A Complete Unknown film: A story of Bob Dylan (The Grinch) for Christmas Day

Blonde on Blonde is food for speculation. As usual, Dylan’s explanation doesn’t get you any wiser: “I have no idea where that came from, but I’m sure it was with the best of intentions … No idea who came up with it. I certainly didn’t.” This was also the case with Brecht On Brecht, a play that Dylan attended in the autumn of 1961, on the advice of Suze Rotolo. The piece about Bertold Brecht made a great impression on him. Another possibility is a reference to Warhol's actress Edie Sedgwick – reportedly an inspiration for many of the songs on the record – who had her hair bleached. After her return from Italy, Dylan and Suze Rotolo did reunite, but Dylan seems to be stuck in the role of the abandoned, wounded lover. Moreover, Joan Baez was now in the picture. It could be argued that the song, at least in its original design, was written with his first great love Suze Rotolo in mind. The subtitle in that sketching stage is “Fourth Street Affair” and that is not very cryptic – it refers to the apartment in which he and Suze lived until August ’63, 161 West 4th Street. The reverie in the autobiography Chronicles, that Suze might have been his spiritual soul mate (“I still believe she was my twin”) and he records his memory of the end of the relationship with Rotolo: “Eventually fate flagged it down and it came to a full stop”. 

Many testimonies of intimates from the mid-sixties make a point of Dylan’s nasty side, his habit of verbally insulting less gifted guests to the bone, surrounded by a few loyal disciples such as Phil Ochs and especially Bob Neuwirth. Suze Rotolo: "When he was on his “telling it like it is” truth mission, he could be cruel. Though I was never on the receiving end of one of his tirades, I did witness a few. The power he was given and the changes it entailed made him lash out unreasonably, but I believe he was trying to find a balance within himself when everything was off-kilter." Although, according to Marianne Faithfull, Dylan's friend Bobby Neuwirth was the worst: “Dylan had a reputation for demolishing people, but when people told these stories it was really Neuwirth they meant. Neuwirth and Dylan did such a swift verbal pas de deux that people tended to confuse them. But the most biting commentary and crushing put-downs came from Neuwirth. I never saw Dylan’s malicious side, nor the lethal wit that has often been ascribed to him. I never thought of him as amusingly cruel the way I thought of John Lennon. Dylan was simply the mercurial, bemused center of the storm, vulnerable and almost waiflike.”

“Visions Of Johanna”: The discussion focuses on the questions about who Louise is, and who Johanna could be. Joan Baez and Sara Lownds? Suze Rotolo and Edie Sedgwick? In any case, Dylan sketches a contrast between a sensuous, present Louise and an unattainable, idealized Johanna, and lards the sketch with dream images, beautiful rhyme play and impressionistic atmospheres. Who are these ladies? Louise: Joan Baez, friend and former lover, a great folk singer. Suze Rotolo, an idealistic fighter for human rights and women liberation. The electricity howls in her face. Mona Lisa: Maybe Edie Sedgwick. She was the muse of the famous artist and painter Andy Warhol. Her lifestyle was shocking. Maybe she is smiling because she has got a fix of heroin. Sedgwick was subject of speculation as having caused the motorcyle accident and Dylan hiding her temporarily at his house while he recovered to avoid further gossip. Dylan and Sedgwick had a strong argument and she left him for Bob Neuwirth, whom she left later to be admitted to a physchiatric hospital in Santa Barbara.

In A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, Suze Rotolo talks about her grandparents who had immigrated from Sicily. Her parents were blue collar but also imbued with culture, affiliated to the American Communist Party. Rotolo recalls with affection his romance with Bob Dylan, then a young up and coming artist recently arrived to New York and she introduces to the bohemian Greenwich Village. He proposes marriage to her, but Rotolo's family didn't like his cynical persona and she leaves him after aborting a child of his. Rotolo thinks she contributed to the awakening of Dylan about the civil social causes in the Kennedy era but she doesn't want to exaggerate her role in the inspiration he took for his songs. Rotolo surmises that Dylan juggled three romantic relationships at once with her, Sara Lownds and Edie Sedgwick, and that Sedgwick rebutting Dylan inspired the folk-rock milestone Like a Rolling Stone.

This idea of self-mythologizing, but as the theme is underexplored, it can’t help but come across as indicative of A Complete Unknown’s unwillingness to fully realize Dylan, or make him enough of a rounded character is his own biography. This is further apparent in Chalamet’s performance, which isn’t “bad” only to say that eventually it goes from being distracting and strange to just something that you’re suddenly used to. Chalamet sounds a bit like Dylan if Dylan spoke mostly through clenched teeth, keeping his lips very close together, recreating Dylan’s distinct, nasally cadence. But his interpretation manages to draw out the adenoidal qualities of Dylan’s voice beyond reality, and the effort to match Chalamet’s vocal recreation to the original owner wades into caricature. At the end of the day, Chalamet is a competent actor. But he isn’t Dylan. He never once truly feels like him, no matter how well his hair is coiffed or the cigarette hangs off his lips. 

This isn’t realloy a chameleonic triumph where the actor disappears into their subject. Mangold’s characterization is admirably non-obsequious, portraying Bob Dylan as an aloof genius prone to selfishness and bitterness, navigating tumultuous relationships with his mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and his romantic partners: artist Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and folk contemporary Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Strangely, Edie Sedgwick and maligned Phil Ochs are conspicuously absent from his story. In the end, A Complete Unknown neither meaningfully conveys Dylan’s mythology nor exposes him as a complete human being. Source: https://awardswatch.com

Like A Rolling Stone - Edie Sedgwick

Jeff Tweedy: I had a girlfriend in high school who dragged me to big arena rock shows. I went to see Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar, and the Who’s first “farewell” tour at the Ralston Purina Checkerdome in St. Louis. It all sounded so bad to me. I wasn’t just bored, I hated those shows. Nothing about the experience was exciting to me. Something always seemed overly macho about how bands postured themselves on those enormous stages. I’m not sure why the macho-ness bothered me. I loved Black Flag, and there was nothing more macho than Henry Rollins at that time. Actually, that was my least favorite part of Black Flag, but it was a different type of macho. For some reason I’ve always been stupid or arrogant enough to walk away from negotiations when they start to feel gross or insulting. It looks like it’d take a lot of confidence, but I don’t feel like an exceedingly confident person. I think I’m just stubborn. And I hate feeling greedy. “No record deal? Okay, it’s back to small budget for me.” And I’m stubborn because there’s only so much I’m willing to compromise artistically. I met Bob Dylan when Wilco played a College Media Journal showcase in New York City in 2006. “Hey, Jeff, how’s it going, man? Good to see you!” Bob had spoken to me! And I was left in his wake trying to play it cool, but I could feel all of the other folks around us looking at me. It was impossible to play it cool. “Dylan talked to me. Did you guys see that?!”

