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| Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown. (Photo: Macall Polay. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.) |
Long conflicted on its subject, I was reluctant to see A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s biopic of the young Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet), which traces his development from a barbed-wire folksinger to the sleek provocateur who caused a near-riot at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by assailing a crowd of purists with noisy, abstract blues rock. (“Dylan goes electric” is the legendary summa, as well as the title of the Elijah Wald book on which Mangold and Jay Cocks based their screenplay.) But people I value kept saying the movie was better than they’d expected, and it turns out they were right.
A Complete Unknown is a bit of a mess, but it’s a pulsating mess. For all its cringey melodrama and historical elisions, it rides fast and sound on two rails—one being its portrait of Dylan the genius-creature, the other its sensual capture of his music (performed, mostly live, by the actor-musicians themselves, closely following the originals). At the start, the young Dylan, hitting New York in 1961, makes his legendary pilgrimage to the New Jersey hospital where Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) lies wasting from a degenerative disease. Pete Seeger (Ed Norton), Guthrie’s longtime comrade in musical protest, and Dylan’s first powerful advocate, is also there. Dylan offers his “Song to Woody,” later recorded for his first album. It starts out touching, respectful, small. Then it grows a bit strange, a bit wider-ranging, until Guthrie seems only the most recognizable point in a landscape no one has painted before. It’s the words, yes, but it’s also, maybe more so, what the voice is doing to the words that makes us feel, in this scene, the gravity of greatness—of history made, history depicted. Chalamet reaches the final verse, holds an impossibly long note, and then lays the tune down softly, like a newborn infant or the corpse of someone beloved.
Chalamet is superb. Does it matter that he’s conventionally pretty, which Dylan wasn’t? Not so much. He has done the work. Dylan’s defensive postures, his twitches and smirks, his way of smoking a cigarette or strumming a guitar: everything is right. But this is a melding, not an impersonation, and that shows clearest in Dylan’s singular stare. For the whole duration of that impossible note, Dylan—Chalamet—stares into Guthrie’s eyes. (Guthrie, mostly paralyzed, can do nothing but stare back; but McNairy makes you know that he’s watching, feeling, taking it in.) That stare is at the heart of this movie’s Dylan: after Guthrie and Seeger, it will be leveled at Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). Predatory, vampiric, it covets not bodies but talents, the parts of others that Dylan wishes to suck out for himself. The stare feels true to his role in the musical and social history of the sixties (he must have stared at The Beatles the same way), and to what we’ve always sensed of his creative psychology—his compulsion, no other word for it, to anger and abandon his audiences, the millions upon whom he has held the longest, hardest stare of all.
The stare is also a great visual motif, since Chalamet has the face and the focus to bring it off. Posing may come too easily to him, but here he inhabits a figure whose poses are inextricable from his acts. His Dylan is distant and indecipherable, but he’s hardly empty. His glower mingles avarice with regret, the realization that his nature is to forever consume others in the bonfire of his own brilliance. This is touchingly realized in Dylan’s last scene with Guthrie, which bookends the beginning: the two alone in the same hospital room, not speaking as a harmonica is pocketed like a stolen soul, and a leave-taking occurs whose sadness takes a few fragile seconds to fully land.
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| Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, with Chalamet as Dylan. |
Monica Barbaro is without flaw as Joan Baez, singing nightingale-clear while incarnating the rich sardonicism that Baez has always shown in interviews. It’s Barbaro’s victory to come out on top despite being caught in the biopic’s dumbest compressions, which often force her to stand in the wings looking wounded at Dylan’s latest betrayal. Most stupefying is a passage involving the Cuban Missile Crisis, whose two weeks are telescoped into a single night of dire newscasts, taxis that won’t stop, and other signs of rising hysteria. Outside the Gaslight Café, a panicking Baez hears Dylan down below, singing his angriest, least poetic protest song, “Masters of War,” and goes inside. Spotting her instantly, he sings the song right at her: again, the stare. He’s already challenged her anodyne songwriting, its stink of buttercups and piety; his song calls down Death on its victims. She’s so aroused by Dylan’s effrontery, by his genius, and implicitly by the imminence of Armageddon, that they start kissing passionately in the alley, throwing each other around in the mad dance of movie lovers since before there were movies. Cut to naked bodies in a morning-after bed: they’ve shared their first fuck on the last night of the world.
