On the last Sunday of this past October, a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest broke out in Washington Square Park in New York City. Dozens of participants and thousands of onlookers thronged to the event and when, in the midst of the proceedings, the famed actor himself appeared, the throng went into paroxysms of ecstasy. Seemingly equipped with endless stores of good humor, good looks, and God-given talent, Chalamet made his way through the roiling sea of admirers and impersonators and let himself be photographed with the winner, Miles Mitchell, who had come costumed as Chalamet as Willy Wonka, the title role assumed by the actor in the latest movie remake devoted to the campy chocolatier.
Public spaces should welcome events that range from the sublime to the ridiculous, as well as those that careen off that vast spectrum into the surreal and subversive. The mindless enthusiasm of that Afternoon in the Park with Timmy comes into telling relief when we recall that so many historic protests—from suffragette rallies to anti-war, civil rights and labor demonstrations—have taken place in the shadow of Washington Square’s triumphal arch. Alerted to the look-alike pageant conducted without a permit, the NYPD arrived to disperse the mob, even carting off at least one contestant in handcuffs.
Not even the apocalypse excites like celebrity, except maybe when it is brought face-to-face with its simulacrum.
The mad appeal of this competition of appearances derives from its in-person-ness. Thanks to AI and other forms of techno-trickery, images, people and facts are now rampantly faked on screens of all sizes, not to mention goggles, glasses and headsets. Holographic Cary Grants can be made to smooch with holographic Michael Jacksons. A digital waxwork Jimmy Carter can rise from his Capitol coffin to tickle an ersatz Shah, not an impersonator per se, but a by-the-numbers dictator resplendent in 3D. Yet at the time of writing, 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, which had concluded shooting in June. The movie premiered on Christmas Day, two months after the Chalamet look-alike jamboree.
Revisited after the release of Mangold’s Dylan biopic, the Washington Square hijinks reveal that Mitchell-as-Chalamet looks more like Dylan than Chalumet-as-Dylan does. The Russian doll dance-and-shell-game also sheds light on the sometimes curious ways of biopics, especially musical ones.
Mitchell was blessed with the more Dylan-like nose. Chalamet’s aquiline exemplar was thought by the filmmakers to require prosthetic enhancement. This fake nose was not nearly as massive and distracting as the cinematic schnozzes previously fitted onto Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro or Nicole Kidman as Virginia Wolf in The Hours. Even with his bespoke Bob-beak, Chalumet 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 Douglass’s arms. These Las Vegas keyboard antics were utterly convincing on screen.
Chalamet, by contrast, does the singing and strumming himself, and has been garnering richly deserved plaudits for his performance of the Dylan tunes heard in A Complete Unknown. Mangold’s project had been planned before the pandemic, and the musically untrained Chalamet diligently set to work learning the guitar and etching his voice into Dylanesque texture. Delayed by Covid, Chalamet continued to work up his musical chops and learn his Dylan songs before the project went into production last year.
Having to watch fake riffs on a mute keyboard or violin can be as off-putting as an actor lipsynching songs to the real artist’s recordings since the speaking voice can be heard in the singing one, and vice-versa. The disparity between the spoken and sung word can become irritating to the point of distraction. But even with the voice, digital technology can be deployed to correct pitch or, in the present case, could have Dylan-ified the core Chalamet sonority, roughening the timbral grain, tweaking the nasal quality already aided and abetted by prosthesis.
Yet even the admirable program of musical skill-building undertaken by Chalamet, however impressive, can only fall short of its model. Adding to the confusion, there are scads of Dylan tribute bands out there with frontmen who are better musicians and mimics than Chalamet, even if they lack his star power.
Another way of querying the ontological difference between meticulously covering a song and acting a part is to wonder whether Chalamet-look-alike Mitchell can act that role as well as Chalamet can play and sing like Dylan. Lacking the celebrity brand, at least for now, maybe Mitchell has music in him too. He’s certainly got the Dylan look down, even if he was trying to be Chalamet in another guise.
It is a lot easier to strum your way through Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” delivered a few times by Chalamet in the film, than it is to toss off a Chopin Polonaise à la Liberace. In the hierarchy of technical challenges in music, learning a few chords is relatively easy as a musical task. That very accessibility allowed so many people to join in the folk music renaissance of the 1950s, the movement that helped birth Dylan’s art.
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 fetishized 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 to find Pete Seeger (done with quavering nobility by Ed Norton in the film’s best performance) there as well. 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 and an affecting performance by Chalamet, not least because one can hear and see the effort. The scene 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, and one is sincerely thankful for the screen time given it by Mangold, and for the practice time taken by Chalamet to get to where he has gotten.
But the film’s welcome concentration on performance and its reenactment (if in occasionally jumbled chronology) 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 but 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 and nose down, voice thrown to the wind.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
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