In viewing A Complete Unknown, I must admit to remaining mystified that rock biopics continue to get made at all in the wake of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the hysterically funny and tragically underseen 2007 parody of basically every rockstar biopic ever made. Indeed, so comprehensive is its satire that the titular Cox even goes through his own Dylan phase, during which he spouts pure gibberish and his own bandmates cannot figure out what is going on. The mystification is compounded by the fact that director and co-writer James Mangold had previously made Walk the Line, a biopic of Johnny Cash and primary reference text for Walk Hard. One has to wonder whether the present film is a deliberate provocation or whether he just doesn’t care.
Interestingly, Bob Dylan has not previously been the subject of a biopic, unless one counts the pretentious I’m Not There, in which Dylan’s multiplicity is represented by having him portrayed by no fewer than half a dozen different actors and probably most notable for its title bringing new attention to one of his greatest unreleased tracks. That said, there has been no shortage of cinematic representations of the man, including the one he directed himself, 1975’s Renaldo and Clara — a nearly unwatchable four-hour extravaganza in which an incomprehensible plot was married to what are admittedly some fiery live performances from the Rolling Thunder Revue shows. Though the most memorable of these probably remain Don’t Look Back and Eat the Document, D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary treatments of his stormiest period, the early electric tours of 1965 and 1966.
This is in fact where A Complete Unknown, based on Elijah Wald’s engaging book Dylan Goes Electric!, leaves off. It does not purport to be a comprehensive biopic, instead covering the beginning of his career, from his arrival on the New York City folk scene (memorably depicted in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis) in the cold winter of 1961 up to his divisive embrace of electric instrumentation at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Along the way, it takes in his personal relationships with fellow folkie Joan Baez and Suze Rotolo, who was immortalized on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and referred to here as “Sylvie Russo,” apparently at Dylan’s own request.
Making a film about a living figure is necessarily a dicey proposition because of how the actual subject interposes himself between us viewers and what’s onscreen. And this is all the more true for a living figure as slippery as Bob Dylan. After all, there have been many Dylans at this point, at least a dozen by my count.
This particular film, meanwhile, faces two additional challenges. First, it has to demonstrate what he managed to do without suffocating under his cultural omnipresence. It really cannot be overstated that there was no template for what Dylan accomplished in those years: Both in the unprecedented nature of his appeal to popular audiences and his galvanizing effect on other musical artists, he simply has no peer. One couldn’t say he “broke through” because there was nothing yet to break through to. As of 1961, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie had already mapped the full extent of folkie territory within the popular consciousness. The British Invasion still lay in the future. And while there had been rock stars, by that time these were either dead (Buddy Holly), religious (Little Richard), tapped out (Chuck Berry), or in the Army (Elvis Presley). We have to be made to see what he did as something other than inevitable.
The other problem is genius, of which he remains perhaps rock’s paramount example, for genius is always hard to depict artistically. Amadeus cleverly deals with this problem by making nongenius Antonio Salieri its audience surrogate. A less clever movie like Good Will Hunting just makes its protagonist a rough kid from South Boston whose genius is like some superpower that exists wholly independent of his consciousness.
The film deals with both challenges by playing it straight, with minimal deployment of Sorkinesque heavy-handedness. Yes, there’s the occasional too-on-the-nose moment, like Seeger telling him to be careful on his motorbike. (Cue Jaws theme.) But it mostly avoids winking at the audience too much and gets a lot of small details right, like the fact that everybody — and I mean everybody — smokes. This is period-accurate, but more importantly, smoking will always just look cinematic and cool on camera.
Plus, Dylan’s life is just inherently cinematic anyway. He really did waltz into town and see Woody Guthrie on his hospital bed; he really did get discovered by John Hammond within months of his arrival; he really did spark an affair with the darling of the NYC folk scene.
As for Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan, he has acquitted himself well enough over the years that the mere mention of his name no longer triggers instinctive annoyance, and indeed he acquits himself well here. He looks and, more importantly, sounds the part. He’s particularly good in the early scenes where Dylan hasn’t yet developed a public image and retains a youthful mix of arrogance and uncertainty; he knows he’s good but doesn’t yet know how good. The trouble is that the original persona (if not the person) of Dylan looms so large over the pop cultural landscape that it is difficult to see this performance as more than a good visual and sonic facsimile.
And it is a good facsimile. (Dylan himself apparently vetted the script.) The film also admirably avoids psychologizing him — no Oedipal backstory, hidden trauma, or what have you. He is what he is. Similarly, it (mostly) avoids villainizing the folkies whose agendas proved at odds with his. Indeed, watching the somewhat ersatz recreation of his infamous appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, which serves as the film’s climax, two things become apparent.
One, the boomers’ greatest hits are increasingly played out, and one wonders how much reel is left at this point. It’s a memorable event, to be sure, but at the end of the day, it’s a music festival, not the Battle of the Somme. Two, Dylan was being an ass; he could have either played one last acoustic set or just declined to show. Imposing his electric turn on the folkies was a choice. Particularly amusing is that he decides to play the electric set after encouragement from a severely inebriated Johnny Cash. Incidentally, this was the same year that Cash was sued by the federal government for causing a forest fire under the influence of a heroic combination of narcotics, which almost resulted in the extinction of the California condor.
Part of what keeps the movie interesting and prevents it from devolving into hagiography is that at least some of its sympathies are with Seeger and Baez, who remain committed to folk’s socially conscious ethos. In a touching moment, Seeger is seen helping the workers break down the set after the Newport festival. No socialist hypocrite he — and I say this as someone with minimal sympathy for his music or his politics.
But in the end, Dylan is touched by genius and they only by talent. And to some degree, that same distance holds between this likably sincere film and its congenitally insincere subject. One could say you’re better off looking for him in his music. But, of course, you won’t really find him there either.
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David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer. Find him at strangefrequencies.co.
