A Complete Unknown

As a Bob Dylan obsessive and a cinephile whose least favorite genre is the biopic, I anticipated James Mangold's film about Dylan's early years leading up to when he "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival with about as much dread as I did Jason Reitman's Saturday Night film about the night of the first Saturday Night Live broadcast. I assumed that Mangold would take a similar straight-up approach to someone as impossible to nail down as Dylan that he did with Johnny Cash in his perfectly watchable but upsettingly by-the-numbers 2005 biopic Walk The Line. As a public figure, Dylan was and remains a trickster who mastered the art of creating opaque and deceptive personal histories to enhance his mystique and maintain sole ownership of his soul even before he became famous. A biopic about such an intentionally misleading public figure seems like a fool's errand. Of course, the biopic genre is so reductive that nearly all such films end up just as misleading as Dylan's aggressive and playful blending of truth and fabrication on the rare occasions when he talks to a journalist or writes about himself. I'm much more a fan of the approach to historical biography the Coen Brothers took with Inside Llewyn Davis, a movie that kinda-sorta tells the story of one of Dylan's primary precursors in the Greenwich Village folk music revival scene, Dave Van Ronk. But the first twenty-five minutes of A Complete Unknown were so powerful, evocative, and moving to me that the film had me in its grip and never let me go.

Timothée Chalamet plays the young Bobby Zimmerman, who moves from Hibbing, Minnesota, to New York City to meet his musical inspiration, Woody Guthrie. Woody is wasting away in a New Jersey hospital with Huntington's chorea, an incurable neurodegenerative disease that robs the afflicted person of the ability to speak and move well. When Bobby, who has already reinvented himself as Bob Dylan, arrives at Woody's bedside, he meets Pete Seeger and sings them the song he wrote for Woody, aptly called "Song for Woody." They are both impressed, and Seeger invites Bob to stay with him for a while and introduces him to the New York Folk Music scene, which Dylan proceeds to ascend since every important figure in the folk music industry just happened to be at Dylan's first club appearance, and then quickly transcend, as he effortlessly absorbs the culture, the politics, and the entire zeitgeist into songs that speak to everyone to such a degree that they cease to hold meaning for him. This all culminates in Dylan's infamous plugged-in electric rock performance at Newport, where he rejects folk orthodoxy, nailing his protest on the door of the tabernacle like a chainsmoking Martin Luthor on Benzidreen. All of this is as fanciful a blending of truth and fiction as any story Dylan ever spoke of or wrote about his life, and as absurd a collapsing of chronological events, characters, and long-disputed conflicting accounts by those where there as are found in any biopic. Yet the movie manages to attain enough poetic veracity to instill curiosity in the viewer rather than attempting to deliver something definitive (which is the best any biopic can do).

The film itself cannot fully transcend its genre trappings the way Dylan reinvented the folk scene by writing new songs that felt just as timeless as the old songs yet were imbued with profound meaning for the times he and his listeners and fellow singer/songwriters lived in. Times that, as he poetically pointed out, were a-changin'. A Complete Unknown has plenty of biopic speedbumps that break the spell most of the film successfully casts. There are lots of narrative shortcuts made to enable the inclusion of as many of the well-documented stories and oft-told legends about Dylan's time in Greenwich Village—his rise to fame, the famous folks he knew and shared stages with, and his frustration at getting boxed into being revealed as the voice of his generation. There's also a fairly contrived and conventional storyline revolving around his relationship with Suze Rotolo, his girlfriend during this period, who had a major influence on his early music and career. Plus, you have to get past typically absurd biopic beats and lines of dialogue like "Which guitar ya gonna use?" "Sorry about this, Odetta," and CLOSE UP ON BOB: "What's your name?" CUT TO CLOSE UP ON AL KOOPER: "I'm Al Kooper." Why do movies like this always have to reduce real-life figures to Easter Eggs in a fuckin' Star Wars movie? (Seriously, Mangold, why include this line when literally everyone who knows who Al Kooper is knows the story of him playing the organ on "Like a Rolling Stone"? Just let the scene play out in a way that doesn't feel like something is being underlined. Including this little name-check adds nothing to your movie other than giving a tiny dopamine hit to any obnoxious people in the audience who go to movies like this so they can elbow the person they came with and say, "I knew that was Al Kooper!")

