A Complete Unknown may be fictionalised but it gets the key parts right.
What is biography for? Especially the biopic, in which years and people and facts must be compressed into a mass-audience-friendly, sub-three-hour format. And what does biography do with an artist as immortal, inimitable and unwilling as Bob Dylan? No filmmaker understood the Dylan conundrum as well as Todd Haynes whose film I’m Not There saw multiple actors depicting fictionalised shades of a possible Dylan – the runaway, the liar, the artist, the lover, the evasive interviewee, the ever-evolving musician, the strung-out touring artist – and saw Cate Blanchett emerge as the greatest Dylan mimic of all time.
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown plays it straight. Sort of. Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, Mangold’s biopic hones in on Dylan’s irresistible origin story: from anonymous to superstar in just a few years. Hollywood fodder in the best sense: the film is a handsome version of Dylan’s ascent with all its romantic possibilities. Mangold wastes no time and drops us into the story as Dylan arrives in the Greenwich village of 1961 and ends the film just after the Newport Folk Festival 1965 where Dylan blew a hole in the folk-legend cage that was clamping down around him by performing an electric set, showing his mentors and fans alike that he did not care to be boxed in.
Chalamet’s Dylan-stare is spooky (for a real-life version of it, see this amusing and insightful clip from a BBC doco on Dylan from 1986). When he’s gazing at Monica Barbaro’s barefoot Joan Baez singing her vibrato-loaded folk tunes on stage at Newport you can see anger and desire, boredom and calculation churning in his eyeballs. Like Chalamet embodied the unhinged joy of Wonka, so he embodies the scruffy, potent boy-rebel that was early Dylan, harmonica and all.
The harmonica playing is excellent. Chalamet’s singing – while not Dylan – is a kind of Dylan. Dylan always sounded old even when he was young: the gravel that was to come was always there, a fine sand, right underneath. Chalamet doesn’t have the sand but he is decent on the guitar, and he has the smile, the hair, and the sunglasses; the limbs, the long fingernails, and the hands that splay while fingers pinch a cigarette and he rubs his weary nicotine-stained mouth with his thumb. He mostly wrangles that iconic intonation that seems to fly away and land heavily at the same time. Chalamet’s performance is some kind of magic and is a huge part of why A Complete Unknown is a compelling, watchable, if not honeyed version of Bob Dylan’s legendary path from penniless nobody into full-blown phenomenon.
But what makes A Complete Unknown sing are the performances that surround Chalamet. Daniel Fogler’s turn as wily music manager Albert Grossman skates too close to stereotype at first – the executive with comedic value in an expensive suit while his latest find more closely resembles New York’s homeless than its future hero – but he soon settles into the role of trying to keep up with his latest goldmine.
Ed Norton’s Pete Seegar is perfection: Norton captures the goodness, the earnestness of the folk-musician-activist and nurturer of Dylan’s early ambitions. When Dylan ignores the pleas of Seegar, and his fellow white-haired board members of the Newport Folk Festival, and plugs in, Norton’s watery-eyed expression is the same brand of kindly heartbreak you see in documentaries of the real Seegar, the one who wanted to pull the cables out to stop Dylan from producing what he heard as a terrible noise. (In the film, Seegar’s wife steps in and stops him. A fictional detail that could be seen as an attempt to insert a strong female character in a film mostly dominated by men.)
Monica Bartolo is a pithy Joan Baez. As Chalamet’s renditions are not Dylan, Barbaro’s aren’t Baez but she captures the essence, and the look, with breathtaking talent. Particularly for an actor who did not sing or play guitar when she landed the role. Bartolo’s voice carries a Baez-like vibrato and her body and speaking voice are charged with Baez mannerisms; “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” is delivered with a satisfying, Baez-esque tone (seriousness on top, humour underneath).
Mangold’s success with A Complete Unknown is his ability to deal in broad brushstrokes. It is tedious to point out smudgings of the truth, especially in a Hollywood biopic, but time is toyed with and there is mythmaking upon mythmaking at work. Which doesn’t make it bad. It makes it what it is: a fictionalisation of Dylan’s formative years.
Where the film takes its greatest license is with the character of Sylvie, played by Elle Fanning. Sylvie, for all intents and purposes, is Suzy Rotolo, who was Dylan’s girlfriend between 1961 and 1964 – she’s the one with him on the cover of the 1963 Freewheelin’ album. Dylan credits Rotolo’s artistic interests and involvement in activist organisations with influencing the political direction, and style, of his songwriting that was so celebrated, and that so captivated his first followers. He is on record saying he regrets the song Ballad in Plain D, which is unmistakably vicious – a revenge song about his break up with Rotolo and his feelings about her family (the film depicts Rotolo’s sister, but not mother, who Dylan reportedly did not get along with on account of her not enjoying the way he treated her daughter). It was Dylan himself who requested that Suzy’s real name not be used in the film.
