Year End Catch-up! 'A Complete Unknown,' 'Nosferatu,' 'Nickel Boys,' 'Kneecap'
#303: "A Complete Unknown," "Nosferatu," "Nickel Boys," "Kneecap"
Edition 303:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: I crammed in a bunch of movies before the end of the year that I want to tell you about — a Bob Dylan biopic, a vampire epic, a gut-wrenching emotional drama and a crazy rap comedy. In this week’s trailer watch…Adam Sandler is back on his bulls***.
A Complete Unknown
Pretty much everyone is familiar with the musical biopic formula at this point. How could you not be. In recent years we’ve gotten movies for Queen, Elvis, Elton John, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Bob Marley Aretha Franklin…and there’s a bunch more on the way in the next few years. You get in, you play the hits loud and proud, sand over the rough edges, solidify the legacy and get out.
Maybe it’s because this movie was directed by James Mangold (Ford v. Ferrari, Logan), starring Timothee Chalamet, or based on the infamous contrarian Bob Dylan that it diverted my attention away from the obvious fact glaring me in the face — A Complete Unknown is a BCE.
Now, this is a great entry into our growing database of branded content experiences. Because the term isn’t meant to be disparaging, it just means it doesn’t abide by the same rules as a Movie. Primarily, I think this movie succeeds in introducing Dylan to a new generation, giving a primer to anyone who never understood his cultural impact before, and I’m sure boosting his Spotify streams. Secondarily, it’s entertaining and watchable as hell.
Or maybe I was just more willing to accept the propaganda when it was about an artist I love and have advocated for in this newsletter. That’s the thing about BCEs. They’re a fandom machine.
And holy moly does this movie have a lot of his music. There are over 40 songs in the 2hr20min movie, and even though they aren’t all full length I’d venture to guess that as much as 40% of the total runtime is just Chalamet singing Dylan songs.
Of course, that’s the central appeal of the movie. Chalamet doesn’t quite transform into Dylan, but does about as good of a job as anyone could at capturing the essence of him during that time — a enigmatic, ambitious kid who wrote some of the most influential songs of the 20th century out of nowhere. This is Timmy’s movie-star-iest part to date, and he crushed it, ascending him to the A+ tier of talent in Hollywood going forward.
Now, I’m no Dylanologist, so it doesn’t bother me that creative liberties were taken on this story spanning Dylan’s first five years in New York City, his rise from obscurity to become the voice of a generation singing folk “protest songs” and then eventually “going electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
The thing I actually appreciated most about it was that it makes no attempts to “explain” the mystery of Dylan, like where the inspiration for his songs came from or why he constantly felt the need to subvert expectations, often hurting those who cared about him.
To me, Dylan has always been a bit of a two-way mirror. People were able to see in him whatever they wanted to see, getting their hopes up on how his incredible talent would help them achieve whatever they wanted for him — whether it’s to change the world, settle down and have a family or be a rebel. The very act of going electric could be seen by one side as boldly rebelling against the establishment to claim his freedom and by the other as selling out and betraying his community.
The movie competently recreates the key moments from the period without really putting its finger on the scales either way. And because the characters and actors playing them are so compelling — Ed Norton as Pete Seeger, a musical Mr. Rogers; Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, the coolest girl in the folk scene; Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a stand-in for Dylan’s girlfriend Suzie Rotolo; Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash; Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie; Dan Fogler as Albert Grossman and so on — it rolls along with undeniable charm.
If you want a Movie, well, Inside Llewyn Davis is a pseudo-Dylan story set in the exact same community at the same time. It’s one of my all-time favorites, but I promise you, if you show a casual movie goer each of these movies back to back, the majority are going to choose A Complete Unknown nine times out of 10.
(**And for those who catch the Dylan bug after watching this, I highly recommend Martin Scorcese’s documentary No Direction Home.)
Nosferatu
Robert Eggers might be one of the best pure filmmakers in the world. The VVitch, The Lighthouse and The Northman are all towering achievements in visual and cinematic design, just as they are committed to a kind of esoteric and cold storytelling style. Nosferatu is a leveling up on both accounts, remaking the 1921 vampire movie of the same name with (I’m told) remarkable fidelity.
