{"id":28824,"date":"2025-01-05T09:40:47","date_gmt":"2025-01-05T17:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=28824"},"modified":"2025-01-05T16:22:13","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T00:22:13","slug":"exnotes-review-a-complete-unknown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/01\/05\/exnotes-review-a-complete-unknown\/","title":{"rendered":"ExNotes Review: A Complete Unknown"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Joe Berk<\/h6>\n

I don’t go to the movies too much anymore, although the theatres have dramatically improved their seating and some even sell complete meals you can eat while watching the movie.\u00a0 We have Netflix, Prime, and Max at home, once in a while I’ll watch something on regular TV besides Fox News, and we pretty much have all the home entertainment needs covered with our TV and the aforementioned subscriptions.\u00a0 Susie wanted to see the new Bob Dylan show, though, and I thought it might be good to get out for a bit.<\/p>\n

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A fake Dylan filming a fake motorcycle scene.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As movies go, A Complete Unknown<\/em> was not too bad.\u00a0 The Joan Baez sound tracks were great, as was Zimmerman’s music (I’ll bet you didn’t know Bobby Zimmerman was beatnikized into Bob Dylan, did you?).<\/p>\n

I have to comment on the motorcycle scenes, though…after all, this is a motorcycle website.<\/p>\n

In the very first Dylan motorcycle scene, he’s riding an early Norton Atlas.\u00a0 You don’t see too many of those with their black trapezoidal fuel tanks and huge chrome valanced fenders, so it had my attention.\u00a0 In all the remaining motorcycle scenes, Dylan is on a mid-’60s Triumph Tiger.\u00a0 \u00a0He didn’t wear a helmet in any of those scenes, and the action was ostensibly set in New York City.\u00a0 Seeing a helmetless Dylan slicing through Manhattan traffic made me uneasy, even though I knew it was all Hollywood tomfoolery.\u00a0 The really goofy parts were the closeup riding scenes in which Dylan’s ample curls were unruffled by cruising speed winds, and the 500cc Triumph starting without Dylan using the Triumph’s sole wakeruppery mechanism (i.e., a kickstarter).\u00a0 Nope, the moto scenes were as fake as a Joe Biden promise, and that made me put A Complete Unknown<\/em> in the Complete Fake column.<\/p>\n

Like I said above, the music was good.\u00a0 Somewhere there’s a probably a Scriptwriting for Dummies<\/em> guide that says a movie has to have conflict injected into the plot, so in this flick it was Dylan doing “his music” at the Newport Folk Festival instead of their desired folk music.\u00a0 Dylan and Pete Seeger almost started a fist fight over that (I know, it’s silly, but I’m just reporting here, folks).\u00a0 At the concert’s end Dylan sang one folk song, so all was forgiven.<\/p>\n

I can’t leave out the best part:\u00a0\u00a0Johnny Cash (played by a real complete unknown, Boyd Holbrook) was in the movie and he was superb.\u00a0 If anyone ever does another Johnny Cash movie, casting anyone other than Holbrook in that role would be a crime against nature.<\/p>\n

If you can ignore the motorcycle phoniness, A Complete Unknown<\/em> is worth the price of admission.\u00a0 The motorcycle inaccuracies notwithstanding, I enjoyed it and I think you will, too.<\/p>\n

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