I wanted to hate it.
This Timothée Chalamet, whoévér hé is: What gives him the cheek to think he can play Bob Dylan? That he can sing Dylan’s songs? The effrontery! Where is Dylan himself to give this latest Baby Blue a truth attack, Donovan-style?
But the truth is I rather enjoyed “A Complete Unknown.” The new Dylan biopic is a fine movie, a welcome addition to the ever-growing catalogue of film tributes to the legendary singer. And Chalamet plays a convincing young Dylan, even down to his performances of the iconic songs of Bob’s early albums from 1961 to 1965, ones that launched Dylan to international stardom.
Released on Christmas Day (with a week to spare for Oscar nominations), “A Complete Unknown” is based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, by Elijah Wald. Directed by James Mangold (who gives himself a screenwriting credit alongside Jay Cocks), it stars the aforementioned Chalamet as Dylan, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a fictionalized version of Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo. (Her name was apparently changed at the request of Dylan himself, who consulted on the script.)
The movie begins with Dylan’s appearance in the clubs and coffee shops of Greenwich Village in New York in 1961, a college dropout from the North Country with a guitar and a backpack full of lies. It takes us through four tumultuous years when he becomes the face of folk and protest music, including a performance on the Washington Mall before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. The film ends with Dylan’s famous (infamous for many at the time) plugged-in three-song performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
We meet the names and faces familiar to any Dylan fan: the manager Albert Grossman, the musician Bob Neuwirth, the producer John Hammond, the music critic who gave Dylan his breakthrough review, Robert Shelton, and more. Viewers without a background in Dylanology may find these scenes distracting and confusing, because the characters are not all that central to the plot.
That plot presents Dylan as more or less a cipher, not only to us as an audience but to those (like Seeger and Grossman) who have big plans for his future and to his erstwhile lovers Baez and Russo/Rotolo. The latter two both struggle to understand the “complete unknown” that is Dylan himself in his interpersonal relationships (“You were so good with words/ And at keeping things vague,” Baez would later sing of him in “Diamonds and Rust”); the 29-year-old Chalamet captures well the Dylan of that period: alternately charming and vicious, Everyman but then Mephisto.
When Chalamet—who sang and played guitar on some 40 songs that appear in this 121-minute film—howls out the second chorus to “Like A Rolling Stone” (from which the film title is taken), one can feel Dylan’s angst and the anger as he tries to break out of the mold his handlers—and his fans—have constructed for him:
How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
It is one of the songs that Chalamet does best, along with a beautiful scene where Dylan and his girlfriend-slash-champion Joan Baez try out an early version of “Blowing In The Wind” together. Monica Barbaro as Baez, too, performed her own songs, and captures Baez’s famous soprano sound beautifully.
Don’t get me wrong, these are still actors trying to imitate real life, and sometimes it shows. Chalamet is, to quote Dylan’s famous description of Baez and her singing, “pretty…maybe too pretty” to play the bedraggled orphan Dylan presented himself as in his early years, and there are also moments when Chalamet looks to be imitating Bradley Cooper from “A Star Is Born” rather than Dylan. But he seems to have understood that a proper paean to Dylan does not require the songs to be sung well, just sung distinctively. “That thin, wild mercury sound” is how Dylan described his own music, and Chalamet gets it right.
Ed Norton is the best actor of the lot, capable of an impressive array of subtly conveyed emotions, and he nails the ambiguous role Pete Seeger played in Dylan’s early career: preternaturally good-hearted, but also part booster, part handler, part jealous rival, part stubborn doctrinaire. Norton, who also performed his own songs, had to learn how to play the banjo to be Pete Seeger.
While the film hews close to history most of the time, there are some notable departures: Late in the film, an angry fan screams out “Judas” at Dylan as he goes electric at Newport, causing the singer to turn to his band and mutter “play it loud.” That all actually happened—except it happened almost a year later and in England. (Known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert,” the famous concert recording is actually from a May 17, 1966 concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall.) The film also includes Johnny Cash in the lineup at Newport 1965; he was there with Dylan in 1964 but not the following year.
Further, in order to make Seeger more central to the plot, the film invents several fanciful scenes where the two are together with a dying Woody Guthrie, Dylan’s first idol and the éminence grise of folk music. Mangold is playing fast and loose with the facts here. Only Dylan nerds will care, of course, but there are a lot of us.
“A Complete Unknown” is beautifully shot, with close attention paid to everything from the appearance of West 4th Street in 1961 to the sartorial choices of the main characters and more. Mangold also has a talent for the wide shot that communicates as much by its background as the person in focus. A scene where Russo/Rotolo looks on in stunned realization from the wings as Baez performs onstage with a captivated Dylan (singing “It Ain’t Me, Babe”) is haunting.
Even more memorable is a late scene where Dylan looks over his shoulder at three people who want him to go back on stage, all stacked up in the shot like planes waiting to land: an eager Bob Neuwirth, an I-dare-you-to Johnny Cash and a furious and betrayed Joan Baez. One can all but hear Dylan’s plaintive lyric from “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,” released that year: “It’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please them.”
What is perhaps most remarkable about the film is that one leaves it having learned precious little about Dylan himself, his motivations or his dreams. Like his interlocutors in the movie, we are left trying to figure out just who and what he is—and why. In a movie about a different singer, this might seem like a failure of the script or the director, but here, it is perfect because of the subject matter: Dylan remains a complete unknown.
That murky ambivalence around Dylan’s character is present to the very end. When we see Dylan ride off into the sunset on his Triumph motorcycle, literally and figuratively saying goodbye to his folk persona, his lovers and his early mentors, we know (actually, the movie tells us anyway) that a world tour, a best-selling album (“Highway 61 Revisited”) and rock stardom are all just around the corner. But we also know that a year later, an accident on that same motorcycle will almost kill Dylan, and cause him to completely vanish from the public eye.
Just like Dylan, of course—to have the instant when his star shines brightest become the moment when he goes completely dark.
