A Complete Unknown Celebrates the Dazzling Unknowability of Bob Dylan: Man, Legend, Jerk
The Bob Dylan of James Mangold’s extraordinary anti-biopic A Complete Unknown—who may or may not be an accurate version of the real Bob Dylan—is a jerk. He blows into New York in 1961, at age 19, having hitched a ride in a station wagon with just a rucksack and guitar in tow. He wastes not a minute looking for his idol, Woody Guthrie. “I want to meet Woody,” he says. “Maybe catch a spark.” He finds Guthrie not in New York but in a New Jersey hospital, suffering from Huntington’s disease, wasting away and unable to speak. The young visitor is polite and deferential—but he still wants his spark. He also meets Guthrie’s close friend, the revered, humble folk singer Pete Seeger, who brings this reedy, awkward kid home with him when he realizes he has nowhere to sleep. (The youngster nearly tromps into the family’s modest, welcoming house without removing his shoes.) Not long after, young Bob encounters the already-getting-famous Joan Baez, and begins, at least semi-consciously, hitching his wobbly little wagon to her star. Then he meets an intelligent folk enthusiast named Sylvie Russo and charms his way into her bed. He’ll go on to treat both women badly. Meanwhile, people hear him sing—if you can call what he does singing, a kind of disruptive nasal sine wave that seems to open a crack in the earth—and he begins to get everything he wished for when he left the kid formerly known as Robert Zimmerman behind in Hibbing, Minn.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]That’s a lot for a movie to hold, but it’s not even half of what happens in A Complete Unknown, a scrappy, semi-unflattering patchwork portrait that serves its subject better than any fawning hagiography could. The movie covers Dylan’s early years in New York; it was drawn from Elijah Wald’s 2015 Dylan Goes Electric!, a book Dylan himself recently praised in one of his delightfully random shooting-star Tweets. The movie’s script is by Jay Cocks (one of Martin Scorsese’s frequent collaborators, as well as a former TIME film critic), and reportedly, Dylan himself went through the screenplay line-by-line. Whether that’s myth or truth doesn’t really matter: There’s something about A Complete Unknown that pushes against traditional Dylan worship and cuts a path toward something far more beautiful, flawed, and human. In my brief era as a baby rock critic, circa the late 1980s, I remember going to parties and standing in a circle of guys, always guys, who would discuss the attributes of various Dylan bootlegs in hushed, somber tones. I loved Bob Dylan, as I will until the minute my heart stops beating. But as well-intentioned as this guy-cataloging of Dylan’s work might have been, it always felt to me like strip-mining, an attempt to edit a mystery down to manageable size. And who wants a manageable mystery?
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The Dylan of Mangold’s film, played by Timothée Chalamet, is in no way manageable; and like the real Dylan, in public he’s sometimes surly and unpleasant. In Mangold’s hands, this is thrilling, not off-putting. Chalamet’s Dylan appears in Greenwich Village like a scruffy, unlikely vision of the future, a skinny guy in a drab green jacket and tattered muffler. He speaks in a stammering stream, but his thoughts only seem meandering: there’s something disarmingly direct and determined about him. This is a guy who clearly wants a persona, but how do you get one? That’s something he’s still trying to figure out.
When he visits Guthrie in that hospital in New Jersey, Woody’s devoted friend Seeger is there, too, and as the newcomer meets their unspoken challenge by singing “Song for Woody” for them, both men—even Guthrie, in his weakened state—see there’s something special about him. Guthrie is played by Scoot McNairy: he’s wiry and irascible, peering angrily from the dim depths of his hospital bed, clearly frustrated by his inability to communicate verbally. Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, his face as open as a sunflower. He’s hokey, folksy, and endearing; he’s also one of the people who made Dylan happen, and Norton, in this wonderful performance, captures that spirit of casual generosity.
Then Dylan starts playing in the small village folk clubs, sometimes opening for bigger, better-known performers. That’s how he meets Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro, in a fantastic, astute performance. Baez, in a woolly schoolgirl plaid dress and cute little pumps, is chilling the marrow of every person in the house with a shivery, willowy version of “House of the Rising Sun.” Afterward, Dylan delivers his impish verdict: “She’s pretty. Sings pretty. Maybe a little too pretty. Hmmph.” This is how a guy both praises a woman and cuts her down to size; the Dylan of A Complete Unknown does this a lot. See? Jerk.
