Timothée Chalamet stars in two of the year’s biggest films. In one, he’s a young man with strange powers who travels to a distant world, learns the customs of its people, becomes their leader, takes a new name, inspires blind devotion, betrays the woman he loves, and spreads chaos.
The other movie is Dune: Part 2.
Chalamet doesn’t exactly make playing Bob Dylan look easy in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, but he sure makes it look a lot easier than I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes’s kaleidoscopic 2006 anthology of partial Dylan reconstructions. The first trick, it would seem, is to accept that any Dylan performance will come off as an impression if not a caricature if not a parody. The second trick is to acknowledge that the first trick barely matters because Dylan himself has always been a guy performing as Bob Dylan. To Bob, tricks are everything.
From the title on down, A Complete Unknown requires us to be content with Bob Dylan as international man of mystery. (Dylanophiles, who get off on their man’s inscrutability, hardly need convincing.) In the ’60s, Dylan lived a life in hiding from the people closest to him; the son of a guy who ran a Minnesota furniture store, he darted around the Village in a ragamuffin cap spewing nonsense about his previous life on the carnival circuit. At the start, Bobby Zimmerman was just one more midwesterner who thought he could travel east to start anew, like Jay Gatsby without the tragic ending.
And yet, knowing the biographical truth about Dylan doesn’t bring us—or the people he knew—any closer to the man himself. Dylan’s great achievement was to separate integrity from authenticity. To be true to your art, each of his incarnations seem to say, you had to be willing to fundamentally remake your identity. And just so’s you don’t miss the point, Mangold has Dylan himself exclaim “People make up their past!” at one point. We can only be grateful that no one says, “Bob, you’re a complete unknown to me.”
To dramatize Dylan’s ability to hide in plain sight offers no great revelation in itself—again, Haynes made critically adored postmodern hay of Dylan’s ineffibility in 2006. Yet even Haynes’s admirers have to admit there’s some merit to reminding the world that Bob Dylan was (and still is) an actual human who did (and still does stuff) and not just a construct onto which we project our fantasies and preconceived notions.
Not that biopics can ever really be about humans either. Painting history in broad strokes, they reduce their subject to a digestible psychological thesis. And A Complete Unknown’s contribution to Dylanology is its suggestion that the Dylan mystique, the unknowability that lures his devotees in, would come to feel like just another trap for the man himself.
The film’s climax is the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan “went electric,” scandalizing a staid folkie crowd. This event is the stuff of formative Boomer myth, encapsulating the moment that the corny Old Left made way for the hip revolution of rock and roll. Yet Dylan hardly emerges triumphant here. He seems swept along as a hapless agent of history. What happens, the movie asks, when the music stops, you look inside yourself, and, well, you’re not there?
Chalamet’s relative success as an onscreen Dylan is just one reason that A Complete Unknown is so relatively un-embarrassing. If that seems like faint praise, consider that Mangold’s much-esteemed Walk the Line helped inspire Walk Hard: The Legend of Dewey Cox, a parody so wicked it could have sidelined music biopics forever (and at no great loss to the film world).
The source material also helps. A Complete Unknown is adapted from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!, a thoroughly researched and reported account of Newport ’65 that’s preceded by an even-handed evaluation of what was at stake: Wald represents the ethos of the folk scene with a respect that rockist triumphalists could never see past their ingrained generational narratives to allow. It’s absolutely the book to read if you think you never want to read one more book about Dylan.
Mangold co-wrote the screenplay with Jay Cocks, who has frequently collaborated with Dylan true believer Martin Scorsese. It’s not a history book—as a rule of thumb, every time something feels like it didn’t happen, it didn’t—but most of its inaccuracies result from a forgivable telescoping of events for dramatic purposes that only Clinton Heylin would get pissed about.
And some of the compression of events is so bravura you almost have to hand it to Mangold. For instance: Dylan hears about the Cuban Missile Crisis on the radio, looks out his window to see people fleeing from New York City like it’s Saigon in ’75, writes “Masters of War” on the spot and performs it that night at the Gaslight, which leads to him hooking up with Joan Baez for the first time.
When they wake up to the news that Khrushchev has not obliterated the eastern seaboard, Bob stumbles over to turn off the TV in his boxers and mutters Dylanishly, “Well, that’s that.” All the preceding nonsense was worth it for that clip.
The film also hides a few treats for those in-the-know. It wittily addresses the long-debunked legend that Pete Seeger grabbed an ax and tried to cut the sound cables during Dylan’s electric performance at Newport: While trying to get the sound turned down, Seeger glances over at a row of axes, and his wife Toshi appears and dissuades him silently with a stern look. There’s a nice cheap shot at Donovan. And the police whistle on “Highway 61 Revisited” gets a cute, if false, origin story.
More often, Mangold and Cocks feel so eager to avoid Walk Hard-isms they elide key moments in Dylan’s development. Unconnected dots leave us to accept the inevitability of his rise to stardom. How’d he wind up at the March on Washington? How could he not have? And the name “Beatles” is never mentioned, omitting a key influence on Dylan’s musical development and fashion sense. Instead, there’s a gap in the action and suddenly it’s 1965. Bob has ditched his Fievel Mousekewitz duds to strut about in tapered suit, dark shades, and a wild nimbus of curls—not exactly the way for a folk celeb to go unnoticed on MacDougal Street. Oh, and also, this is a curiously drug-free trip through the ’60s.
