beast” and “the architect of chaos”. And, in the context of what’s gone before, Bloom’s key thesis – that Netanyahu’s direction of the unrelenting bombardment of Gaza was primarily designed to shore up his political position and to serve as grounds for the postponement of his trial – is both deeply disturbing and very persuasive. As the 19-year-old, softly spoken Gili Schwartz, a survivor of the horrific 2023 massacre by Hamas militants at the Kibbutz Be’eri, puts it, “A forever war is beneficial to Netanyahu. It makes people feel they always need him.” 

 

It emerges in the film that one of Netanyahu’s most outspoken supporters is his third and current wife, Sara, which elsewhere might appear to be a perfectly understandable case of spousal loyalty. Here, however, she’s cast as a modern-day Lady Macbeth, whispering in his ear, encouraging his excesses and generally keeping him under her thumb. Her astonishing outbursts when pressed politely but purposefully by police interrogators does nothing to discourage such a view. And their elder son, Yair, emerges as a very splintery chip off both their blocks.

 

The film also establishes that Netanyahu’s pursuit of power has propelled him into unholy alliances with far-right figures in Israeli politics. The backgrounds of two in particular are documented via news footage in the film (both of whom have repeatedly declared their opposition to the peace process in Gaza). One is Bezalel Smotrich, who’s openly committed to ethnic cleansing, is described by Ami Ayalon, ex-director of the Israeli Security Agency, as “a Jewish terrorist”, and is (at least at the time of writing) Finance Minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet. The other is the outspoken extremist, Itama Ben-Gvir, who’d threatened PM Yitzhak Rabin on camera shortly before his assassination and, until his recent resignation in protest against the peace talks, had served as Minister of National Security and was in charge of the Israeli police force (responsible for overseeing the West Bank). 

 

As Gibney told Christiane Amanpour on CNN a few weeks ago (when he could get a word in), production of the film began with the allegations of petty corruption against Netanyahu but ended up dealing with “the huge crime of using the unbelievable carnage in Gaza to solidify his personal position”. However, despite the convincing case it builds about the threat the PM has been posing to Israel’s security and rule of law – or perhaps because of it – there are forces at work that have sought to bury The Bibi Files. 

 

In September last year, when it was to be screened as a work-in-progress at the Toronto International Film Festival, Netanyahu’s lawyers petitioned – unsuccessfully – for an injunction preventing the screening. They’ve since sought a court order to prevent any further showings of the leaked police videos. Given what they and the film reveal, such actions were only to be expected.

 

More troubling, however, is the fact that, while the film has been programmed at a few festivals (including the Jewish International Festival in Australia) and has been bought for theatrical distribution in several European countries, it’s been banned (apparently for privacy reasons) in Israel and has struggled to find theatrical exhibition outlets elsewhere.

 

“No mainstream outlet will show the film in the US,” Gibney told Amanpour. And while Madman has bought the Australian distribution rights, the only way to see it here at the moment is via the company’s adventurous streaming arm DocPlay   (Click on the link to take yourself through to the film's page.) However, given the controversy swirling around it – and the attempts to silence it – the film seems destined to remain in the public eye. Where it deserves – and needs – to be.