It’s thanks to Chalamet’s unvarnished performances that the songs can speak. When his voice strains, flattens a syllable, or sounds more nasal than Dylan ever did, when he sings through gritted teeth, it does the songbook justice by not overdoing anything. If you haven’t seen A complete strangerthe soundtrack may sound like a fun novelty record, Chalamet’s Dylan karaoke, which, in some sense, it is. But in the context of a generational actor playing a musician who was constantly playing himself, these 23 tracks sound more like A complete strangerThe audio supercut of.
Timmy Dylan – and, on some tracks, his merry would-be Hawks – is joined by Monica Barbaro (of Top Gun: Maverick fame) as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Seeger and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, portraying the angels and demons on Dylan’s shoulders. These studio recordings were originally intended for use in the film before Chalamet argued in favor of playing everything live instead. Norton sings the interactive Zulu song “Wimoweh,” popularized by Seeger’s blacklisted folk group the Weavers, and clearly chosen to portray him as hokey. Among Baez’s three immaculate solo pieces is her haunting rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” in which Barbaro’s vibrato silences a room on screen as she places her hand on the mic to sing a cappella . The Timmy-Monica duets vividly recreate “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Girl From the North Country” (although there is no evidence that Dylan and Baez ever sang this together).
Solo, Chalamet is faithful to Dylan’s acoustic writing, from the sweeping protest poem “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” to his ode to expanded consciousness, “Mr. Tambourine Man.” “The Times They Are a-Changing” stands out because it retains the explosion of fan cheers and choruses at Newport 1964, a nod to the fiasco the following year, as Dylan baited the crowd with bars on “finger” bars. Sixties idealism insisted that the powers that be “don’t criticize what you can’t understand!” » The film’s truncations and adjustments to songs can be confusing, however, such as the decision to cut the poignant epic “Masters of War” down to just two minutes (not to mention the way the editing focuses the best lyric, “Jesus would never forgive what you do).
One of the joys of Chalamet’s performances is hearing the dizzying, transformative charge of getting into Dylan for the first time, just like Chalamet, who grew up on the work of Kid Cudi and Lil B. Those palpable kicks push into the red on the “electric songs” with their swirling poetry, irreverence incarnate, like the “God says No/Abe said What ?» opening Bible craft from “Highway 61 Revisited.” I wish the soundtrack had stopped the audience from jeering and smashing the bottles in the film’s “Like a Rolling Stone” scene, mixed in with the bitter dreamscape alongside the infamous “Judas!” scream (although even the most amateur Dylanologist knows that didn’t happen in Newport). But Chalamet personifies the thrill of putting it all together for the first time: “You don’t need a meteorologist to know which way the wind is blowing.” » Wait… the answer is blowing in the wind! It’s supposed to be this fun. This first “electric” album, released already four months before Newport, was entitled Bring it all homeafter all. In real life, Dylan was returning to his first love: playing in a band like he did as a teenager obsessed with Little Richard. “I embrace the chaos,” Dylan wrote in the liner notes for this album. “I’m not sure he accepts me.”
