As impossible a task as doubling one of the 20th century’s most distinctive figures might be, Timothée Chalamet largely measures up to it in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which follows Bob Dylan from his arrival on the Greenwich Village folk scene in 1961 to his electrified performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. But there was one moment when I had to stifle a laugh. It’s when we get our first look at the 1965 Dylan, curly hair piled atop his head and a permanent sneer etched beneath his sunglasses, as he strides past his old folkie haunts, hops on his motorcycle, and roars off down MacDougal Street. After nearly two hours in the company of Dylan the sensitive balladeer, the abrupt leap into his sullen rock-star persona is a jarring one, and for the first time, Chalamet feels less like his character and more like the third-place finisher in a Bob Dylan look-alike contest, one who’s got the wardrobe down but can’t muster the mystique. But before the guffaw had left my throat, I realized something: He’s not meant to be pulling it off. We’re not buying this new version of Dylan, and neither is Dylan.
Written by Mangold and Jay Cocks and based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric, A Complete Unknown is a fine movie about Bob Dylan, the self-mythologizing son of a Minnesota mining town who took the world of folk music by storm, then turned his back on the genre he played a key role in popularizing. But it’s a better movie about the people who watched him do it, the die-hard believers who saw him as their greatest hope, then their greatest adversary.
After hitching a ride to New York City, the 19-year-old immediately makes a pilgrimage to the bedside of Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), only to find that his musical idol has been rendered mute by illness. After Bob gushes that Woody’s recordings “struck me down to the ground,” Woody points at Bob’s acoustic guitar, and Bob plays him a song: “Song to Woody,” a tribute that both acknowledges Guthrie’s influence and drafts ever so slightly off his name recognition. (It’s his “Tim McGraw.”) Woody listens attentively to this rumpled teenager with a reedy voice, holding notes until his voice begins to crack, and although McNairy’s face barely moves, you can sense the emotions roiling beneath the surface. He’s touched by the homage, the confirmation that his legend has outlived his ability to sing or play, stunned by the raw but remarkable talent already on display. And he’s angry, furious that this kid who’s practically fresh off the bus can do what he cannot, sensing the potential that this up-and-comer has to do even more. When Bob finishes his song, Woody doesn’t clap or smile; he pounds the nightstand next to his bed, so hard you can hear its rattle echo around the empty hospital room.
Bob barely acknowledges the other person in the room: Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), the folk singer and ambassador who had already, at that point, released more than two dozen albums. Pete thinks that Bob might not recognize him, but it’s worse: He does, and he doesn’t care. After praising Guthrie’s songs to the rafters, Bob can muster only a polite “I like yours too, Pete.” Nonetheless, Pete offers to take in the stray, and Bob spends the night at his house, waking up early to work on the song that will become “Girl From the North Country.” As Bob is lost in his own world, oblivious to the Seeger children noisily eating breakfast a few feet away, Pete stands, unobserved, behind him, watching over his shoulder for a long, uninterrupted beat. A more conventional biopic would be centered on the moment of creation, but Mangold wants us to witness it without feeling as if we’re a part of it. Pete seems to sense that he’s at the birth of something earthshaking, but he also knows, like Woody, that whatever is coming into being in front of his eyes is something he can’t yet understand, and that’s both thrilling and terrifying.
Soon, of course, many more people are watching Bob. From the moment he steps onstage at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, he draws the eyes of every person in the room, even when he’s just futzing with the microphone and cracking wise about how his songs flopped in East Orange, New Jersey. Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), the impresario who will shortly become Dylan’s manager, locks onto him like a dog who’s just caught the scent of a freshly cooked steak, and so, on her way out the door, does Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), a fast-rising star who instantly realizes that her competition has arrived. Baez is a knockout with a clear, fluid soprano, and by the end of the next year, she’ll be on the cover of Time. But Bob has something she doesn’t, a charisma that draws people to him, wrapped around a determination to hold them at arm’s length.
