ON the last Sunday of this past October, a Timothee Chalamet look-alike contest broke out in Washington Square Park in New York City.

Chalamet made his way through the roiling sea of admirers and impersonators and let himself be photographed with the winner, Miles Mitchell. There is still no substitute for the presence of real people — for a star’s charisma and a worshipper’s scream and shudder.

Notwithstanding Washington Square’s status as a vital site of protest, it was strangely appropriate that this recent eruption of fandom took place there. The park is in Greenwich Village, the main location for the early 1960s rise to fame of the young Bob Dylan who is depicted in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. The Washington Square hijinks reveal that Mitchell-as-Chalamet looks more like Dylan than Chalamet-as-Dylan does.

Mitchell was blessed with the more Dylan-like nose. Chalamet’s aquiline exemplar was thought by the film-makers to require prosthetic enhancement. But even with his bespoke Bob-beak, Chalamet would never be mistaken for the real McCoy from Minnesota.

There are also ways of doing a nose job on the singing voice and the guitar-playing appendages. In Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace, the flashy pianist-entertainer’s hands were grafted by CGI onto Michael Douglas’s arms. These Las Vegas keyboard antics were utterly convincing on screen. Chalamet, by contrast, does the singing and strumming himself. 

Yet the admirable programme of musical skill-building undertaken by Chalamet, however impressive, can only fall short of its model. The Chalamet nose only approximates Dylan’s and the same is true for his guitar-playing. 

What so many movie directors seem to forget is that the hands are as expressive as the face, that mirror of emotion so fetishised by the Hollywood close-up. I don’t mean to be cruel about Chalamet’s musical efforts: he can indeed play and sing and it is fun to hear and watch him do so, even if his contorted left hand lacks the supple surety of Dylan’s and his right is sometimes hesitant and irregular in its strummings and occasional pickings.

Just arrived on the East Coast from Minnesota, Dylan makes his way early on in the film to Woody Guthrie’s hospital room in New Jersey. Woody is rendered mute by a debilitating disease, but Seeger asks Dylan to play something and the complete unknown duly serves up “Song to Woody.”

It’s a poignant, if fabricated, scene that becomes not so much a magisterial demonstration of the power of method acting, but of meta-acting, a gifted actor demonstrating that he has put in the time and has the talent to pay tribute to Dylan analogously to the gifts that Dylan himself, at a much higher level of musicianship, has brought with him on this pilgrimage to meet his stricken idol.

A Complete Unknown is filled with music, but its concentration on performance and its re-enactment means that character development and the human relationships that should give the drama life and originality are reduced to set-piece moments of caddish unfaithfulness, narcissistic posturing, the Oedipal collision between father-figure Seeger and his renegade progeny, Dylan, who (hardly a spoiler) electrocutes the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 at the film’s overcooked climax. 

These amplifications and distortions of history accord with the imperatives of the Hollywood biopic, and the music is asked to carry the larger themes of genius and generational conflict and also to speak — to sing — for itself.

The film’s real problem, however, is not just that the fingers are as telling as the face, but that the moving, sounding images of the real Dylan are so ubiquitous in documentaries and recordings, much of this material instantly accessible on the internet.

In the look-alike and sound-alike contest staged by A Complete Unknown, Dylan, forever young in black-and-white footage, beats Chalamet, hands down, voice thrown to the wind.
 
This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in CounterPunch.