More than a few people have observed that the most finely wrought character in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown—even more exquisite than Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan or Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez—is the 1960s Greenwich Village of production designer François Audouy. Like great Hollywood actors, New York City neighborhoods move through phases as they age, yet manage to retain their primordial nature. Audouy scratched at the corporate sheen of today’s West Village, tossed in some period trash cans and a few Coupe DeVilles, and revealed it once again as a place of protest and longing, of young people striving and old people withering, a place where calls for freedom and justice echoed from doorways.
It was much the same in the 1920s. The paintings of John Sloan emanate a similar energy, his famous Village nightscape balancing the weight of the brownstones against the lurid glow of electricity. Greenwich Village residents of that earlier era—Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair, and John Reed among them—were as obsessed with the concept of freedom as Jack Kerouac, Dylan, and Baez would be.