The alternative rock scene has been in a constant loop of stagnancy. Nothing explosively innovative or inventive has really burst onto the scene in years, in my opinion. I may just be too harsh a critic, but even the bands I admire like the National Post, Beach House, Animal Collective, Paramore, Tame Impala, or the '90s acts still going like Mercury Rev, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Kim Deal and such seem a bit pessimistic about the future. Rock isn't where it's at in terms of mainstream appeal any longer – I think Arcade Fire's The Suburbs was the last time a rock-oriented record did massive success. I do not count ear bleeder monotony like Imagine Dragons. The 2020s is the decade of the singer-songwriter pop star (usually with half a dozen or more co-writers), Reggaeton beats, EDM, and generic hip hop. Underground rock artists are the ones with substance, but they haven't a prayer of a chance of hitting it big. Even quality groups like the Last Dinner Party or the Warning just don't have the appeal of, say, nepo babies who have become pop stars. One thing I appreciate about Rick Beato's chart review videos is how he demonstrates many things are regurgitated endlessly by producers and force-fed to the public. Most of mainstream acts play it safe on new records with little divergence or variety – they stay within a comfort zone. Whatever has certain substance or innovation is more or less pushed to the fringes on the outskirts of the Internet, booked in some clubs or as opening acts, and you just have to become familiar with them via name recognition. It's lamentable but I don't anticipate another big indie era or alternative rock era. That ship has sadly sailed. Source: pitchfork.com

Was Bob Dylan The Mystery Man in Like a Rolling Stone? Edie Sedgwick, Joan Baez, Marianne Faithfull and Bob Neuwirth have been suggested as possible targets of Dylan's famous song. Dylan's biographer Howard Sounes warned against reducing the song to the biography of one person, and suggested "it is more likely that the song was aimed generally at those Dylan perceived as being clueless". Sounes adds, "There is some irony in the fact that one of the most famous songs of the folk-rock era—an era associated primarily with ideals of peace and harmony—is one of scorn." Mike Marqusee has also written at length on the conflicts in Dylan's life during this time, with its deepening alienation from his old folk-revival audience and clear-cut leftist causes. He suggests that Like A Rolling Stone is probably self-referential: "The song only attains full poignancy when one realises it is sung, at least in part, to the singer himself: he's the one 'with no direction home.'" Dylan himself has noted that, after his motorcycle accident in 1966, he realized that "when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me." Edie Sedgwick inspired Bob Dylan ​​to produce Blonde on Blonde, one of the best records he ever produced. “Just Like a Woman” — “with your fog, your amphetamines and your pearls” — was clearly written directly to her; “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” — “You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine” ​— ​was written directly about her too. Source: popmatters.com

Edie Sedgwick was the “heroine of Blonde on Blonde,” as Patti Smith stated. From my memory, I thought that we learned that they did have a love affair and that’s why she was the “heroine” of that album, and also indirectly referenced in Like a Rolling Stone. However, in 1985 Dylan pretty much affirmed he never had a relationship with her but knew Bob Neuwirth did. Andy Warhol commented: “I liked Dylan, the way he created a new style… I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around. Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country. When I’d ask, ‘Why did he do that?’ I’d invariably get hearsay answers like ‘I hear he feels you destroyed Edie [Sedgwick],’ or ‘Listen to Like a Rolling Stone — I think you’re the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse, man.’ I didn’t know exactly what they meant by that, but I got the tenor of what people were saying — that Dylan didn’t like me, that he blamed me for Edie’s drugs.” Warhol took to satirizing Dylan in films like “More Milk Yvette” (which included a harmonica-playing Dylan lookalike); a spoof called the “Bob Dylan Story”; and the repeated playing of a Dylan song at the wrong speed in “Imitation of Christ”. In reality, Dylan hadn’t damaged the Elvis painting, but he had gotten rid of it. All accounts — including from Dylan himself — have him trading the Elvis to his manager Albert Grossman for a sofa, a decision he’d come to regret. Grossman’s widow, Sally, later sold the painting at auction for a reported $750,000.

There are those who maintain (notably Michael Gray) that Edie Sedgwick probably had no relationship with Dylan at all. She had an affair with Dylan's sideman Bob Neuwirth, however. One theory is that "She's Your Lover Now" is directed to Neuwirth and that Sedgwick is the "she," with Jack Elliot as "your friend in the cowboy hat." Sedgwick was quite a significant part of Dylan's life in the mid-60s so it wouldn’t make sense to not include her in A Complete Unknown but I don’t imagine Dylan gave his approval. I can imagine Like A Rolling Stone being shown in the movie as being his hit song rather than what the song is actually about. In Like A Rolling Stone, besides the Edie Sedgwick subtext, I've always felt like he's singing to himself. As if to say, "now that you got everything you ever wanted, how does it feel?" I think this song illustrates what Dylan mentions in Blood on the Tracks, that "you find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom." 

Dylan may have barely known her but multiple sources from the Warhol/Factory camp thought they were dating. As far as Nico she was gifted I’ll keep it with mine and she had an intimate relationship with Dylan, so if they weren't not intimate, that would explain why Dylan ended up so burned out by Edie's volatility. “You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns. When they all come down and did tricks for you.” This could refer to the many suitors that Sedgwick had. Dylan refers to them as “jugglers and clowns”, as in, men trying to entertain her, trying to catch her attention. Dylan thought of them quite literally as desperate clowns. He comments that she had little care for their feelings, and probably refers to himself as one of these “clowns”, as he was well known to have pursued her vigorously. Dylan's first wife Sara Lownds accused him of 'accidental' violence domestic and received near 40 million dollars. Since 2000 Dylan is rumored to have a common law marriage with Susan Pullen. —The Double Life of Bob Dylan (2024) by Clinton Heylin

