A Complete Unknown

Do you want to make a...Dylan?

I saw A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold and starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, the day after Christmas. I saw it in a full theater within a multiplex alongside my girlfriend, who liked the movie better than she thought she would, and my teenage daughter, who liked it less than she expected to.

Me? It was about what I anticipated—no better and no worse. Which means that it was a mix of good: some well-built sequences, captivating performances, cool set designs, tons of Bob Dylan music; and not-so-great: puzzling historical inaccuracies, rock-biopic clichés, schmaltz, a lack of character/relationship depth.

Seasoned Dylanologists (or even those seeking degrees in Dylanology) were nervous (or skeptical or hostile) heading into A Complete Unknown, figuring the film would be another shallow, hokey two-hour impression filled with simplified Hollywood pablum and timeline blunders along the lines of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man. And, yes, there’s plenty of all that in A Complete Unknown—it’s basically Dylan for Dummies, and Bob fanatics will most likely bristle at all of the made-up hooey in the film.

But let’s start with some good notes. Chalamet is about as good as we can expect for anyone portraying the ‘62-’65 Dylan. I think he overplays the mumbly hangdog side of Dylan, so at times it becomes too much of a caricature, but, sure, Chalamet is a skilled actor, and he looks and sounds like Dylan, and he’s a charismatic enough actor that it was entertaining whenever he was on screen, which was every scene for 140 minutes.

Much has been made of the fact that Chalamet sang and played everything himself. Subsequently, we get a whole lot of sustained shots of “Dylan” singing with minimal cutaways or overdubs, so the whole thing feels more authentic. For example, during one early scene, Chalamet performs almost the entirety of “Song to Woody”—bedside for that song’s titular figure—in what appears to be a single take. It’s one of the more satisfying moments in the film.

Now, it’s no monumental feat that Chalamet, who had been prepping for this pandemic-delayed production for five years, learned to play four chords and a couple of hammer-ons. You are probably Facebook friends with more than 100 people who can do that. However, Timothy also simultaneously replicates Dylan’s ‘63 vocal timbre probably better than anyone you know. It all adds up to an impressive performance. We’ll see how he does in the sequel, jamming in Big Pink, doing the Nashville Skyline voice, and finding the Lord.

The other performances are likewise terrific, especially Edward Norton in a note-perfect simulacra of Pete Seeger. Norton, who you know would have died to have had the Dylan role himself, embodies every fiber of Seeger’s aw-shucks earnestness and cracker-barrel moralism. And while Elle Fanning is fairly forgettable as the Suze Rotolo stand-in “Sylvie,” good luck taking your eyes off of never-shod Monica Barbaro in a star-making turn as Joan Baez. Barbaro can’t sing like Joan—who can?—and she looked a lot more like Emmylou Harris than like Joan Baez, but she lit up the screen whenever she was on it.

Other bit parts were a hoot, including Dan Fogler as Albert Grossman (why wasn’t he grayer-headed?), Scoot McNairy as a post-lingual Woody Guthrie, and Boyd Holbrook as a scene-stealing (if hammy) Johnny Cash. Plus some blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em appearances of key Dylan-lore figures like Tom Wilson, Dave Van Ronk, Maria Muldaur, and John Hammond.

That’s a fun part of the experience for Dylan fans—spotting the references, picking up lyrical allusions, taking in the recreations of Dylan’s 4th Street apartment and the Chelsea Hotel and Columbia’s Studio A. The film’s restoration of MacDougal Street back to 1961—Cafe Wha?, Folklore Center, the Gaslight, Gerde’s—is remarkable; one of the most fascinating aspects of the film is being transported into those spaces in that time…in color; that alone is worth the price of admission.

For example, one sequence is set during the nights of October 1962 when the world was in the grips of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more economical depiction of the panic (New Yorkers slamming car trunks as they try to get out of the city) and resignation (the real Walter Cronkite on television speculating that “there goes the whole ballgame”) as everyone thought the world was about to come to a fiery end.

And, of course, there’s the music. Which is almost the entire film. There’s really not much dialogue in this thing, so the movie plays like a giant music video, so if you love the songs—not just Dylan’s; we hear sides by Guthrie, Cash, Seeger, Hank Williams, Phil Ochs, Little Richard, and lots more—then you can’t help but delight in the continual cavalcade of tuneage.

