A Complete Unknown
Musical bio-pics appear to have immunity from the demands we make of most movies. They may be corny, sentimental, badly put together, or almost completely fictionalised, but this doesn’t dampen the enthusiasm of the fans. Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man were patchy films but were well received and got the numbers at the box office. By contrast, Better Man, in which Robbie Williams is played by a chimpanzee, has been a flop. All that monkey business may ultimately have been a turn-off for fans, or perhaps Williams is simply not in the same class as Queen or Elton John.
The secret of success seems to be: Forget the gimmicks and lean into the music – hard. James Mangold, a thorough professonal, shows he has learned this lesson in A Complete Unknown, a film that traces the early career of Bob Dylan. No director would dream of making a monkey out of such an iconic musician. Dylan, more than anyone except the Beatles, defined the arc of popular music in the 1960s, and has maintained his legendary stature despite the many ups and downs that followed.
Although I’m still sceptical about Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, so was he - he didn’t turn up for the presentation. With more than 600 songs to his name there’s ample room for failure, but when he hits the mark, you can feel the tremor run through your entire body. There are a lot of songs in A Complete Unknown that will resonate with viewers: A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall, Blowin’ in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, It Ain’t Me Babe (with Joan Baez), Like a Rolling Stone, and more.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this movie is that these songs are sung, not by Dylan himself, but by Timothée Chalamet, in the lead role, while Joan Baez’s numbers are performed by actress, Monica Barbaro. It works better than one might have suspected. The alternative, which would have seen the actors lip-synching to the originals, would have been unbearable.
As Chalamet’s star has soared in Hollywood, I’ve felt my initial good impressions declining, as he has spent one movie after another looking soulful and self-conscious. I’ve found the Dune saga to be frankly dull, but the film that almost made me a Chalamet-phobe was the bilious Wonka (2023).
How surprising then, that an actor whose musical talents could make one cringe in that CGI-laden kids’ film, manages to pull off a very successful Bob Dylan impersonation. It may have to do with simply being able to imitate rather than create a musical number from scratch. It may also owe something to Dylan’s idiosyncratic, nasal drawl. Pavarotti, he ain’t, but the voice is perfectly suited to the edgy nature of the songs. One can hear the difference when Joan Baez covers a Dylan song in sweeter, more melodic tones. Her versions may be more tuneful, but they lose that vital expressiveness. “A little too pretty,” as Dylan puts it.
Chalamet doesn’t sound precisely like Dylan, but he gets the tone and the delivery right. In this portrayal, the young Dylan is no study in pouting cuteness. For much of the time he comes across as a jerk – selfish, arrogant, ambitious and manipulative. When he attains the success he craves, he acts as if it’s an unbearable burden on his tortured sensitivity.
The story begins in January 1961, with the 19-year-old musician’s arrival in New York, fresh from Minnesota, armed only with a guitar, a handful of songs and a set of fibs about his background. After a coffee in a downtown café, he sets off to visit his idol, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairie), in a New Jersey hospital. Guthrie is suffering from Huntington’s disease, which means he can barely talk or move. When the young Bob turns up, Guthrie has another visitor – folk legend, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). After listening to Dylan perform his Song to Woody, Seeger realises he’s discovered a booming talent. He invites Bob home to stay for the night and will soon put him on stage at the leading folk music club in Greenwich Village.
That same night, Bob will meet Joan Baez (Barbaro), who is already an acknowledged star of the folk music scene; aggressive talent agent, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogle); and CBS luminary, John Hammond (David Alan Basche). In a flash, Bob has a manager, a record deal, and – in Baez - a future lover and collaborator. Shortly afterwards he encounters a girl named Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), at a Blues concert, and they become a couple. Sylvie is a threadbare alias for Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend at the time. She’s the woman holding his arm on the cover of his second LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963).
From this point our hero’s rise is unstoppable, although the film is short on detail. Instead, we get a series of set pieces in which Bob has brief, significant exchanges with another character – mainly with Pete, Sylvie or Joan. Most of these conversations are linked to a particular song that provides a musical and dramatic context, as in the bedroom scene in which Joan tells Bob he’s “kind of an asshole,” then gets caught up reading his hand-written lyrics for A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall, which they sing together, in their underwear.
The script is based on Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan Goes Electric! (2015), taking us on a journey towards that iconoclastic moment when Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and performed an electrified set with his band. It may not sound like a big deal today, but it was earth-shattering in the context of the American folk music movement, which saw itself as the true “music of the people”, as opposed to the raucous, commercial product being churned out by rock musicians. Folk music was the sound of protest movements, of the undervalued and oppressed, and Dylan was its most prominent new exponent. To walk out on stage with an electric guitar was a betrayal of epic proportions.
The entire movie edges its way towards that climax, showing Bob becoming disenchanted with the folk scene and its pieties, seeking a more dynamic way to get his music into the mainstream. At one stage he explains that to be a star, you’ve got to be a freak. But by the mid-60s there was nothing freakish about folk music, which was being ruthlessly sent up by satirists such as Tom Lehrer: “We are the folk song army/ Everyone of us cares/ We all hate poverty, war and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares…”
In compressing and rearranging events for dramatic effect, A Complete Unknown often feels a little too calculated. In particular, the love triangle between Sylvie, Bob and Joan; the convenient way Pete just happens to be present at Woody’s bedside when Bob arrives; and Woody handing over a harmonica – or should that be “baton”? – to Bob. A recurrent reference to the last scenes in Now, Voyager (1942), feels entirely contrived. Bob’s hooning around on a motorbike foreshadows a serious accident he will have in 1966, but only Dylanologists will get the reference.
Sylvie and Joan play a symbolic role in this story, the former as Bob’s ‘true love’ who is ultimately too grounded, too ordinary to hold his affections. Joan is a kind of trophy. Without denying his genuine attraction, there’s also a sense in which he is envious of her fame and wants to snatch it for himself. As for Pete, he’s the dependable father figure who must be rejected when Bob goes electric, while Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) is the wicked urger who encourages Bob to “track some mud on the carpet”.
These binary oppositions may sound too obvious, but they are swallowed up by the sheer momentum of the music that carries Dylan from obscurity to stardom in a few short years.
If Bob is a complete unknown at the beginning of the film, he is hardly less so at the end. Everyone who has gotten close to him has discovered that his stories about himself are no less of inventive than his songs. He seeks fame but feels embittered when it arrives. He exploits the women in his life but seems to believe they’ll always be there when he needs them. As he grows progressively cooler, he gives up the cap and the fleecy-lined coat in favour of a blue, tailored jacket and sunglasses, to be worn day and night. It’s a gripping portrait of a youthful enigma who will only grow more enigmatic as a long career unfolds.
A Complete Unknown
Directed by James Mangold
Written by James Mangold & Jay Cocks, after a book by Elijah Wald
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Dan Fogler, Eriko Hatsune, Scoot McNairy, Boyd Holbrook, Will Harrison, Laura Kariuki, Norbert Leo Butz, Charlie Tahan, Eli Brown, David Alan Basche
USA, M, 140 mins