To say I was skeptical of A Complete Unknown, which opened around Israel on Thursday, would be an understatement since I thought that Bob Dylan was too unique and iconic a cultural and musical figure to be portrayed with any authenticity in a drama.
But I kept in mind Dylan’s words, “Come writers and critics/Who prophesize with your pen/And keep your eyes wide/The chance won’t come again,” and hoping for the best, I headed to the theater.
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which tracks Dylan from his arrival in New York in 1961 to the moment he played electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, causing the kind of musical brouhaha that cannot be imagined today, is charming, captivating, and surprising in all the good ways that Dylan’s music is.
It’s far from flawless, but the problems with it are likely not ones that will bother you as you’re watching it; they may sneak up on you as you think about it afterward.
For the most part, it captures the spirit of Dylan and his cronies evocatively.
The more it focuses on the details of the music and the scene, the better it is.
Its misfires mostly come when it ventures into more traditional biopic territory, and what it leaves out is as important as what it includes.
Was Timothée Chalamet able to pull it off?
Prior to seeing the film, I was concerned that Timothée Chalamet, an actor who has done a good job playing wispy young guys just beginning to figure out their lives, could embody Dylan.
Dylan, according to all accounts, was a remarkably self-possessed figure when he burst onto the Greenwich Village scene and eventually won over the whole music world, even becoming the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (although, as the end titles point out, he didn’t attend the ceremony).
But Chalamet pulls it off and seems more substantial than he has in the past.By the end, I even forgave him for having a first name whose spelling I always need to look up. He manages to capture the mixture of arrogance, wit, self-absorption, and sheer talent that has characterized Dylan’s public persona throughout his career.
Even Chalamet’s singing, which is a kind of approximation of Dylan’s, works well enough. Lip-syncing never looks good on screen, and even if that weren’t an issue, no one could pull off lip-syncing to Dylan; that voice could only come from the real Bob Dylan’s mouth.
At times, like an American actor playing a Brit who switches among different British regional accents, he seems to slip out of Dylan’s voice and into Bruce Springsteen’s, but that may be a measure of how much Springsteen tried to channel Dylan.
THE MOVIE starts in 1961 as Dylan arrives in Greenwich Village, having hitched a ride. Fascinated by the coffee shops and music stores he sees, he doesn’t lose his focus on meeting his idol, folk legend Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), whom he is sure will become his mentor.
The opening music in this sequence is Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” and in this and certain other key early scenes, the movie pays homage to those without whom Dylan wouldn’t have been inspired to take the path he chose.
He quickly finds his way to the hospital in New Jersey, where Guthrie, suffering from the Huntington’s Disease that killed him a few years later, is confined.
At Guthrie’s bedside, Dylan meets Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and the folkie king immediately recognizes Dylan’s spark and takes him under his wing.
Soon, Dylan becomes a fixture on the downtown music scene, performing to enthusiastic crowds and writing and recording folk standards at the direction of his new manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler).
He also begins romancing many women, principally Sylvie (Elle Fanning), a character who seems to be based on Susan Rotalo, Dylan’s girlfriend, who was featured with him on the cover of the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
He meets his idol, Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), who now worships him, and begins a sometimes romantic, often contentious, and rivalrous relationship with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, one of the standouts in an excellent cast) that fans will recognize from her song, “Diamonds and Rust.”
What is the movie about?
The movie is primarily about Dylan’s musical development, how he forges a new identity for himself, recording his own songs and eventually scandalizing the folk purists, especially Seeger, when he swaps his acoustic guitar for an electric one, making a definitive break with his coffeehouse roots.
It’s all entertainingly filmed, and this is the rare music drama where the performers get to play many of the songs from beginning to end.
While the movie cannot be faulted for its attention to the music, it falters when it tries to get inside the head of the man behind the shades.
The Dylan who emerges in this movie is a man drunk on his own success but also confounded by it.
Joan Didion wrote an essay, “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” about the young Joan Baez at the height of her fame, and her words could apply to Dylan as well: “Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.”
SYLVIE AND Joan Baez immediately see through his highly embellished origin story of how he picked up music from traveling cowboys at a carnival.
They learn that his surname is Zimmerman, but nothing is made of this, and the film doesn’t address his Jewish background and what it might have meant to him. Nor is there any comment about why a Jew might want to conceal his identity in the supposedly open and liberal folk scene at the time.
Another issue is the politics of the folk scene, which was the subject of a fascinating article in The Free Press by Michael C. Moynihan. To summarize his argument, I’ll just quote the subhead: “The ’60s folk singers didn’t hate Dylan because he went electric, as A Complete Unknown suggests. It was because he didn’t care about their lefty politics.”
Dylan was not and would never be the activist that Seeger, Baez, and others wanted him to be, although he did perform concerts to support the Civil Rights movement and certain other causes.
Moynihan details how avidly many of the folkies supported Stalin and how little and late most of their apologies for that support were, suggesting that Dylan may have been skeptical of their political agenda. But in the movie’s telling, Seeger is merely a middle-aged fogey who can’t stand rock ‘n’ roll.
The movie’s portrayal of Dylan’s relationships with women also veers into cliché territory, as he comes and goes as he pleases, although, to be fair, that’s pretty understandable behavior for a young guy who suddenly finds himself a superstar.
The relationship with Baez is the most interesting, and the two actors have real chemistry when they sing together.
What the movie really gets right is the exhilaration Dylan felt at coming into his own and the energy of the folk scene.
After you see A Complete Unknown, you may want to listen to your Dylan records again, if you still have them, or look them up on Spotify.
One of the best Coen brothers movies, Inside Llewyn Davis, is about a similarly ambitious but much less talented folk musician in New York in this era who can’t catch a break, and this put me in the mood to see that again, too.
A Complete Unknown could introduce a new generation to Dylan’s music.
When Chalamet performed several Dylan songs on Saturday Night Live recently, one of them, “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” made it onto the iTunes charts. Maybe the times really are a-changing – again.