The film does include a couple of odd song choices that get considerable screen time. In one scene, after Seeger first introduces Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City (one of the film’s many fictional events), Dylan steps up and plays the early obscurity “I Was Young When I Left Home,” a song Dylan never actually performed live and that for decades was only available to collectors on the Minnesota Hotel Tape bootleg. In a later scene, Dylan sings the bawdy “All Over You,” a demo he played live just twice (neither time at the church as depicted in the film) and that didn’t see the official light of day until the release of the Witmark Demos compilation in 2010.

This kind of deep-Dylan cred-flexing strikes me as compensation for what Mangold was doing elsewhere in the plot by throwing in fictions and oversights and fallacies elsewhere in the film. It is as though Mangold is saying, Yes, I know I got a bunch of stuff wrong, but, look—I know “I Was Young When I Left Home” and “All Over You”!

All of which creates a strange pastiche that tries to incorporate a little of everything without completely nailing any of it. If you’re looking for psychological insight into the figure of Bob Dylan, the film does not even attempt to provide it. If you want an alluring depiction of Bob Dylan’s romantic entanglements, or even the Bob/Suze/Joan love triangle, you’re not going to get much of a story there either. If you want the unlikely story of how a “complete unknown” from nowhere Minnesota ended up in New York and became a sensation—forget it: The film opens when Dylan arrives in NYC and then gives short and mythical shrift to Dylan’s rapid rise within the Greenwich Village folk revival scene.

The odd inaccuracies start to pile up. Some of these I can understand in the spirit of story compression and taking some narrative liberties and best-guesses. But that kind of make-believe constitutes practically the whole film.

For example, everyone knows that the young Dylan, shortly after arriving in New York in January ‘61, visited Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital. However, in the film, the first time Dylan walks into Guthrie’s room, Pete Seeger is there, which isn’t true. Nor did Dylan perform “Song to Woody” for Guthrie that night as Seeger looked on. Nor did Dylan go home and crash at Seeger’s house that very night (or any other night). Nor did Seeger sponsor Dylan by introducing him at Gerde’s where John Hammond and Albert Grossman and Joan Baez were all in attendance.

Now does any of this matter? Is Mangold merely being true to the spirit of the story and bringing key members of Dylan’s orbit together for the sake of more concise storytelling and a more entertaining movie?

Maybe. But I would have preferred to see it closer to as it actually happened. Imagine montages of Dylan trying to talk his way into performing at bars and cafes, passing the hat for tips, sleeping on people’s floors, stealing people’s folk records, writing songs in his apartment and in coffee shops and on trains, picking Izzy Young’s brain at Folk Center, playing in the Cafe Wha?, opening for John Lee Hooker, playing harmonica with Carolyn Hester at an apartment party, etc. That could have been fascinating, fast-moving, exciting, funny, cool, visually stimulating. All while still being—actually due to being—accurate.

Instead, we sacrifice all of that, partly in favor of Pete Seeger, who, god love him, and in spite of a great impression by Norton, is not all that exciting as a character and, in any case, existed only on the periphery of the Bob Dylan story. The preponderance of Pete was one of my daughters’ biggest complaints about the film. At 17, she’s in the top 5% of Dylan aficionados in her age class, and she couldn’t understand why Pete was worked so liberally into the screenplay.

And then there are the love stories, neither of which amounts to much in the film. We’re not given enough into Dylan’s state of mind to care much about his relationships with Joan or Sylvie. And again with the phony contrivances. On the night when the Cuban Missile Crisis is coming to a head, Joan—who was never even part of the Greenwich Village folk scene anyway—heads to the Gaslight where Dylan just happens to be there playing “Masters of War” at that moment, which leads to Bob and Joan acting out their own little private missile-and-explosion game in Bob’s apartment that night.

But we’re given no reason to root for these characters to be together since the main reason the film shows Dylan with any of these women is to prove that he’s an asshole. Which may be accurate enough, but you don’t need to devote a lot of screen time to demonstrate that point, and it certainly doesn’t make for good storytelling. In other words, if this film were about a fictional musician rather than a real one, would the plot points about Sylvie or Joan be interesting at all? Would they contain any dramatic sweep or gripping surprises or genuine emotion or even honest realism? None that I could see.¹

Another girl, identified as Becka, shows up to a party with Dylan at one point. Ostensibly, her inclusion was to demonstrate that suddenly famous and mercurial Dylan was carelessly going through the women, but it sure seems like Mangold really wanted to establish that Dylan was always into Black chicks.