But the creakiest conceit in A Complete Unknown is the love triangle at its center. While gigging around, Bobby meets Elle Fanning’s character, called Sylvie Russo but essentially Suze Rotolo, the gal huddled with Dylan on the Freewheelin’ cover. (Dylan himself asked that her name be changed, for presumably Dylanesque reasons.) She introduces him to NYC intellectual life (what’s the Dwight MacDonald article she wants him to read, I couldn’t help but wonder) and, as a member of CORE, leftism, which hardly makes Bob the first guy to get into politics because he met a cute girl.
The third point of the triangle is Monica Barbero’s charismatic Joan Baez. We’re introduced to her striding imperiously past admirers into Gerde’s to deliver a stunning “House of the Rising Sun,” singing, as Dylan snarks (not inaccurately) onstage, “maybe a little too pretty.” Already the star of the scene, she’s seduced by Dylan’s songwriting and maybe by her pride in seeing through his fabulations. Barbaro also captures that Baez quality of sounding like every cuss word she utters is in quotation marks.
Cynical me, I suspect that Mangold chose a love story to lure young (presumably female) Chalamet fans to a Dylan biopic. Poor Fanning has little to do but get teary whenever she watches her man harmonize with Baez and say shit like “Your record was all other people’s music!” as though Dylan wasn’t already drooling after the opportunity to cut his own material. Late in the film, Bob totes her to Newport on his motorbike (he didn’t), and pours out his heart to her (he didn’t), belatedly realizing (he didn’t) that he’s been a cad, and she leaves him (she did, but years earlier).
Though some pure-minded youngsters seem aghast at what a jerk Dylan could be, the film goes a lot easier on him than Don’t Look Back. He’s not much more of an asshole than most guys in their early 20s—admittedly a low bar.
But there’s another love story that drives A Complete Unknown. Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) meets Dylan at the bedside of Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who’s been rendered speechless and partially paralyzed by Huntington’s. Pete is there to nurse his friend; Dylan, newly arrived out east, has come to meet his idol. He plays “Song to Woody” for the older folkies, and a besotted Pete brings a homeless Bobby back to his house afterward, though en route they immediately have a bit of a disagreement over the merits of rock ‘n’ roll. (Foreshadowing!)
Seeger escorts his protege through the folk circuit, a world the film sketches adequately, if not as richly as Inside Llewyn Davis, which had essentially imagined Dylan’s alternate life had he been a talent rather than a genius. (The real-life inspiration for Llewyn Davis, Dave Van Ronk, appears in passing here.) Dylan’s not the only youngster on the make in the Village—with the Times’ Robert Shelton jotting notes, and Columbia’s John Hammond listening close, careers are to be made in these dim basements. Future Dylan manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) lurks about as well, a far more cuddly figure than you’ll find in most accounts.
Norton’s pitch-perfect Seeger holds the film together. An earnest man who truly believes that people singing together will change the world, the old Red’s folksy patrician air is everything Dylan will come to reject. Unfortunately, the script balances out the angelic Seeger by placing Boyd Holbrook’s cartoonish, blotto Johnny Cash on Dylan’s other shoulder, where he encourages Bob to “track mud on the carpet.” A showdown at Newport is all but assured.
Thing is, no one agrees what happened at Newport in 1965, as the Wald book makes exceptionally clear. Everyone says there were boos during Dylan’s electric set, but no one agrees on what people were booing: Dylan’s iconoclastic trashing of the folk verities, a poor sound mix, or Dylan’s short set. You could make a Rashomon-like film out of the moment based solely on the various ways Seeger has described the events over the years.
But to make its point, A Complete Unknown has to render the public rejection of Dylan’s new sound all but unanimous. (We do see one woman in the front row obliviously boogieing away to “Like a Rolling Stone.”) The film also commits its biggest forced error here: transporting the most notorious Dylan fan interaction—a “Judas!” accusation flies out from the crowd and Dylan snarls “I don’t believe you”—from a ’66 British show to this festival a year earlier. As historical rewrites go, it’s not quite as bad as, say, having Elvis appear on Ed Sullivan in a white jumpsuit, but it is jarring.
Dylan’s rockin’ performance doesn’t feel as triumphant as we might expect, nor does the acoustic kiss off of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” that follows. He and his gang split in a rush like the outlaws they imagine themselves to be after the gig, but that feels like a put on. Dylan comes off less as a genius coming into his own than a cornered, confused guy lashing out at whoever comes closest. This story certainly couldn’t have been told this way 30 years ago, or even 20. (Thank Bob that Oliver Stone never took his shot at a Dylan movie.)
Earlier in the film, when Bob is griping (isn’t he always) about how everyone pushes their own idea of who he should be on him, his new pal Bobby Neuwirth asks Dylan point blank who he wants to be. “Whoever they don’t want me to be,” Dylan shoots back, and it’s hard not hear a hollowness to that defiance.
A Complete Unknown ends with Dylan at his creative peak, settling into the contrarian stance that has fueled much of his career in the decades to come, as he hopped from recluse to country singer to balladeer to showman to evangelical scold. By the time he returns to visit Woody one last time after Newport, reflecting on what he’s done and lost, Bobby Zimmerman is now as completely Bob Dylan as Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith. How does it feel? Not great, Bob.
Maybe Dylan deserves a four-hour epic that dives into the nuts and bolts of the folk scene, that explores how the man’s attachment to music, that connects more of the dots. The film hints at but doesn’t show how much he enjoys being in a band, after years of creative isolation. The clearer it is that creativity is just having a brain and a sensibility that absorbs everything around you and reconfigures it into something new at a pace you can’t control.
GRADE: B
A Complete Unknown opens in area theater on Christmas Day.