Wilco, Jeff Tweedy, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana

Jeff Tweedy: I have hung this corny frame on my living room's wall. How’s everybody doing after Election Day? Not so good, probably. A lot of you are probably feeling about the same way I am, scared. My thoughts on our current moment: I think we all saw a new world and we were all excited about that coming true. And I think a lot of our fellow citizens saw that world as well, but were much more afraid of it. I don’t feel like I should get to hate people I don’t know. So I’ll just say that I think they’re very fearful. And I don’t think we should be fearful. We saw that new world, and I don’t think we should let it go. It’s going to be clearer, and clearer. And maybe we just need to get better at explaining why it’s not to be feared. Personally, I’m making a choice to not be fearful. It’s not easy. But I have good examples in my life of people who saw something far on the horizon, and worked for it, fearlessly, for long long periods of time. I hope that hope isn’t ever an unwelcome message. Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable. But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse. When you heart grows cold, that's when they think they have truly won. Source: siriusxm.com

Jeff Tweedy wishing happy birthday to his wife Sue Miller Tweedy: "Happy birthday to this blinding beam of light and goodness. Everything, every decision I make, every song I write… every ounce of everything I do is an act born from the sincere desire to manifest in myself some sense that I’m worthy of her love—that I really deserve a place by her side. I love you, Sukierae!" When Tweedy met Sue Miller in June 1991 while she was booking Wilco at the Axe Lounge club, Nirvana had exploded in the charts with their anthem "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and Tweedy looked a bit jealous sitting uncomfortably on a chair while he observed her future wife cheerfully listening to Cobain's band. In contrast to Nirvana, Wilco were another underground alternative rock band struggling to be popular. 

Despite of their different personalities, Tweedy fell in love with Sue Miller and proposed to her two years later. At that time, Sue was living with her best friend Julia Adams and she seemed hesitant to abandon her single lifestyle's jollies. Tweedy reacted at first refusing her phone calls, then progressively embracing their friendship and finally wooing her with his charisma. They got married in August, 19, 1995, a year after the grunge star Kurt Cobain's death. According to Greg Kot in his book "Wilco: Learning How to Die", Jeff Tweedy could have tried to replace Cobain's figure in the alternative rock landscape, but Tweedy was always reluctant to be solely associated to a musical genre.

No one can say for certain what went through Kurt Cobain’s mind in the hours before his death. As he said just a month before the end, ‘I feel like I’m performing in a circus.’ It is known that, after struggling to overcome his addiction, Cobain had again fallen prey to heroin. The toxicology report confirmed that, along with traces of Valium, there were 1.52 milligrams of the drug in his blood, three times the normal fatal dose. According to the doctor who performed the autopsy, ‘it was the act of someone who wanted to obliterate himself, to literally become nothing’. Courtney Love would tell a reporter that police could identify her husband only through fingerprints. Dental records were no use, because nothing was left of his mouth. A relative named Beverley Cobain, a psychiatric nurse, adds: ‘Kurt was, without doubt, bipolar – he had a psychological disorder which caused him to swing from wild ecstasy to manic despair. In trying to self-medicate with heroin, he certainly made the problem worse. That was the background to his shooting himself.’ According to this reading of Cobain’s life, an heroic but fragile talent, hemmed in by the demands of the market, took the only way out to maintain his dignity and preserve the legend. Yet another image was that of the young, tormented demi-Christ – a perception Cobain angrily denied yet hastened to play up to – whose early death was somehow of a piece with a violent, beleaguered life. For TV host Andy Rooney, simply ‘Kurt Cobain was a loser’. Yet another view was that Cobain, an admittedly rare and fragile talent, had betrayed his radical ideals, as if by becoming so successful, and thus by inference ‘selling out’, he had in some way impoverished his gifts. 

This was a theory heard frequently in Seattle. Cobain in person was nothing like Cobain the legend. He was an intensely shy man, poorly educated, and prone to the same vanities and excesses he despised in others. Like all his family he was over-sensitive and never forgot a word of criticism. Like anyone who grows up feeling more intelligent and more put-on than everyone else, he was afflicted with a strange mix of ego and insecurity. Cobain succeeded because his voice tapped the eternal themes of frustration, bewilderment and anger. Suddenly a sizeable part of the world’s youth had a hero figure they could relate to. The adulation had just the opposite of the desired effect on Cobain. When he realized that, for the first time in his life, perfect strangers not only admired but worshipped him, he was confronted with all his old feelings of inadequacy and doubt, and it was this weakness that killed him. He had to know that injecting himself with Buprenex or heroin merely exacerbated a craving for more drugs, and that by dulling the nervous system he did nothing for his creative faculties. ‘His addictive side came about then,’ says Beverley Cobain. ‘From early childhood it was a religion for Kurt that everything could be cured by drugs.’ 

As someone whose protest lay chiefly in drugs and punk rather than sex and alcohol, it was true that Cobain was almost blushingly monogamous compared to other rock stars. His shyness was real, as was his modesty. According to Michael Azerrad, ‘he slept with a total of two women on all of Nirvana’s tours. To sleep with someone who he worked with or liked was as natural as playing the guitar, but to screw someone just for sex was out of the question.’ Azerrad saw in Cobain’s taste for independent women a warped reflection of his lost relationship with the mother who abandoned him. Love explained: ‘We bonded over pharmaceuticals,’ she told Azerrad. ‘I had Vicodin extra-strength, which was pills, and he had Hycomine cough syrup. I said “You shouldn’t drink that syrup because it’s bad for your stomach.” 

In a short time the meetings and chemical exchanges evolved into dating, sex and a full-blown affair. For all the lies, half-truths and skewering of Love as a drug-fuelled opportunist who bought into celebrity, it is certain that she stuck with Cobain when even his immediate family and colleagues deserted him. In a long harangue in Spin, Love would complain, ‘All they want to talk about is how much drugs Kurt and I did. That is not all we did. We ate breakfast. We ate lunch. We ate dinner. We rented movies, and ate ice cream. We would read out loud to each other almost every night, and we prayed every night. We had some fucking dignity.’ All of those things were true. Until he was nine, Cobain was raised in a normal working-class home; although he could never reject Aberdeen enough, some of its habits and customs stuck with him. Among these was a refreshing humanity and simplicity of outlook that survived the ravages of his later fame. When in the mood, he could be exceptionally kind, sensitive and considerate of others. He was, in some senses, the antithesis of rock star vanity.

