Review: A Complete Unknown (2024)
Enjoyable Dylan biopic earns credibility by having its stars do the singing
A Complete Unknown (2024)
Directed by James Mangold
Co-written by Mangold and Jay Cocks
As a kid in the 1960s, I was raised on Broadway soundtracks, annual Firestone Christmas compilation LPs, The Beach Boys and Peter, Paul and Mary (my older brother’s albums) and the Beatles (my older sister’s). By the time I was a high school student I was teaching myself guitar, figuring out chord charts for songs by James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel, and — because I lived in Texas — more obscure figures like David Bromberg, Joe Ely, Jerry Jeff Walker, B.W. Stevenson, and Townes Van Zandt. Houston, in particular, had a thriving music scene in the late 60s and early 70s, and though I never went to one of the Montrose District clubs where Van Zandt and Ely and Bromberg played, I absorbed their songwriting through Houston’s Pacifica radio station.
It wasn’t until I, along with two other recently graduated 18-year-olds, were driven to freshman orientation on a hot July day by one of our mothers, that I really woke up to the music of Bob Dylan. I had been aware of him as the writer of some of those Peter, Paul and Mary tracks like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a song I used to teach myself finger-picking.
But I never really listened until we were eating pizza in a restaurant near campus, and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” began playing on the stereo. Somehow it sounded like the perfect anthem for our nascent freedom, a blessing on my newly independent life.
So the first record I bought after moving in to my dorm was “Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume 2,” which had “Stuck Inside of Mobile” and a hell of a lot of other great stuff from Dylan’s catalog from 1964 to 1968. I was already writing my own songs, many of which were imitations of Dylan, or the other songwriters I had soaked up.
I was just a little bit too young to grasp the significance of the transition from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Like a Rolling Stone.” This shift by Dylan, from modern folk music to blues-infused rock played on electric instruments, showed not only Dylan’s artistic courage, but constituted a brilliant pivot and rebranding. It pointed the way into the future for pop music by white musicians.
That transition, and the resistance to it by the folk music crowd, is the subject of the new feature film about Dylan’s rise in pop music, “A Complete Unknown.” Based on the book “Dylan Goes Electric” by Elijah Wald, it depicts his 1961 arrival in New York, his encounters with Woody Guthrie, his rise in the folk music scene shepherded by Pete Seeger, his early affairs with Suze Rotolo (the girl clinging to his arm on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”) and Joan Baez, and his characteristic rebellious streak.
In the first sequence, Dylan makes a pilgrimage to muse and ur-influence Woody Guthrie, who was hospitalized for the last decade of his life with Huntington’s Disease, a progressive neurological disorder. There the young Dylan receives Guthrie’s blessing and meets Pete Seeger. Seeger was a folk singer and comrade of Guthrie, not only in the music scene but in the movement — it didn’t really have a name — of post-WWII left-leaning artists, the kind who were investigated by the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Seeger introduces Dylan to the Greenwich Village folk scene, and the movie is off and running.
Probably the most impressive thing about this movie is that all of the actors in the major roles — Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, Edward Norton as Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Baez, and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash — sang and played the songs you hear in the film. And the songs — Chalamet is heard in over three dozen — sound great. Although he has become one of those actors whom you can’t forget you’re watching no matter how hard he tries to disappear into his character, he does a very believable Dylan. His consistency in the way he performs Dylan’s familiar vocal whine, the way it never becomes a parody of Dylan, is admirable.
In a way, the performance by Barbaro as Joan Baez is even steadier. Once you get past the fact that she doesn’t resemble Baez very closely, she does an excellent job as the dignified singer who could stand in awe of Dylan’s songwriting ability despite recognizing early on that Dylan — a mercurial personality from the start — is, as she says, “kind of an asshole.” Elle Fanning, as Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s early girlfriend who can be seen with him on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” has even more screen time in “A Complete Unknown.” (In the film the character is called “Sylvie.” According to this Mashable interview, Dylan himself gave notes to director Mangold during preproduction and asked that the character’s name be changed.) Fanning is a brilliant actor who, unlike Chalamet, really can submerge her identity into a character, and the camera loves her. In a movie about singers, this nonsinging role really stands out. It makes me want to see more of her filmography.
One important musical group in the early 1960s was Peter, Paul and Mary, probably more important than Joan Baez in popularizing Dylan’s music to the folk and civil rights crowd. (They famously sang at the 1963 March on Washington.) Their performances of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” sold a lot of records before Dylan became famous1. He acknowledged this debt by writing a beat poetry tribute as liner notes on their 1963 album “In the Wind.” But in the film, they are merely and literally just part of the background standing offstage or at a crowded party, smiling at Dylan while he sings.
All through the late 50s and early 60s, the attraction of young white people to folk music and its identification with anti-war and anti-racist sentiments had made it more than a genre of music. To most of its listeners, and to its champions — Seeger, archivist and producer Alan Lomax, and others — it was a movement. When rock music started to tear off folk music listeners, it was seen by this movement as a threat and betrayal.
The film uses Dylan’s annual performances at the Newport Folk Festival to illustrate the evolution of Dylan’s music during the years from 1962 to 1965 and to dramatize this clash between folk and rock. Exaggerating this conflict — which is what movies do — “A Complete Unknown” shows the distress among the festival’s managers, including Seeger, who have booked Dylan as the festival’s closing act but are uneasy about his new electric sound. (They don’t seem to have the same ambivalence about the presence of electric guitars and drums in Johnny Cash’s act.) When Dylan starts playing, the crowd boos and starts throwing things, and Lomax and Seeger panic.2 But by the time Dylan launches into “Like a Rolling Stone,” the crowd is at least starting to be converted, and the moment is triumphal. You’ll sing the song to yourself on the way home.
But Dylan really was an asshole. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” is a great song — but the lyrics are, as many of Dylan’s songs would be for years to come, brutal. It starts off sounding like a fond, almost no-fault farewell, but by the end he’s singing:
I ain’t saying you treated me unkind;
You could have done better, but I don’t mind.
You just sorta wasted my precious time.
And this theme is echoed over and over again in Dylan’s songs from the era. From “It Ain’t Me, Babe:”
Go 'way from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed
I'm not the one you want, babe
I'm not the one you need
From “Like a Rolling Stone:”
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody who was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal
It’s not just “goodbye,” it’s “goodbye and fuck you, you bloody parasite.”
Who says this to someone who once loved them? Only someone very angry. And maybe Dylan had cause to be angry — at commerical or conscience-driven pressures, at his own ambition, at some still-to-be-revealed trauma. But his rage at women is very clearly misdirected. If the truth were to be known — an impossible task, at this point — those women would probably have greater cause to resent him.
Christ, what an asshole. But what fabulous songs.
It’s at this moment that the film takes time to depict consternation on the face of Pete Seeger’s wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune) as she watches these events unfold from backstage. Seen early in the film welcoming a 19-year-old Dylan into the Seeger household, Toshi is a motherly figure, but the choice of Mangold to spend several shots depicting her distress during this concert scene suggests a larger role that ended up on the cutting room floor.