The romantic plot between Dylan and his first Greenwich Village girlfriend, Sylvie (played by Elle Fanning and based on Suze Rotolo, author of A Freewheelin' Time, one of the best Dylan books) is more drawn-out, but just as hopeless. The two watch the 1942 Bette Davis soap opera Now, Voyager, whose last line (“Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars”) becomes the theme, or metaphor, or running non-joke of their doomed affair; the device falls as flat as you’d expect. But not as flat as Sylvie’s last line to Dylan: “It’s been fun being on the carnival train with you. But I gotta get off.” These scenes barely try to stay alive, to breathe fresh air. Fanning gives them all she’s got, whereas Chalamet has the convenient get-out of portraying Bob Dylan, He Who Gives No Fucks: he can disengage from the scene as Dylan disengages from his lover.
As for the movie’s climax, most of us remain uncertain of what truly happened on July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival. The legend that grew up, unabated, for years was that Dylan’s new, electrified music was met with an onslaught of booing from those who sensed, correctly, that he was abrogating the holy mission of direct social protest. Other parts of the legend are that Dylan’s manager, Albert Goldman, had a rolling fistfight with folklorist and uber-purist Alan Lomax, and that Seeger attempted to cut the PA system with an axe in mid-performance. The movie mostly prints the legend: the boos and fists are here, though Seeger, after attempting to kill the soundboard, decides not to go for a set of nearby axes. Revisionist historians have sought to overcorrect the legend, saying there were actually no boos at all, only calls to heighten Dylan’s vocal in the sound mix. You call your expert, I’ll call mine. But the mélange concocted here, partly truth, partly fiction, is undeniably exciting: you give in to it despite all doubts.
Beyond Chalamet’s performance, most of the magic in A Complete Unknown is purely musical: Dylan singing to Guthrie that first time; Dylan and Baez soaring into harmony their first time onstage; Al Kooper sneaking into a recording session and inventing the organ part that lifts “Like a Rolling Stone” above the earth, despite not knowing how to turn on his instrument. Several Black folk musicians are shown, and while these scenes bring touches of historical realism, they’re only touches, and the movie treats the musicians themselves—not necessarily unfairly, given the vampire at the center—as genius fodder. A Newport performance by the Texas Work Song Group is shown from a great distance, and runs for a few seconds; we’d like more. When Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee follow Dylan in a concert at Riverside Church, he ignores them and tries to pick up Sylvie. His encounter with a (fictional) blind blues singer, Jesse Moffette (played by Big Bill Morganfield, son of Muddy Waters), thrilling for the minute it lasts, exists mostly to show off Dylan’s blues bona fides, and to set up a later encounter at Newport, when Moffette will greet Dylan warmly and dance approvingly to his rock ‘n’ roll.
A Complete Unknown is good at conjuring Greenwich Village during the Folk Revival, its tight streets and squalid apartments, the constant talking and smoking and musicking. (Although in this and other respects, it’s not in a league with Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coens’ tough, uncompromised study of a self-centered asshole folksinger, a user and abuser who is cursed with talent but unredeemed by Dylan’s genius, or even Phil Ochs’s star quality.) Mangold does very well with the actors, taking time to register their changes of expression, the effect things are having on them. No one here is ever less than enjoyable. Albert Goldman is played by Don Fogler, who stood out as Francis Coppola in the phony, headachey Paramount+ series The Offer (about the making of The Godfather). Charlie Tahan, the aspiring white-trash son of Netflix’s Ozark, does nicely as Al Kooper. Ed Norton’s Pete Seeger is convincingly decent, generous, and brave, but the character is written too narrowly, as a schoolmarm who not only urges Dylan to stick with protest lyrics but also straightens up his hotel room and warns him to be careful on that motorcycle—as if Seeger needed to be an overbearing fusspot for Dylan’s metamorphosis to be dramatically motivated.
A number of small touches in A Complete Unknown clearly weren’t staged or planned, but were simply allowed to happen. One that I’ll remember for a while is the woman in the front row at Newport ’64, dancing in her folding chair as Dylan performs. Her arms and legs swivel gently in a private boogie, expressing simple pleasure in being there. She stands in, or sits in, for all of us in all of the audiences, we who are worlds away from the personal treacheries that feed great art and great artists; who simply listen, look, and are transformed by the creative products of others’ dramas and upheavals. Catching that feeling again and again, A Complete Unknown is finally only partly about the pain inflicted by genius on a few; it’s also about the exhilaration it confers on the rest of us.
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