Once the first delights of marriage had worn off it became obvious to both that, although they complemented each other in many, perhaps most, respects, in others they were woefully incompatible. Love rebelled fiercely against the shackles of domesticity, while Cobain’s vision of a perfect match was of a relationship so close that every confidence was shared, no private agenda pursued. He wanted to possess and to be possessed. This vision filled his wife with horror. Not only was there the matter of her career, there was also the threat of Cobain’s drug habit. Looking at Cobain’s life in full, it is tempting to see a kind of insecurity of which his need for a strong wife was typical. He honestly thought he was marrying above himself. Courtney Love compensated for his crippling lack of self-esteem. ‘She’s my one and only chance,’ Cobain described her to Grohl. What he wanted from marriage was constant encouragement, loyal support, and affection. Within reason, Love gave them to him. That she also valued her independence and her career was understood, and in July 1992 Hole signed to Geffen for a sum that led one cynic to tell Newsweek, ‘sleeping with Kurt Cobain is worth a million dollars.’

According to Frank Hulme, ‘They were not compatible. They may have loved one another. I doubt they’d have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.’ The Vanity Fair article destroyed Cobain’s spirit, hastened his physical decline and almost crushed him financially. In part this was due to the irrational fear that the world was out to ruin him. There was also the ‘suicidal grief’ of losing old friends. Cobain was hurt deeply when his own colleagues began to turn their backs on him, leave the studio when he arrived, and make excuses to be elsewhere when he invited them to dinner. The most shocking feature of Cobain’s outbursts was not his savaging of Nirvana but his scornful dismissal of the world. Cobain recognized that, though ‘one or two people’ were worth saving, ‘the same fuckwits were always around’, that ‘ninety-nine per cent of humanity could be shot if it was up to me’, and that rock music had done ‘literally nothing’ to transform society. By late 1994 rumours had surfaced of a Hollywood ‘biopic’, potentially starring Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt or Stephen Dorff (whose role in S.F.W. is highly reminiscent of Cobain). -Kurt Cobain and the Grunge Scene by Christopher Sandford (2024)

Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan (rock biopics), Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, Jeff Tweedy

20th Century Studios this morning shared a first look at Jeremy Allen White suited up as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere, the studio’s forthcoming biopic based around the making of the musician’s 1982 album Nebraska. The film is currently in production. In the first look pic, the lead actor can be seen donning a typically Springsteen-esque fit: a plaid shirt and biker jacket. Scott Cooper is directing the biopic. Also starring are Harrison Sloan Gilbertson, Odessa Young, and Paul Walter Hauser. White and Springsteen recently linked in real life at the premiere of the documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band. 

Jeremy Allen White appeared at the film’s screening at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he posed for pictures with Bruce Springsteen. Speaking to Deadline at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards, White teased the project. “I’m so excited to start this thing,” he said. “We’re going to start pretty soon. You know, I don’t want to talk about it too much. It feels wrong before getting there and starting the thing.” He continued, “But I can say I’ve got a really beautiful team of people helping me and Bruce has been really lovely and supportive and available, which has made this whole process an extra joy. His support and Jon Landau, his management support, who has a large role in the film as well. So I feel really lucky.” Source: deadline.com

What’s the plot of A Complete Unknown? While the plot is still largely under wraps, we know that the film will follow a 19-year-old Dylan’s first arrival in New York City from Minnesota, as he seeks a career in music and soon skyrockets to worldwide fame. “It’s such an amazing time in American culture and the story of a young 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with, like, two dollars in his pocket and becoming a worldwide sensation within three years,” James Mangold told Collider during a red-carpet interview in April 2023. “First being embraced into the family of folk music in New York, and kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises so beyond belief.” Searchlight Pictures has released a new promotional video for the Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown. The new clip finds lead actor Timothée Chalamet recreating Dylan’s iconic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video; it features Chalamet’s original rendition of the song, too. A Complete Unknown hits theaters on December 25, 2024. 

Columbia Records will release the film’s soundtrack, and it will include Chalamet’s cover of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, the 1965 album that featured “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” reached No. 38 in Pitchfork’s “The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s.” Joining Chalamet will be Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, Dylan’s fictional girlfriend, inspired by the musician’s real-life former girlfriend and muse Suze Rotolo. Edward Norton will play Dylan’s fellow folk musician Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro will play a young Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook is rumoured to play Johnny Cash. Chalamet confirmed in a December 2023 interview that 70% of the soundtrack had already been recorded in a Californian studio with Nick Baxter, the film’s music supervisor. In the same interview, the actor also revealed that Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, sent Chalamet 12 hours of unreleased Bob Dylan music from 1959 to 1964. “This might earn the ire and wrath of a lot of Bob fans, rightfully,” Chalamet pre-warned. Source: pitchfork.com

What defined Lou Reed’s best work—besides fearlessness, beauty, intelligence, and switchblade New York City wit—is what places it at the highest level of art making: its empathy. Reed wrote his way into other voices, not all of them pretty. These kindred humans, regardless of gender, spoke as if with Reed’s own voice, a compassionate ventriloquism geared toward understanding both the subject and himself. And when you sensed Reed was writing about himself—in a song like “Waves of Fear,” as visceral a depiction of end-stage addiction and the panic-attack hellscape of withdrawal as any musician is ever likely to record—he seemed to be doing it to commiserate as much as to exorcise. New York, his most consistent and satisfying album attacked the greed and hypocrisy of America’s poisoned political and economic systems as they played out among the haves and have-nots on his hometown streets. And toward the end, in a storybook denouement, he achieved a sort of redemption and grace through love.

“It was a devastating thing for me,” Reed said of Kennedy's assassination. “I thought Kennedy could change the world.” Indeed, a generation looked to Kennedy—the youngest president in history, elected at forty-three—and Jackie Onassis as the ultimate inspiration. Even that nascent counterculture skeptic Bob Dylan was impressed. “If I had been a voting man,” he affirmed in one of his memoirs decades later, “I would have voted for Kennedy.” John Cale believed that Reed’s “fears about sanity” led him toward “provocative behavior, actively and purposefully trying his darnedest to set people off. That made him feel he was in control, rather than living in a state of uncertainty or paranoia. This put him in the position of perpetually seeking a kind of advantage for himself by bringing out the worst in people.” 

