A vampire and a complete unknown

Lily-Rose Depp and the shadow of Bill Skarsgård in Robert Eggers' ‘Nosferatu.’ PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Lily-Rose Depp and the shadow of Bill Skarsgård in Robert Eggers' 'Nosferatu.' PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, "A Complete Unknown" starts off with 19 year old Bob Dylan and his guitar arriving in Greenwich Village, New York in 1961. The movie continues with his career taking off and wraps up in the aftermath of his performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. 



There really are no spoilers because we all know what happened, what matters in this film is the journey, not the destination. It runs two hours and 20 minutes, and it's buoyed by captivating performances from the cast and the music of Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash and more from the era. 



It takes a look at a great moment in music history when there was so much incredible poetry in the lyrics, lines and melodies which live on to this day and many musicians in that scene challenged and inspired each other. There are 23 songs in the soundtrack album and apparently three times that used in "A Complete Unknown." I was reminded of so many classics like "The Times They are A-Changin'," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall,""Folsom Prison Blues," and "It Ain't Me, Babe" (a duet with Dylan and Baez). My favorite musical performance in the film has to be that fictional jam between a fictional character named Jesse Moffette — played by blues musician Big Bill Morganfield (who also happens to be the son of Muddy Waters) — and Bob Dylan at a taping of Pete Seeger's folk, bluegrass and blues TV show, "Rainbow Quest." 



Timothée Chalamet owns it as Bob Dylan, but it's Ed Norton's Bob Seeger who won my heart. He plays Seeger with a Mr. Rogers earnestness combined genuine and fierce love for folk music underneath all that amiability and generosity. Boyd Holbrook also looks like he's having a grand time pulling off Johnny Cash.



"A Complete Unknown" is up for several Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Norton) and Best Director.



Fans of all things dark and gothic will probably never tire of hearing the story of "Dracula" over and over again in different iterations. On film it's been notably told via F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror" in 1922, Werner Herzog's "Nosferatu" in 1979 and Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" in 1992. There's also the incredibly fun "Shadow of the Vampire" from 2000, which works on the premise that Max Shreck (the actor who plays Count Orlok in the 1922 film) was actually a vampire.



This new retelling has all the elements you need in a gothic fairytale—a tragic heroine, a mysterious, hideous yet oddly seductive monster, a madman or two, castles and curses. Even if we know the newly married Thomas Hutter (Jonathan Harker) is headed towards peril when he has to make a long, arduous trip through the Carpathian Mountains to meet his mysterious client, we still like the anticipation for the revelation of the Count.



Jarin Blaschke who worked on Eggers previous features, "The VVitch," "The Lighthouse," and "The Northman" composes these fitting bewitching, mysterious, scenes of 1838 Europe using drab, desaturated colors. Snow, crypts, old houses, the absence of electricity, the costumes, he captures it with haunting elegance.



The young cast — Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor Johnson — is competent on the whole. Bill Skarsgård in a category all his own as Orlok.

But if you think the kids are great, the older actors, Simon McBurney (who plays Knock, the equivalent of Renfield) and Ralph Ineson (an Eggers favorite) are fabulous. Willem Dafoe is an absolute thrill as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (the Van Helsing equivalent). It would not be the same film without him. I just love the way he says this line, "I have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb!"



There's so much more to say about these two films but not enough space. They were both a joy to watch. And if you still have time for more Oscar films, SM Cinema's Oscar Marathon is still running. I hope to catch "Conclave" and "The Apprentice."