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Right around this time, Dylan also meets a smart and dewy-beautiful young student and artist, someone who knows just as much about traditional American folk music as he does. Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, Dylan’s early and most influential girlfriend. (This character’s real-life counterpart is Suze Rotolo, who died in 2011, leaving behind a glorious 2008 memoir and cultural history, A Freewheelin’ Time. Reportedly, Dylan didn’t want Rotolo’s real name used in the movie, as a way of respecting her privacy even after death.) He seduces her by offering her a peanut, claiming, of course falsely, that he survived on a steady diet of them while traveling with a carnival. Later, after the two watch the great Bette Davis film Now, Voyager, he lights two cigarettes in his mouth at once, a la Paul Henreid: he can charm as well as bamboozle.
Sylvie is no one’s fool, but she falls hard for this guy, trusting him even when he shouldn’t. His star rises as hers merely shines steady. As Fanning plays Sylvie, she’s as self-possessed as a summer breeze. No wonder Dylan attempts to return to her, even after he betrays her. Yet Sylvie walks away from him when she needs to, a woman who finds herself on the wrong side of an artist. That’s no place anyone would want to live.
Somewhere in there, Dylan writes “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a rumpled bed, wearing only his underpants. Genius lives in the margins, and A Complete Unknown gets that. I’ve heard some criticism that the movie relegates the women in Dylan’s life to the margins, but I’d argue that they’re the movie’s core: they’re more interesting than he is because unlike him, they live in the real world. He’s so busy living through his art—which, admittedly, turned out to be pretty great—that there’s almost no man there. This is the genius of Chalamet’s performance. He doesn’t so much grab at the center of the film as melt right into it. It’s true that he captures the cadence of Dylan’s speech perfectly, and he also does his own singing—his versions of these familiar songs are like shimmering mirages of the originals, seductive in their own right. But let’s face it: Dylan is easy to impersonate, so much so that when we hear the real Bob Dylan, it’s almost as if he’s impersonating himself. (This may also be the key to the almost scientifically provable fact that as many times as the real Dylan has sung his own songs across decades of touring, he has never performed any of them the same way twice.) Chalamet gets at something more elusive than mere impersonation. As Dylan, there are moments when his eyes look as dark and flat as a freshly cleaned chalkboard, as if he were protecting the swirling contents of his brain from invaders and interlopers—even, maybe, the women in his life.
The real Dylan is a well-known spinner of fanciful fictions, and not just in his songs. Even the title of his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One is a wry joke: don’t hold your breath for Volume Two. But his refusal to adhere to facts isn’t constricting. Instead, it’s freeing, inviting us to invent our own Bob Dylan: maybe he actually wants us to improve on the real, fallible one. (That’s part of what Scorsese did with his delightful 2019 neo-documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.) Is it possible that Dylan read certain lines of the A Complete Unknown script and thought to himself, “This is correct, I was such an asshole”? And if so, what does that say about the real Dylan, a man and artist who, at age 83, has become so much larger than life that any attempt to fully understand his true nature, let alone his art, is doomed to failure?
James Mangold already has some practice making movies about unknowable legends: his 2005 portrait of Johnny Cash, Walk the Line, understood Cash as a figure beyond anything so pedestrian as comprehension. (Cash also figures in A Complete Unknown: he’s played, with louche, sexy, bravado, by Boyd Holbrook.) Similarly, A Complete Unknown won’t help you understand Bob Dylan any better, and the movie contains elisions and outright fabrications that are likely to put certain knickers in a twist. Dylan purists revere their facts, and the fact that Dylan was heckled with the epithet “Judas!” at the 1966 Royal London Hall concert, and not at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival performance, as the movie avers, will surely not escape their gimlet gaze.
But come, now: gimlets are for drinking, for celebration, for pleasure, and A Complete Unknown is, too. Like a Dylan song, it doesn’t scorn myriad interpretations; it invites them. Just before Chalamet-Dylan writes that now-famous protest song from his palace of an unmade bed, he strums his guitar and says to no one in particular—certainly not to the woman who has just risen from that bed, Barbaro-Baez—“These are chords I learned from a cowboy named Wigglefoot.” Believe him at your peril. Believe it all. That’s what you do when you fall in love with an artist, a song, a jerk. The fact-checked heart is no heart at all.