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When we first see Pete Seeger onstage in A Complete Unknown, he’s guiding a packed theater through the harmonies for “Wimoweh,” a South African composition that later formed the basis for “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” With his banjo slung over his shoulder, he gestures like a conductor, playing sections of the audience against each other until they’re a unified choir, and only then joining in himself. But where Pete teaches audiences to sing, Bob just wants them to watch him do it. Although the real Dylan was, at least for a time, immersed in the collaborative spirit of the American folk movement, the movie’s Bob is a singularity, allowing others to accompany him only if they can match his pace. When Grossman books Bob and Joan on a joint tour, she’s the one who insists they give the people what they paid for, while Bob would sooner stumble offstage mumbling something about a broken guitar than play one note of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” (Although there are scenes in which Dylan is clearly under the influence of something or other, the movie is strangely circumspect about his substance abuse, perhaps because when he talked about kicking a heroin habit in the mid-1960s, biographers weren’t sure if it was an admission or yet another piece of his self-created myth.)
Bob and Joan become lovers along the way, on and off, as he pursues relationships with other women, especially the young painter Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a fictionalized stand-in for Dylan’s longtime girlfriend Suze Rotolo. But their romance ends for good after Bob turns up on her doorstep late one night at the Chelsea Hotel. She welcomes him in and they sleep together, but she’s awoken in the early hours by the sound of him softly strumming, working out the lyrics to “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” His selfishness annoys her, but what sets her off is the suspicion that sex was just a pretext for his real goal. “Why did you come here?” she spits. “To make me watch you write?” Bad enough that he’s flaunting the talent that she’ll never have, the ability to pull songs from the ether with no apparent effort. (After an earlier tryst, he casually insults Joan’s songs by informing her that she tries too hard.) But to do it in her room, on her guitar, is more than she can stand.
The only time we see Bob give a fellow performer his full attention is when he comes face-to-face with an elderly Black bluesman named Jesse Moffett, played by Big Bill Morganfield, the son of blues legend Muddy Waters. The old man is a last-minute replacement for Bob himself, filling in as the guest on Pete’s public-TV show because Bob is too busy recording his new album. But Bob shows up anyway, unannounced. Jesse is immediately worried he’ll be bumped, but Bob, for once, knows he’s got something to learn, trying to puzzle out an odd guitar tuning that they don’t teach at Newport’s workshops. “How close were you watching me?” Jesse asks when Pete, sensing an opportunity to blend the music’s past and future, asks them to jam together. “I was watching real close,” Bob responds. “I got these special binoculars, and they see right into your soul.” It’s not the first time Bob has said something like that—flattering, self-aggrandizing, more than a little full of shit—but it’s the first time he’s meant it. When they play together, you can see him studying every gesture. It’s like the moment in Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue when Joni Mitchell plays “Coyote” for the first time and Dylan just settles in behind her on rhythm guitar, realizing that the greatest contribution he can make is to just play along.
By the time Bob makes it to Newport in 1965, it feels as if the whole world’s eyes are on him. Dylan wasn’t the first or only person to play an electric guitar on the Folk Festival’s stage that weekend, and, according to Wald’s book, the issue may have been less what he played than how loudly he played it, cranking up the volume so high that all that was audible was a wash of distortion. But by that point in A Complete Unknown, what Dylan sounds like is less important than how others hear him. Mangold cuts to Joan, to Pete, to Sylvie, to an apoplectic Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) and a tickled Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), and to the audience, which howls at Dylan’s new songs and howls louder when he leaves the stage after only three of them. Early on, when he’s still studying the stardom he has yet to achieve, Bob decides: “You can be beautiful or you can be ugly, but you can’t be plain. You gotta be something people can’t stop looking at.” That crowd might hate him, but it can’t turn away.
On their first date, Bob and Sylvie take in a matinee of Now, Voyager, and as they dissect it at a diner afterward, Sylvie expresses her relief that Bette Davis’ repressed character finally managed to find herself. “She didn’t find herself,” Bob responds. “She just made herself into something different … what she wanted to be in that moment.” The music biopic’s job is to lay bare the truth of its subject, to reduce the ineffability of creation and the chaos of life to a manageable narrative. But A Complete Unknown gives up before it starts. Mangold is a respected craftsman with two Oscar nominations to his name, but he’s not a great artist, and he seems to know it. This isn’t an empathetic portrait of a tempestuous genius but a movie about what it’s like to stand next to one, to pass through the same circles, learn the same things, even play the same instrument, and yet to never be able to pinpoint what separates you from them. “Everyone asks where the songs come from,” Bob tells Sylvie, “but when you watch their faces, they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why they didn’t come to them.” At the end of A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan revs his motorcycle and speeds off down the road, receding into the distance as the screen cuts to black. He’s gotten away from us again.
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