But, for the most part, A Complete Unknown is remarkably free of these distractions and contrivances and, in many segments, allows the music to speak for itself. We don't get complete Dylan songs (even his early compositions are famously long compared to, say, a Johnny Cash song), but we get far more than a snatch here and a snatch there, as with so many contemporary music biopics. We often get far more than just a single verse and chorus, especially in the movie's first third. This centering of the music and limiting this story to a five-year period largely prevents this biopic from reverting to the genre's standard fictionalization of famous events that are mostly concerned with the accuracy of surface details and, instead, focuses the viewer on what's actually important about the subject of the movie we're watching. We do get some of those inevitable shots of the writer protagonist witnessing something inspirational or having a conversation that leads directly to them writing something at a desk, typewriter, or piano in the act of creation, but these moments play far less inauthentically than the similar scenes and beats found in 95 percent of all music biopics or docudramas about creative individuals.

Some of this is due to the screenplay being nimble enough to allow Dylan to be the observer in as many scenes as he is the center. Mangold co-wrote the film with Jay Cocks, the New York film critic and screenwriter who is a frequent collaborator of Martin Scorsese, co-scripting The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, and Silence. As their source bible, they base their narrative on the excellent book Dylan Goes Electric! by the Cambridge-based music journalist, historian, and folk-blues guitarist Elijah Wald. The movie doesn't try to do too many things at once. Its main focus is on trying to show why Dylan was important, why the folk music scene was significant, why the music itself was consequential, and what, if anything, we can apply from the lessons of sixty years ago to today. The film does not try to be the cinematic equivalent of Dylan's mind, lyrics, or perception of himself like Todd Haynes's I'm Not There does. That's a relief since we already have I'm Not There, which is not the Dylanesque masterpiece many seem to regard it, but a rather silly gimmick movie that's only interesting about a third of the time. Instead, A Complete Unknown uses the standard artificial biopic formula to say what it wants to say, much as Dylan used the well-established folk traditions and the way the rapidly changing music industry chased success to express himself.

Still, as with all biopics, the best thing about this movie and the main reason it works is the central performances. Chalamet is as terrific as Dylan, instantly capturing his early mix of naiveté about and preternatural understanding of the world he was entering, his willingness to be guided by others with the cocksure swagger of someone who was making things up as he went along, and his later anger, arrogance, and bravado, which covers a radically different type of vulnerability. He nails Dylan's iconic speaking voice and does a decent job with his singing voice. Of course, Chalamet is a beautiful young man in ways that Dylan never was, but he's not too pretty to play Bob Dylan, as the Dylan of this era was a sex symbol to millions of fans in ways that directly parallel how scores of young people of the current generation regard Chalamet. It's great that Mangold and the makeup and VFX teams don't attempt to transform the actor into an uncanny replication of what young Dylan looked like on his first album cover. The costume, wig, hat, voice, and physicality are all we need, and we instantly accept Chalamet as a fully dimensional character and not just someone doing a Dylan impression (which is no small feat, considering that, like Jack Nicholson, practically everyone over the age of 30 has a Dylan impression).

Likewise, Monica Barbaro (the female aviator in Top Gun: Maverick) doesn't look or sound all that much like the young Joan Baez, but it's again fitting to depict the Baez of this era and this story as such a sexy, confident, and direct individual. And it's great that Barbaro doesn't go too overboard in terms of an impression when she's singing, as trying to exactly mimic Joan Baez's vocals will inevitably end up sounding like a parody or worse. Muddy Waters's son, the blues singer and guitarist Big Bill Morganfield, plays an electric blues singer who inspires Dylan, Boyd Holbrook makes a fine Johnny Cash, and it is great that Bob Neuwirth and Dave Van Ronk are played by little-known actors Will Harrison and Joe Tippett instead of celebrity cameos. Dan Fogler never allows his performance as Dylan's famously aggressive and corpulent manager, Albert Grossman, to turn into a caricature like Tom Hank's Colonel Tom Parker in Elvis. (Lord, watching A Compele Unknown made me despise Baz Luhrmann's Evils movie a thousand times more than I did when I saw it. Mangold's aesthetic is almost 180 degrees from Luhrmann's).

