I had real trepidations about seeing “A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s painstaking rendering of Bob Dylan’s arrival on the folk scene in New York in 1961 through his boundary-breaking performance with a rock band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to see it. As a friend said to me, “You can’t duplicate Dylan, it’s not possible.”
But the allure of seeing even an ersatz Dylan in his early days was too enticing. If you ever wondered what it was like when the 19-year-old Dylan, fresh off the road from Minnesota, first visited his idol Woody Guthrie at a New Jersey hospital, the scene of that is a stunner. It’s as if you’re there witnessing the passing of the folk music torch.
So, reservations aside, it is indeed exciting to watch a young Dylan—shrewdly played by Timothée Chalamet—come to life. Chalamet, who reportedly stayed in character for the course of filming, captures Dylan’s unshakeable confidence in his own talent and destiny, and the self-absorbed arrogance that goes with it.
One of the most revealing and truthful lines in the film is when Dylan turns up unannounced late one night at the Hotel Chelsea to see his on-again, off-again girlfriend Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). After having sex, Dylan goes back to writing a song and is paying no attention to her when she says, “You know, Bob, you’re really kind of an asshole.”
Chalamet is very good at communicating how an ambitious kid form Minnesota becomes more and more closed down as his fame gets out of his control. Adoring fans banging at the window of his car, women falling in love with him, the attention was just too much. At the height of his popularity, Dylan is asked by a street vendor if he has any kids, he sighs and says, “Yeah, thousands,” before speeding off on his motorcycle.
Chalamet’s Dylan looks down a lot and his tight-lipped, nasally Midwest twang seems to emanate from his throat, not his gut. It’s only when he’s onstage that he opens up and becomes the real Dylan. Chalamet has done his homework and it shows, nailing the intonation and phrasing that was as unique for Dylan as it was for Sinatra.
The range of Dylan’s song catalogue is nothing short of miraculous, and many are heard in the film, from the groundbreaking poetic lament of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” to the anthemic protest songs, “The Times They Are a Changin’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” to the song that blew the roof off of folk music, the electric and electrifying “Like a Rolling Stone.” Doing his own vocals, Chalamet makes good on the white-hot intensity and power of the performances with a credible facsimile of the real thing.
The big notes and famous bit players of Dylan’s early career are all here, with dramatic license in some cases. In addition to a rather unconvincing Baez, there is his cantankerous, money-hungry manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), his other girlfriend, the long-suffering Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), based on the real-life Suze Rottolo, who was immortalized huddling with Dylan on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”. Edward Norton is convincingly earnest and old-fashioned as folkie paterfamilias Pete Seeger, the protector of the music’s purity. Dylan didn’t give a damn about that. Legend has it that Seeger tried to pull the plug on Dylan at Newport and the film presents a plausible version of that.
Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) also turns up as a rascally partner in crime and collaborator. Mangold had previously directed the Cash biopic, “Walk the Line” (2005). But with Cash he had more story and the span of a lifetime to work with. For “A Complete Unknown” a lot of dramatic stuff happens in a relatively short time, it’s just Act I of Dylan’s life. The challenge for Mangold and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks (“Age of Innocence,” “Gangs of New York”) was to create a narrative about someone who has always been evasive and deceptive by nature.
It’s unlikely you will come away understanding much more about Dylan than you did going in, which isn’t entirely the film’s fault. We are watching the beginning of the famous Dylan mystique; he has been obfuscating and making up his identity for years. In the film, he tells anyone who will listen that he ran away from home to join a carnival when he was a kid. Only Baez calls bullshit.
Mangold, who worked on this project for five years, is not the first director to try to crack Dylan on film. For perhaps a better understanding of what he was really like at this stage in his life, refer to D.A. Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back” (1967), a warts and all cinéma vérité account of Dylan’s pre-electric British tour of 1965, which is seen briefly in “A Complete Unknown.” Decades later director Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “May December”) attempted to get a handle on the illusive troubadour in “I’m Not There” (2007) by fragmenting the narrative into a surreal mash-up with no fewer than six actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing an element of Dylan’s fractured persona.
Biopics are by nature linear and straightforward. So Mangold’s approach is more conventional but it’s still a fun ride. “A Complete Unknown” is more a platform to present the music than a deep dive into solving the mystery of who Dylan is. But the character and the period are so charismatic and cinematic, the result is a great looking, great sounding, colorful historical document.
The filmmaking and craft is masterful on all levels.
The look of the film—from period costumes by Arianne Phillips, production design by Francois Audouy, dreamy cinematography by Phedon Papamichael, as well as hair and makeup by Jaime Leigh McIntosh and Stacey Panepinto, respectively—reveals the enormous change in styles from the early to the mid-’60s. Mangold is committed to portraying the rhythms of the period accurately. To see and hear the streets teeming with people, half of them folk singers, one thinks this is what walking in the Village in the early ’60s must have felt like.
In a way, it’s really the dynamism of the era that is the underlying aesthetic of the film. If Dylan’s move from folk singer to full fledged rock ’n’ roller, as his artistic identity and voice takes shape, seems inevitable in hindsight, at that time and place nothing was written in stone and anything was possible. It’s in creating that wild, quicksilver feeling of the times that “A Complete Unknown” is most successful.
In that moment in time when Dylan plugged in and played with a ragtag group of rock musicians behind him, nothing mattered more to the stunned crowd than Dylan going electric. For those who cared, pop music was forever changed. For those who still do, this film is indispensible.