A Complete Unknown (2024)
Read the film’s title. That’s the point.
“I never knew he was such a big deal…”
Those were my 18-year-old niece’s first words after watching A Complete Unknown yesterday. She’s heard me talk about Bob Dylan often, only to have her dad (my brother-in-law) deride me each time. It’s okay. I’ve been a Dylan fan since the release of Blood on the Tracks in 1975, so I’ve heard all the Dylan jokes. I’ve even told a few.
I knew Timothée Chalamet was the only reason my nieces (ages 18 and 16) would want to see A Complete Unknown. That same reason, no doubt, will draw scores of young people into theaters to see the picture chronicling Dylan’s life from his 1961 arrival in New York City to his controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. If you don’t know why Dylan’s three-song set stirred things up, see the movie. Then you’ll realize, like my niece, why it was such a big deal.
By this time, everyone who’s heard about the movie knows that:
Chalamet does his own singing as well as guitar and harmonica playing. (I have heard that Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash also do their own singing and playing.)
Director James Mangold previously directed another film about a popular singer, Walk the Line (2005), with Joaquin Phoenix playing Johnny Cash, a movie many called a paint-by-numbers biopic.
The first statement is enormously admirable, regardless of how much (or little) musical study the actors had undertaken before the cameras rolled. The second statement constitutes an attitude of “I’ve seen this formula before.” The group embracing the first won’t necessarily pay much attention to the second, and the latter group may not be impressed by the first. But there’s more to the divergence of responses than that.
Even conceding the excellent performances, many critics can’t get past the film's “cookie-cutter” progression, i.e., it’s told linearly. (If you’d like to see the same story in a less-linear fashion, I invite you to check out Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home.) Some of the same writers also complain that we never get any depth from the characters, especially Dylan.
I would ask those critics, “Have you been paying attention for the last 60 years?” Dylan is difficult to pin down on anything, any aspect of his lifestyle, beliefs, worldview, or even what he had for breakfast. The man is totally unpredictable.
Read the film’s title. That’s the point.
Dylan has created his own universe, an origin story constantly morphing into something else. He’s been a folk singer, protest singer, rock star, reclusive poet, born-again Christian, rock star again, meandering troubadour, crooner, bluesman, and probably a dozen more I haven’t named. And I’m not even talking about the quality and style of his lyrics, his fashion sense, or a closet of other things. Bottom line: Dylan is never going to fit into your idea of what or who you think he is.
Here’s another thought: What mystifies people about Dylan isn’t so much him as it is us. How do we react to someone like him? Why do we want to know so much about him? Is it because we want the secret of his success so we can move from where we are to the place where he is? Just when we think we’re getting close, he vanishes or changes into something else. That frustration makes us think that success (whatever that means to us) is always elusive, always just out of reach. When we seek answers from Dylan, we’re really seeking answers to who we are. We could explore that for several more paragraphs, but I’m leaving it there for now.
Let’s get back to the issue of other characters’ lack of depth, but before we do that, think about how many supporting players we have in the film:
Sylvie Russo (renamed for Suze Rotolo)
Pete Seeger
Joan Baez
Johnny Cash
Woody Guthrie
Albert Grossman
Alan Lomax
Harold Leventhal
Bobby Neuwirth
Al Kooper
Dave van Ronk
Brownie McGhee
Toshi Seeger
John Hammond
Jimmy Dean
Tom Wilson
Peter Yarrow
Theodore Bikel
Mike Bloomfield
These real-life characters (and I didn’t list them all) appear in a 2+ hour film. Good luck trying to work in some depth, even limiting yourself to Russo, Seeger, Baez, Guthrie, and Grossman. You’d need at least a miniseries for that. Yes, the film is loaded with characters, but so are many of Dylan’s songs. You can find at least ten personalities in Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues” and a dozen slipping in and out of “Desolation Row,” songs that are six and eleven minutes long, respectively. I’ve never heard anyone complain about the lack of character development in those songs.1
Does the film have problems? Yes. It lingers too long on Sylvie (Elle Fanning) and her attachment to Dylan. Without giving away spoilers, we see her watching Dylan perform on two different occasions, and Mangold seems determined to make absolutely sure we see her emotional turmoil. Other parts seem rushed, causing people to complain that the movie lacks depth of character, but with so many people moving in and out of Dylan’s life, it’s impossible to give them the time they deserve. Again, you can only do so much with a 141-minute movie. But if you want to know more, read Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (2015) by Elijah Wald.
But let’s go a little deeper still. When you’re a complete unknown, a person with no past (especially pre-internet), you can be whoever you want to be. The only information people have about you is what you tell them. They can believe you worked in a carnival or not, but that’s the story you tell them. How are they going to know otherwise? Through what you say and do. In this case, most of what you say is through your songs. People heard Bob Dylan’s music, and it resonated with them. Everything he wanted to say was right there in the music. If you pressed him further, he didn’t shut down as much as he toyed with you and played with your mind. You advance, he withdraws. When the people in power (and the audiences) wanted him to move in a certain direction (or stay in the one he was in), he took a different path. Newport could have ended his career, but it didn’t. He took chances. He still does, and he’s still calling the shots.
Even if you don’t like his music, you must admire Dylan. While we’d like to call the shots in our lives and careers, few of us can do it, at least on his level. A Complete Unknown shows us one man who did (and continues to) call the shots, but we also see that such actions come at a price, and sometimes collateral damage is part of the price.
But we also see enormous talent. And, lest we forget, the right things happened for Dylan at the right time. Consider Connie Converse, another singer with tremendous gifts who didn’t make it big. Arriving in New York several years before Dylan, Converse probably never played for more than a handful of people, yet recently rediscovered recordings have captivated scores of listeners and fans she never could have imagined. (Converse’s tremendous story is the subject of the 2023 book To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse by Howard Fishman.)
And for Dylan, the story isn’t over. At 83, he still performs regularly and releases new material.
As for the film itself, yes, it is formulaic, but it also looks (mostly) authentic, is superbly acted, contains great music, and - like any good biographical film - leaves you wanting to know more. I hope I have left you wanting to see it. And maybe, like my niece, you’ll realize that Dylan is a big deal. So is this movie.
Yes, I understand that songs and biopics work differently, and comparisons are somewhat unfair. But A Complete Unknown gives us enough information about the people we need to know to focus on how Dylan responds to them and how they respond to him. If you want to know more, read Dylan Goes Electric.