James Mangold (director). A Complete Unknown . 2024. Rock and roll ghosts are possessing our movie stars. Austin Butler apparently went so deep into character over the years-long process of filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis that he got stuck there, eventually hiring a vocal coach to help de-Elvis him. Watching a trailer for an upcoming spy movie, it occurred to me that its star was not so much Rami Malek as Rami-Malek-as-Freddie-Mercury-in- Bohemian – Rhapsody , blowing up bad guys with a camp flourish. It is a storied tradition: some say Val Kilmer needed therapy to extricate Jim Morrison from his psyche after wrapping Oliver Stone’s very bad The Doors . This is to say nothing of the mortifications of the flesh: Malek’s prosthetic Mercury teeth; the gallons of microwaved ice cream Butler had to drink to achieve Elvoid proportions. Rock history weighs like a tub of Cherry Garcia on the stomachs of the living.…