“I was just this poor little rock and roller,” Reed later lamented wryly, “and here was this German goddess, Nico. We didn’t really feel we had a choice. I mean, we could have just walked away from it, or we could have a chanteuse. So we had a group meeting and said ‘All right, we’ll have a chanteuse, and I will write a few songs for her, and then we’ll still be the Velvet Underground.’ Y’know, why not?” Ronnie Cutrone, a Factory assistant around that time, characterized Nico as “a weirdo” and suggested love was out of her wheelhouse: “You didn’t have a relationship with Nico.” At that time, speed was the ideal New York City drug. Distributed widely via legit prescriptions from psychiatrists and general medical practitioners, as well through gray-market diet clinics and assorted black-market channels, it’s estimated that between 8 and 10 billion amphetamine tablets were ingested annually in the United States between 1963 and 1969. Unlike SSRI drugs, they lent themselves to indiscriminate abuse. 

Shelley Albin, Lou Reed's first steady girlfriend said of ‘I’ll be your mirror’: "that was our conversation, word for word.” According to Albin, whose eyes are not blue but hazel, the title was an in-joke for her. She’d still meet up with Reed occasionally, and it was clear he was still hung up on her. “I wrote this for someone I missed very much,” Reed confessed years later—adding with a chuckle: “Her eyes were hazel.” After their break-up, he kept calling Shelley Albin, wanting to reconnect. Shelley Albin had moved into Washington Square Village with her new husband, who taught at NYU. Reed had remained in touch (“He always knew where to find me,” she recalls) and still carried a torch. When she heard his voice on the phone, she told him “You must have the wrong number”, and hung up. Albin destroyed all the letters Reed had sent her over the years. Albin had been Reed’s great muse, his Beatrice, his Guinevere, his Fanny Brawne and Daisy Fay Buchanan. She was the only woman that Reed had considered having a child with. Whatever hopes he might’ve held out for their reunion, it was clear that she would not be leaving her husband anytime soon.

Reed first met Bettye Kronstad in the spring of 1968. She was visiting their mutual friend Lincoln Swados at Mount Sinai Hospital’s psychiatric ward. Reed was sauntering out of the elevator as Kronstad was leaving Swados’s room. “Hey, you! Beautiful!” Reed snapped as she breezed past him. Bettye Kronstad: "At seventeen, Lou’s parents had sent him to see a psychiatrist who prescribed EST for his depression and mood swings. During the summer of 1959, he was treated at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, New York, where the EST treatments were administered without an anesthetic. At that time, the procedure involved putting him on a wooden gurney with a rubber block between his teeth. This was an experience that scarred Lou for life. It is commonly thought that EST was prescribed to Lou in order to cure him of his ‘bisexual tendencies,’ but he never told me this or even alluded to it. I think he told journalists this to be more sympathetic to the gay community, and in part to broaden his appeal to that audience. From the beginning of our relationship I told Lou in no uncertain terms that if I saw a needle anywhere near him, I would—without fail—leave him. Hard drugs were his Achilles’ heel, and I knew they would destroy him if he started taking them again." 

Transformer was convoluted in production, and Reed was a hot mess during the sessions. “I think he was on heroin,” recalled Tony Visconti, the glam-rock sculptor who produced T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, of meeting Reed for the first time. “He was just sitting in the corner on the floor kind of nodding off. I remember kneeling down and shaking his hand and saying ‘hello’ and he just looked up and was all glazed over.” For Reed, the stress of what he knew was a make-or-break album must have been overwhelming. Reed often spoke in a troubled whirlwind about his Velvets legacy (“I’m in the odd position of having to compete with myself”), self-doubt, and self-loathing. In a published story, Rolling Stone's writer Ed McCormack collaged Reed’s end of the conversation: "Sometimes I have this horrible nightmare that I’m not really what I think I am… Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in my shoes? I mean, I have made every hip scene and sometimes I think I’m just a phony c*cksucker like the rest of them. I mean, Bettye is not hip at all and that’s why I love her. I want to keep her that way. I mean, she is so pure… And I believe in sparrows… I believe in pretty princesses. There are hip people, brilliant people, yet on another level they are the scum of the earth, so how can I know what I’ve done means anything… But I still love rock and roll…”

In early January, 1972, Lou Reed and Bettye Kronstad were married in their apartment at 402 East Seventy-fourth Street. The couple had upgraded with the help of Reed’s $15,000 Transformer advance: their new place had a small foyer, parquet wood floors, a large living room, separate bedrooms and dining rooms, and an eat-in kitchen with a street view. Kronstad’s family, not thrilled with their daughter’s choice of husband, declined to attend, so Reed chose not to invite his family. Reed was evidently a mess. He was also performing a new role as solo artist, with a new persona, perhaps applying lessons Kronstad had shared from her acting classes and interview strategies he’d gleaned from Warhol. Reed began riffing—on alcohol and drugs (“I take drugs just because in the twentieth century in a technological age there are certain drugs you have to take just to keep yourself normal”); on the glam-rock embrace of queer chic (“The notion that everybody’s bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited”); and on his unruly creativity (“I may come out with a hardhat album. Come out with an anti-gay song, saying ‘Get back in your closets, you fuckin’ queers!’ That’ll really do it!”).

“There were countless mornings I found myself sitting, half-awake, on the concrete steps of Dr. Freymann’s office,” Kronstad recalled, “to get his famous injection of vitamins laced with amphetamine. Lou loved them more than any other drug he took.” A week later, after discovering Reed injecting heroin, Kronstad reached her limit, and demanded a divorce. Not wanting to involve her family, she allowed Reed’s legal team to arrange a flight to the Dominican Republic, where she checked into a hotel, and a day later had secured legally binding divorce papers. She was home that night. They’d been married less than a year. The next evening, Reed phoned, and a day later, came to the apartment with roses, wine, and take-out from a favorite restaurant. He pleaded his case, made an impression, and before the month was out, the couple were both on a plane to London for the Berlin sessions. Krondstand recalls: "With women Lou was polite, shy, and almost behaved like a high-school kid. It was how you could tell if he was really interested in you. He could be passionate, although typically maintained his guard up. One day Lou mentioned a dress he thought I could wear, which surprised me."