The real love of Dylan’s early life was Suze Rotolo, the character on which Sylvie is based. Just listen to “Ballad in Plain D” or “Tomorrow is a Long Time” or “One Too Many Mornings,” all of which were written about Suze. Or consider the fact that Dylan himself reportedly asked Mangold not to use Suze’s name in the film, out of, one imagines, respect for Suze, even though she died in 2011. Clearly, that relationship did not lack for real drama and heartbreak and reconciliation and ultimate loss. Yet the film chooses to graze the relationship only on its surface, to throw in some token Joan, and then to depict Suze falling apart while watching Bob and Joan duet on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk festival, despite the fact that Bob and Joan didn’t duet at the festival that year at all and that by 1965 Suze was no longer involved with Dylan anyway. When Dylan chases her to ferry afterward, we have no investment in their relationship, and the actors have established no chemistry.

Some of the little fabricated moments didn’t bother me. Like when Dylan bought a toy whistle from a street vendor. (The vendor asks Bob if he has kids, which no such vendor would do, but it provides a snappy comeback from Bob: “Thousands of ‘em.”) Dylan fans know the whistle will later be used at the beginning of “Highway 61 Revisited” but also that his bandmate Al Kooper was the one who gave Bob the whistle. But so what. That’s some minutiae that can be altered for a humorous moment of cinematic invention without losing or rewriting anything critical to the overall Dylan story.

Changing the timeline of the songs was odd though. The writing of “Girl from the North Country” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” are out of place, as is the the order of recording “Highway 61” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” No biggie, but then why depict the scene in which Al Kooper sneaks onto the organ to play on “Like a Rolling Stone”? That is, if you’re new to Dylan, you probably don’t mind that the songs are out of order, and if you don’t, then you definitely don’t care who the hell played the organ part on “Like a Rolling Stone” and why. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of Dylan aficionado who really wants to see Kooper sneak past Tom Wilson to sit at the organ, then you also know enough to be bothered by the screwed-up chronology of the recordings.

Also bizarre is the scene when Dylan interlopes into Pete Seeger’s TV show when Seeger is interviewing a blues musician. Dylan never appeared on such a show, the blues dude is fictional, the verbal banter is unrealistic, the jam session that ensues sounds nothing like Dylan’s playing, and the whole scene feels utterly pointless, especially since it never happened. And why show the one Black musician in the whole movie continually sipping from a bottle of peppermint schnapps?

Or what about that silly on-stage argument between Bob and Joan when Bob refuses to play “Blowin’ in the Wind”? Totally made up. I understand needing to show some friction between the two of them, but that’s not how it would have gone down. Or that business with Johnny Cash at Newport 1965 handing Dylan his acoustic to go back out and calm down the angry crowd. That’s some old-fashioned Hollywood corn, but Cash wasn’t even at the festival in ‘65.

Worse yet was having some gal call Dylan “Judas” (twice! why?) during the climactic Newport set when even casual Dylan fans know that that incident occurred (courtesy of a dude) almost a year later in England when Dylan was touring with the Band. And speaking of crowd reactions, Mangold succumbs to one of the mushiest, overworked shticks in the music biopic book—the shot of someone watching in transfixed awe from the side of the stage as Dylan performs. We must have gotten a dozen of those moments in this film, half of them from Baez.

Mangold’s handling of the entire Newport scene looks kind of cheap, from the artificial action on stage to the overblown shots of a furious crowd. Not only did no one yell, “Judas” at Newport, there were no actual reports of anyone throwing things on stage at Dylan, Alan Lomax and Albert Grossman did not get into fisticuffs during Dylan’s set, and there was no row of axes waiting for Seeger to cut the sound cables.

Mangold, instead of taking so many corny liberties, could have made the scene—and the whole film—darker, cooler, sexier. We could have ventured inside Dylan’s mind, his cerebral process, his rebelliousness, his shape-shifting in a more expressionistic way. His thoughts were racing, he was bending the culture into his image, the words and the sounds in his mind were swirling—so let’s swirl with it.

Instead, Mangold went for broad, mainstream appeal. He did so by adding a bunch of cooked-up fables to sell A Complete Unknown to the masses. And it’s fine. Throw the bums a dime. But once upon a time, the real story was already all anyone needed.

1. On the other hand, the Bob/Joan fling gives rise to my favorite line of dialogue in the movie, when Bob complains that the E string buzzes on the acoustic guitar he’s holding. Joan’s response: “Not when I play it.” A nice reference to the fact that when it came to guitar skills in ‘64, Joan put Dylan’s dick in the dirt.