Fanning’s Sylvie is the romantic anchor of the story. The betrayed girlfriend upon which aspects of Dylan’s more magnetic and deceitful nature plays out. His affair with Baez is famous. Rotolo’s hurt over it, famous, too. The film skips over the abortion of Rotolo’s pregnancy to Dylan and at one point seems to direct the audience to make an unnecessary comparison between Dylan’s artistic talent and her own when, at a party, she is heard talking about her painting against a shot of an unremarkable portrait.
Instead of being a particularly three-dimensional character, Sylvie is symbolic: a domestic cocoon that Chalamet’s Dylan both exploits and rebels against. When Sylvie’s eyes fill with tears as she’s watching Dylan and Baez play ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ she, in a way, stands in for all Dylan fans. The ones desperate to know him, get close to him – an impossibility unless you were equally talented, could meet him on his own stage, and even then, as Baez knows, that wasn’t a certainty either.
A Complete Unknown gives the masses what they want. The Dylan – so young – that pours out miraculous song after miraculous song; the Dylan that was stressed, even endangered, by the fame that grew around him; the Dylan that rides a motorbike like he’s riding a dragon; the Dylan that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be pinned down. A Dylan that was hungry to evolve, experiment, “tread mud on the carpet” as Boyd Holbrook’s scene-stealing Johnny Cash encourages.
While watching A Complete Unknown, Miranda July’s recent novel All Fours sprang to mind. The novel (autofiction, meaning the story draws from July’s real life) documents a semi-famous female artist’s struggle to evolve. It takes a book to figure out how and why she needs to do this. July’s artist labours over her needs, tries to balance those with her family’s needs of her and her of them; works hard to bring her partner into the process. It’s messy and takes time and money to arrive at a place of change.
Evolution has always been part of Dylan’s enigma and his attractiveness. Dylan’s magic in part is his dogged commitment to his art above fame, his ability to emerge over and over again. While Miranda July openly agonises her way into a new phase, Bob Dylan’s career is marked by a series of artistic and personal shifts. Who’s to know what struggles were involved each time – the songs suggest change wasn’t easy – but the fact is, Dylan consistently puts himself first. He’s never been significantly judged for that in the way you can imagine a woman might be.
Which is not to say that A Complete Unknown doesn’t explore the cost of Dylan’s decisions. Sylvie is hurt. Pete Seegar is hurt. Fans are hurt. Dylan is hurt. Mangold hammers the message of Dylan’s single-mindedness home in the final scene in which Dylan pays what looks like a last visit to his hero and inspiration, folk legend Woody Guthrie who is in hospital wasting away with Huntington’s disease. Dylan sits on the windowsill, distractedly blowing Guthrie’s tune ‘Dusty Old Dust (So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yah)’ in the harmonica that Woody had earlier gifted him (another fictional detail). The song is a tad on the nose; it plays over the opening credits, too – a framing device if ever there was one. When he’s finished playing, Dylan gets up, stares meaningfully into Guthrie’s eyes, hand resting on the sick man’s head, and leaves.
The last we see of Dylan is him roaring away on his motorbike leaving Guthrie to stare after him out the window. It’s a moving scene, it does its job, but it is laid on pretty thick (especially Guthrie peering out the window – an image that veers toward cliché). There’s sadness, and respect, as much as there is a coldness, a need to cut and run just like the men who “come with the dust and are gone with the wind” in Dylan’s ‘Song to Woody’ (which Chalamet performs very well). The drifting troubadour of folk legend is a particularly masculine stereotype and it is made very clear – because of Mangold’s placement of it in the film – that Dylan extracted a path to some semblance of artistic freedom because of that example. Not a new observation. But with July still resonating in my head, the film did make me see that female artists don’t have such a well-embedded role model (until All Fours, perhaps, which is now spawning something of a revolution).
What everyone wants to know of great artists is how. Where does the talent come from? The ideas? “They ask me where the songs come from. But what they really mean is why don’t they come to them,” says Chalamet’s Dylan. It’s the perfect response to a question that has always plagued artists. Thankfully, A Complete Unknown doesn’t try to answer that question by unraveling Dylan, by poking into the vague family years in Minnesota, or by trying to expose any interior artistic process. Instead we look at Dylan the way he’s always been looked at: as someone who came out of nowhere and had the talent, the guts, the work ethic, the arrogance, and the wisdom not to play the game of pleasing the crowd.
Dylan is indisputably one of the greatest chroniclers of our times. Predictably unpredictable, he is the white whale, he is Ahab and he’s Ishmael. Existing Dylan fans won’t find anything new in A Complete Unknown and purists will find plenty of discrepancies to quibble with. But for those not so familiar or concerned with biography-pure, Chalamet’s Dylan is beautiful, entertaining and will surely turn a whole new generation of fans onto the music, just like Guthrie did for Dylan, which is the most important part after all, eh Bob.
A Complete Unknown is now playing in cinemas across Aotearoa.