That’s great news if you’re a film snob, a fan of gnarly horror or interested in the occult — a triumvirate that makes up Eggers’ core audience. And don’t sleep on that audience! This movie is lapping A Complete Unknown at the box office and could turn a tidy profit.
But this story offers zero on-ramps or exposition for casual movie-watchers to pick up the trail. Lily-Rose Depp stars as a young woman who gets possessed by a dark spirit, in probably the most committed performance I saw all year. Her physicality and willingness to play sexy, possessed, doting, crazy and disgusting to the farthest degree is nothing short of…and I hate to use this word for actors…brave.
Nicholas Hoult co-star as…well, it’s Nicholas Hoult, so of course he plays a man who gets cucked, in this case by Dracula, who he travels from Germany to Transylvania to track down. There he meets absolute monster transformation hall-of-famer Bill Skarsgård, before tracking back home to torment Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who always comes off best when he can play big ridiculous characters, Emma Corrin as his wife, and crazy professor Willem Dafoe (an Eggers staple).
The story is equally simple and also going to leave most people going…so what happened exactly? You cannot help but be impressed by the unbelievable level of craft that went into it and nobody can accuse Eggers of not making capital-M Movies, but I think this is going to be a very hard movie for people to love.
Nickel Boys
No other theater-going experience in 2024 ended with the almost-full theater in complete silence, not getting up from their seats for several minutes. That speaks to the gravity and tone of this story, based a on a Colson Whitehead novel, about a juvenile corrections camp in the 1960s that for all intents and purposes, operated like a slavery plantation (the novel was based on a real school).
But that reaction of stunned silence also reflects the movie’s unwillingness to let anyone, not even the viewers, off the hook. Once the cruelty of the movie has its foot on your throat, it doesn’t let you up for breath (apologies for the crude yet intentional analogy there). There’s a lack of hope that disheartens both the characters and us in the audience, that deepens the emotional reaction but also just leaves you feeling really bummed out.
Themes aside, this is A LOT of movie. It’s told from a first-person point of view that alternates between the two main characters, bounces to a behind-the-head POV in the flash-forwards (turns out this technique is very important to the movie’s big plot twist), and intersperses photos, videos and other artistic renditions throughout in unexplained interludes.
In an already heavy movie, the flash and zing felt too much, and will make this movie inaccessible for a lot of viewers (those who won’t otherwise be scared away by the actual content).
I still ranked it very highly for the year, because I give major kudos to any movie that can make me feel as many emotions as this one did, and leave such a lasting impact on me.
Kneecap
Netflix
It’s quite possible that after watching the “Say Nothing” series through on Hulu, I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to the thick accent and f— you attitude of Northern Ireland. Thankfully, there’s a little indie movie based on a true story about a group of rappers who helped save native Irish as a national language with their provocative songs.
I was even more shocked to find out, as the credits roll, that the three principle actors are in fact the actual three members of Kneecap, one of which was a school teacher who made beats in his garage and wore a tri-colored ski mask on stage to hide his identity. They more than held their own on screen, even beside Michael Fassbender, who plays one of the boy’s fathers and a hero to the rebellion (Fassbender is fast becoming one of my favorite actors working today).
The movie mixes a quaint Sundance charm with some serious Belfast bonafides, filming in locations that really could not be faked or recreated on a sound stage in a more professionalized production. It’s exciting throughout and lands the emotional conclusion. Much like the band, it punches way above its weight.
Trailer Watch: Happy Gilmore 2
The Sandman continues to find ways to surprise me with just how much he can be rewarded for so little. Throw on an oversized hockey jersey, play a few rounds of golf with your friends, and boom you’ve got what will almost certainly be the most-watched movie on Netflix in 2025. If you know a single millennial who isn’t excited to watch this, they’re lying. And if you hear anyone tell you with a straight face they think this movie will be good, they’re also lying.