Elle Fanning does what she can with the Suze Rotolo character, Sylvie Russo, but her storyline is the weakest aspect of Cox and Mangold's screenplay. We never get a real sense of who this woman was in Dylan's life, why their relationship lasted for five years (kind of an eternity at this age, at this time, in this scene), or the profound role she played in causing his writing to move in such a political direction and inspiring his greatest early songs about love, romantic longing, and the frustrations of male-female relationships. All she gets to play is lip service about Sylvie's involvement in civil rights causes and the standard truncated music-biopic scenes of relationship complications. I wish the filmmakers had found ways to use this character to explore the politics of the day in the way the ingeniously create Bob and Sylvie's first date, in which the random choice of movie they see informs our understanding of Dylan's mindset about personal reinvention.

The real revelation in this movie is Edward Norton's performance as Pete Seeger. Norton captures every one of Seeger's vocal inflections, mannerisms, physical attributes, banjo playing style, and the sweet and genital way the man fought like a warrior for the people and causes he believed so strongly in. These devoted and passionate yet coolheaded and pragmatic qualities carry over to how he interacts with Dylan at many key points in this story. As any movie of this ilk would, A Complete Unknown simplifies Seeger while embellishing the mentor role he played in Dylan's life and career. But so what? The best that fictionalized movies about real events can do is capture an essence, not recreate facts, and one of Seeger's essential roles in life was as the elder statesman of traditional folk music. He was, in essence, a mentor to all who followed him, and, unlike today's elder statesmen, he seemed to know intrinsically when it was time for him to yield the stage. This is Norton's greatest performance and, I believe, the best performance by an actor this year.

I was deeply moved by every scene in which Norton's Seeger appears. Even as the film's final act veers farther and farther away from its playful appropriation of the biopic form, the Seeger character keeps us grounded. As the movie heads into the Newport Festival climax, it becomes more and more like a standard everyday docudrama. Even though I didn't despise the hit Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody to quite the same extent everyone else now seems to, the Newport climax bears far too many similarities to that film's recreation of Queen's Live Aid performance for my comfort level. Still, the scene where Pete Seeger wakes Dylan up on the morning of his fateful plugged-in set and makes one final attempt to express how Seeger views the importance of the folk music movement and Dylan's role in it is as heartbreaking as any movie's "theme statement moment" could ever be.

A Complete Unknown is no mere liberal boomer nostalgia trip; in fact, it can be read as an indictment of liberal boomer attitudes by reminding us that their's was less a generation of Bob Dylans and more a generation of the crowds that booed Dylan when he didn't stay in his box and play the songs they believed would change the world. The scenes depicting Alan Lomax and the various Newport Folk Festival organizers arguing with Dylan and Albert Grossman might make you imagine similarly heated exchanges in the Democratic National Committee over the past several years as they decided that Joe Biden was the only way to win the presidency in 2020 and that whatever bench the Democrats had of promising young candidates needed to be silenced during Biden's first administration and the 2024 primary so that the oldest American president ever could once again be the only choice and only hope for the nation.

The film stands as a reminder that what Dylan did with his early '60s songwriting was not merely to recycle the folk traditions that came before him but to transform these conventions, melodies, and lyrical ideas, combining them with a myriad of other influences to create something that spoke to the growing populous that rejected all forms of the status quo, honoring the past but looking forward to something better or at least more alive. He vehemently did not want to be defined by others and wanted people to think for themselves. "Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters," and the like. This makes the end of 2024 an ideal time for Dylan to become part of mainstream culture and conversation again. Not that he offers us any answers, but he serves as a reminder as we enter what promises to be as dark, violent, and absurdist an era in America as the 1960s were that music, film, and the other arts may serve not only as a balm but a form of salvation for a great many, and maybe, just maybe, can help people organize into something that truly makes the times a-change for the better.