"He never told me what to say, how to act, or what to wear. He always told me I looked great. The dress Lou was talking about was one I had bought in London, when Angie and I went on a shopping spree on the Kings Road. It was a 1930s white, beautifully draped, crepe floral dress. I wore my red stiletto platform heels to match. Lou kissed me. ‘I love you,’ he said quietly. ‘There are no words to tell you how much, Princess.’ From the beginning of our relationship I told Lou in no uncertain terms that if I saw a needle anywhere near him, I would—without fail—leave him. Hard drugs were his Achilles’ heel, and I knew they would destroy him if he started taking them again, as he had before we starting going together." According to Kronstad, Reed added heroin to his diet of scotch and cocaine. It was as if, in advance of the album drop, he was determined to stage Berlin as a reality drugs show. By Kronstad’s account, Reed threw a drunken tantrum preshow, accusing her of depleting the coke stash. She tossed a glass of milk in his face and stormed out of their hotel room. The next day, she was on a flight home to New York, and never spoke to him again.

But Reed’s struggle with drug and alcohol abuse was ongoing, and one might reasonably imagine much of his life being shaped by the shadow of panicked anxiety: the need to keep it at bay by self-medicating, lashing out at anyone who might trigger it, and making art that muted it, stared it down, or otherwise defused it. And if “Waves of Fear” was more purely visceral than anything Reed had written to this point, it was at the same time a reminder of the harrowing competition for that honor in the Reed oeuvre: the visions of piled-up corpses in “Heroin”; Waldo Jeffers’s blood-spurting skull in “The Gift”; the body strapped to a table in “Lady Godiva’s Operation”; the orgiastic dope-shooting murder scene in “Sister Ray”; the self-loathing of “Candy Says”; the lacerating loss of “Pale Blue Eyes”; the misty entrails of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams”; the brains served on a plate in “Ocean”; the electroshock treatment in “Kill Your Sons”... But for all its horrors, The Blue Mask was an album, like so much of Reed’s work, about the mythic, and sometimes real, salvation of love. Beyond its titular pun, “The Heroine” posited Reed waiting to be rescued by a figure who “transcends all the men.” And the album’s final song Heavenly Arms is a touching doo-wop tribute to “Syl-vi-a,” whose name Reed incants, breaking it into syllables until meaning dissolves into longing, a love letter to the former Sylvia Morales, who might have reasonably, after hearing the album in its entirety, bolted for the door. But she didn’t.

Lou Reed remarked about “Waves of Fear”: “It’s about anxiety and terror about which nothing can be done. Terror so strong that the person can’t even turn a light on, can’t speak, can’t make it to a phone. Afraid to turn a light on for what they’ll see—for what he is.” “What motivation,” Bruno Blum asked, with astonishment, “could you possibly have to approach that subject?” Reed responded flatly and plainly, as if there was just one conceivable answer: “Empathy,” he said to the French author and journalist Bruno Blum. Reed was performatively frank about his tastes. He called the Beatles “garbage” and claimed he never liked them, while the Doors were “painfully stupid and pretentious.” He expressed dislike for Stephen Sondheim (“Broadway music I despise”) but admiration for Randy Newman. Reed was largely dismissive on the topic of Bowie. He talked, reluctantly it seemed, about working with him in the early ’70s, claiming his own glam-rock turn was basically bandwagon-jumping, “trying to be part of whatever was going on,” that he’d “watch what David did” and “do my version of it.” Blum asked if Reed had “ever looked at Bowie and thought there was some promise there, or some things that you liked?” Reed said flatly, “No,” waiting a beat before adding, “David’s very bright, he knows what he wants and how to do it—I think.”

Set the Twilight Reeling was an album about Reed’s relationship with Anderson, who’d prove the most lasting of his muses. “The Adventurer” was hard rock addressing “a queen reborn”, declaring her “my one true love.” On “Hooky Wooky,” the narrator meets his lover’s exes at a rooftop soiree and plays it cool, despite wanting to hurl them into the traffic below. In many ways, Reed’s lack of commercial success had worked in his favor. While much of the Beatles catalog and other ’60s–’70s touchstones became frozen in cultural amber, Reed’s work was comparatively timeless. Reed’s relationship with Anderson seems mirrored in “Turning Time Around,” a poignant conversation about the meaning of love. The album also interrogated extreme forms of need and desire. In almost all situations, the presence of Anderson changed Reed. Colleagues breathed a sigh of relief when she joined him on tour. Things immediately became more familial: group dinners were more common, and tensions slackened. “He worshipped the ground she walked on,” says a former Sire/Warner records employee who feels that Reed, quite literally, “would have died for Laurie.”

Although Shelley Albin knew Reed first, Erin Clermon maintained the longest relationship with him, on and off from the late 60's to the early 90's. Erin Clermont recalls going often to the Mineshaft club with Reed. One of the few relationships Reed maintained from his Syracuse days (Erin was a good friend of Shelley Albin), Clermont was frequently a lover and a confidante, someone Reed could call at 3 a.m. to talk or to meet up at some late-night dive. On 3 June 1980 Reed visited Erin Clermont to tell her about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, adding that he was taking Lithium for his problem. Lithium salts have been used as a treatment for depression and manic behaviour, but overuse can result in lethargy and serious side effects. From what Erin could see, lithium ‘completely fucked him up.’ He knew he could count on her. “Lou was a very strange person. I had a lot of fun with him, but he had a cranky side. Lou had an act going all the time. I was eternally interested in him, not in love with him, although we did love each other. There were periods when he gave me the impression of having little or no interest in sex. I’d come home and there’d be like thirty-two hang-ups on my answering machine,” Erin recalls. “I knew then he was trying to get in touch with me, and I’d just have to make up my mind whether I was going to answer his next call or just turn off the phone and get some sleep.” —Lou Reed: The King of New York (2023) by Will Hermes

Kurt Cobain was probably the last rock star when rock music actually mattered as a cultural force. Cobain was the last rock star who (unwittingly) embodied all the profound contradictions of The Rock Star mythology as we know it. He was good-looking, a delicate soul, with an ear for melody and gift for crafting lyrics in a singular way, who both embraced and rejected much of the mythology of rock and roll. He wanted it, and he hated it. He had a great voice and he wasn't afraid to use it to express his inner anguish. Beyond that, he seemed a confused, retiring, angry kid who never got over his parents' divorce and their subsequent (perceived) rejection of him as a teenager. That feeling of rejection uniquely informed his character, and people really latched onto it. Cobain redefined what "rock star" could mean, and all of a sudden a rock star meant someone like him, so a rock star could be an anti-star. This contradiction has stayed with us ever since. Cobain wrote that he first had used heroin in Aberdeen in the late eighties; but former friends contest this, since he had a fear of needles at the time and there was no heroin to be found in his circle. He did occasionally take Percodan in Aberdeen, a prescription narcotic.

In early November 1990, he overcame his fear of needles and first injected heroin with a friend in Olympia, after his break-up with his first official girlfriend Tobi Vail from Bikini Kill. He found that the drug’s euphoric effects helped him temporarily escape both his heartache and his stomach pain. The next day, Kurt phoned Krist Novoselic. “Hey, Krist, I did heroin.” Krist cited his Olympia friends who had died of heroin addiction and warned Kurt that heroin wasn’t like the other drugs he’d done. “I remember literally telling him that he was playing with dynamite.” But the warning fell on deaf ears. Though Kurt promised Krist he wouldn’t try the drug again, he broke this promise. To avoid Krist’s or Grohl’s finding out, Kurt used the drug at friends’ houses. He found a dealer who was selling at Evergreen State College in Olympia. On December 11, 1990, Kurt sought medical help for his stomach condition, seeing a doctor in Tacoma. This time Kurt was prescribed Lidox, a form of clidinium. The drug didn’t seem to help his pain, and he discontinued it two weeks later when he got bronchitis. The year ended with a New Year’s Eve show in Portland at the Satyricon. According to his biographer Christopher Sandford, who painted an unflattering portrait of the grunge superstar: “Cobain was isolated, easily led, and self-obsessed. Cobain was also sick with a bipolar disorder resulting in alternate bouts of depression and mania.”

In 2009, NME reported that a film about Kurt Cobain was in the works based on Charles Cross's groundbreaking biography of Cobain "Heavier than Heaven" (2002), which would have likewise been the title of the movie, but the only film that resembled loosely the life and tribulations of the grunge superstar was Last Days (2005) directed by Gus Van Sant, starring Michael Pitt as Blake, a suicidal musician who obviously is a stand-in for Cobain. Courtney Love, who was expected to having been the executive producer of Heavier than Heaven, said she wanted actor Ryan Gosling to play her late husband Kurt Cobain in the film, and she wanted Scarlett Johansson to portray herself. According to Rolling Stone magazine the pre-production didn't ever kick-off, despite having an additional cast lined up aside from Ryan Gosling and Scarlett Johansson: Justin Long as Krist Noveselic (Nirvana's bassist), Topher Grace as Dave Grohl (Nirvana's drummer), Cate Blanchett as Eric Erlandson (guitarist and songwriter for Hole). Also in talks were Emile Hirsch as Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, and Toni Collette as Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Source: www.nme.com

   

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart - A Film About Wilco, directed by Sam Jones in 2002. "Both Nonesuch and Reprise are owned by AOL Time Warner. In other words, the same suits who supposedly found Wilco's approach too artistic to tolerate when the band was working for one part of the company apparently found it commercially viable when the band was working for another part. In the movie, this comes across as simply an ironic twist of fate. But it's more than that. In fact, Nonesuch's move makes the whole "victim of multinational capitalism" narrative look rather disconcerting. After all, if Reprise's axing of Wilco was really the inevitable result of a corporate ethos that privileges commercial appeal over artistic integrity, then Nonesuch's decision makes no sense." Source: www.slate.com

Jeff Tweedy traces his life from his childhood in Belleville, a town he describes as "depressing and depressed in all of the familiar ways common to dying Midwestern manufacturing hubs." He took to music early, listening in his family's attic to the Replacements, discovering "a secret self. A better self than the one I was stuck with." It was in high school where Tweedy made a friend who would change his life. He and his classmate Jay Farrar bonded over their shared love of music, and soon formed the band Uncle Tupelo. The group released just four albums before breaking up acrimoniously; their record No Depression would lend its name to an alternative-country fanzine, and later, to the genre itself. Not unlike Kurt Cobain, Jeff Tweedy actively demythologized the figure of the rock-’n’-roll hero. Instead of painting a self-indulgent portrait of bravado, Tweedy related tales of social awkwardness and panic attacks overcome by hard work, claiming vulnerability as his defining artistic trait. Reluctant to talk about the grunge genre or Cobain, Tweedy said to Pitchfork in 2015 when Montage of Heck was released: "The documentary is about the abrasion of fame. It is a wrenching analysis that many fans have been craving since the terrible suicide of Kurt Cobain, capturing the humanity of a rock star, not just the extent of his image."

Jettisoning the hackneyed image of the womanizing rock star, Tweedy defied that archetype, recounting a haunting story about a sexual encounter with a female friend named Leslie (25) when he was just 14. After Farrar left Uncle Tupelo after a bitter quarrel over Farrar's girlfriend Monica, Tweedy and his remaining bandmates formed Wilco, whose sophomore album Being There gained critical acclaim. Tweedy met his future wife Sue Miller in 1991 at the Chicago club Lounge Ax and they were married on August 9, 1995. In 2001 Tweedy would fire Jay Bennett from the band. Tweedy suggests that he and Bennett were enabling each other's addiction to painkillers, writing, "I fired Bennett from Wilco because I knew if I didn't, I would probably die." Tweedy's music has never shied away from darkness, but he's also never been afraid to celebrate joy. His personality, like his music, has been alternately sorrowful and triumphant. Source: npr.org

Jeff Tweedy and her wife Sue Miller (married August 9, 1995). Jeff Tweedy: "There are only three people I’ve committed myself to completely for the rest of my life: my wife Susie, and my sons Spencer and Sammy. My actual family. My wife is Susan Miller Tweedy. I’m tempted to say that if you aren’t married to her then your life is crap. But hearing her voice in my head, I’m thinking better of saying such a thing. See, even without consultation, she’s been steering me toward a subtler and kinder way of saying what I want to say. Which all goes to show what a force she’s been in my effort to get better. After 29 years of marriage and over 30 total years of going steady, I still can’t believe my good fortune. Somehow the coolest and funniest woman alive thought enough of me to take my hand. I love her more every day and I wouldn’t be here without her." Source: www.avclub.com

Dennis Quaid and The Substance

Bad movies are very common in Dennis Quaid’s filmography, particularly recently, but it is rare for him to actually give a bad performance. When you write a great deal about acting, a question like “Is there a good actor with such a terrible filmography as Dennis Quaid?” is the kind of thing that can keep you up at night. When I’ve posed this question to colleagues over the years, some doubt my assertion that Quaid is a good actor, others that his filmography is uniquely bad, but I think any honest examination of his work will lead to the same conclusion. Let’s start with the filmography. He’s had over 110 film roles with very, very few high points. In stark contrast to other prolific actors like Nicolas Cage, Quaid hasn’t led a classic or important film, and he’s made a lot of terrible ones. Many of his films don’t even have the decency to be worth hate-watching and instead, like The Long Riders and Wyatt Earp, are merely boring. Yet he is almost always good in these films. Often, he’s the best thing about them. 

In The Day After Tomorrow, he undergirds Jack Hall, the sad dad and prophetic scientist, with real vulnerability and need. His performance as the tubercular Doc Holliday in Wyatt Earp, which required a punishing physical transformation, is electrifying in its death-soaked charisma. Unfortunately for Quaid, his scene partner for much of the film is Kevin Costner, whose performance seems borderline comatose. Quaid managed to make another epic during this period, 1983’s The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman. The film, originally a box-office flop, now a beloved and influential classic, chronicles the true story of the first Americans in space. Quaid is again not the film’s focus; instead, he plays Gordon Cooper, an Air Force test pilot whose nickname (Hot Dog) tells you a lot about him. Hot Dog is filled with the same yearnings, ambitions, and rage as Mike from Breaking Away. 

After The Right Stuff, Quaid began racking up leading roles. He starred in three sci-fi films: Dreamscape, Enemy Mine, and Innerspace. The latter, which co-starred Martin Short and Meg Ryan, remains surprisingly charming. In it, Quaid plays Lt. Tuck Pendleton, a down-on-his-luck Air Force test pilot. The Rookie is a sentimental, sun-dappled story of a man who, in early middle age, makes a long-shot attempt to pitch in Major League Baseball. This Disney film would not work were it not for Quaid’s world-weary turn as Jim Morris. He eschews the kind of big, star-centered performance he could have given and instead embodies Jim Morris as a real man with real struggles, working his ass off to make his dream come true. Quaid doesn’t flash that typical smile once in Flesh and Bone. Instead, he plays the damaged Arlis Sweeney, a drifter who stocks vending machines in rural Texas. Arlis is a decaying isotope of a man, the leftovers of a childhood spent with his criminal father Roy (James Caan) and, as a result, being witness to a horrible crime. Instead of wearing his heart on his sleeve, he keeps everything inside. Instead of ambition, he has stasis. 

Quaid was a bigger than life character as Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire (1989), whom he impersonated really well. Alongside, Quaid has done stellar work in supporting roles. He’s excellent in Far From Heaven, Postcards From the Edge, and Traffic. In the satirical body-horror film The Substance, he's playing an ogre of a TV executive named, unsubtly, Harvey. Quaid’s performance in The Substance is at once subtle and also so over the top it breaks the surly bonds of earth. But it is, again, exactly the right style of performance for this film. It’s that sense of fitting a genre that makes Quaid such a good actor. Put him in a blockbuster as a cardboard-cutout dad devoted to finding his kids, and he’ll make him believable. Want him to play a psychic who solves people’s issues by going into their dreams? As Dreamscape proved, he can do that too. He can be the divorced dad in a wholesome kids movie like The Parent Trap or the uptight reverend in Footloose. 

Whether playing the GOP president Ronald Reagan or a sleazebag TV mogul in The Substance, he adapts himself to the project, never signaling to the audience that he thinks the work is beneath him. The vast gulf between his dedication and his judgment has resulted in a remarkably varied body of work, one that has very few good movies but even fewer bad performances. Perhaps this is why we like Quaid so much, even if getting to enjoy his acting means watching films that make us want to die: He does the work. That is the job of most actors—to do a good job day in and day out, regardless of the project. That is what it means to be a professional, rather than a star. A professional spends their life working in a largely interpretive art form in an industry that rarely grants them much control over the final product. Few of them win awards. Many of them, like Quaid, wind up in a lot of crap. But there is beauty to be found in the work of artists who always show up, even, or maybe especially, when the project doesn’t deserve it.

We’ve all dreamt, at one time or another, of being better versions of ourselves. But the notion of relentless self-improvement is something filmmaker Coralie Fargeat pushes to the extreme in her new feminist film The Substance. A bone-chilling body horror that’ll make even Cronenberg disciples squirm, it stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-esque, ex-Hollywood movie star who’s made to believe that she’s aged out of the industry by a slimy executive, pointedly named Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Shaken by her careless discardment and more self-conscious than ever, Elisabeth is drawn in by a mysterious advert for The Substance, a fluoro-green fluid that, if taken correctly, will produce ​“a better you.” A younger, more beautiful you. 

Enter Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, a younger doppelganger who promptly replaces Elisabeth as the face of the hugely popular televised exercise class she once taught and embodies every facet of her life – with only the halo of youth as her shield. Fargeat makes the horror of insecurity tangible, blowing it up into a living, breathing monster. Because injecting The Substance comes at a cost: Sue and Elisabeth can only swap roles for two weeks at a time. And increasingly, Elisabeth and Sue are at odds, battling for dominance and power. 

Whereas Elisabeth clearly loathed Harvey, shallow Sue seems flattered by his leering attentions and adulation. And although the faceless suits at The Substance HQ repeatedly instruct Elisabeth to work with Sue rather than against her, that’s easier said than done when you’re literally being ripped apart from the inside out. Self-inflicted violence, ultimately, sits at the very heart of The Substance. But Fargeat has brought it to life as a bitingly satirical, absurdly funny, nauseatingly gory (we can’t emphasise that enough) film version. Coralie Fargeat said in the Q&A at Toronto International Film Festival that she was influenced by Requiem for a Dream and Cronenberg's body horror.

"I love genre films that allow you to dive into an alternate reality that’s so far from the real world, where the rules can be whatever you want them to be. There’s also Robocop by Verhoeven or Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. I’m interested in societal violence and how that gives way to horror. I think that’s what generates real horror–society. The fear of invasion. That’s what I relate to most strongly." And her advice to actresses Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley was: "I hope that we can feel at ease in our bodies the way we want. I hope we feel empowered to feel sexy or not to feel sexy, that we don’t feel judged, that we feel free. But In The Substance, when the characters finally like themselves, is when both become a monster. So here's a huge tongue-in-cheek element to their story, and I think that is very key to the point of the film.” Source: slate.com