Early on in A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan sidles into the hospital room of a dying Woody Guthrie, the young musician’s hero. It’s the early ’60s and Dylan’s guitar is still slung over his shoulder, his hair still flying up and around his head.
Sitting next to Guthrie is folk musician Pete Seeger, expertly played by Edward Norton. He smiles and motions Dylan in, who walks over, uncharacteristically unsure of himself.
“You shy?” Seeger asks him.
“Not usually,” Dylan responds.
The rest of the film goes to great pains to prove that point about the Nobel Prize-winning musician.
There’s his early encounter with a girlfriend — when she asks whether he thinks he’s God, Dylan quips, “How many times do I have to say this? Yes.”
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After Dylan begins to establish himself in the New York music scene, there’s a tryst with an early-career Joan Baez. As opposed to his own seemingly effortless and unquestioningly deserved success, he believes Baez is working too hard to prove herself. “‘Sunsets and seagulls,’ ‘smell of buttercups,'” he says. “Your songs are like oil paintings at the dentist’s office.”
And there’s the early meeting with collaborator and manager Bob Neuwirth after a particularly oppressive party. Dylan — recently inducted into the sticky world of fame, pen pals with Johnny Cash and touring the world — is coerced into performing for a fawning high-society group who hold little interest in him as a person.
Heading down the elevator in a huff, Dylan whines to his date: “They should just f—k off and let me be.”
“F—k off and let you be what?” asks Neuwirth, posturing nonchalantly in the corner.
“Whatever it is they don’t want me to be,” Dylan answers.
Based on Elijah Wald’s biography Dylan Goes Electric, the story spans from that acoustic-oriented early Dylan in Guthrie’s hospital room to the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan swapped his acoustic guitar for a Stratocaster. There, the movie builds to arguing that Dylan expanded the narrow definitions of folk into something transgressive, innovative and of the moment.
Reconsidering folk music
It’s perhaps an alien conceit to present a genre modern audiences associate with Noah Kahan, Bon Iver and Taylor Swift as some flashpoint of controversy. But this was an era of folk steeped in contemporary issues, everyman activism and civil disobedience. Instead of Starbucks-approved playlists, Seeger was deliberately trying folk music to use to feed activist causes.
That era of folk eventually led to modern artists like Jeffery Lewis singing about the L train, suicide and the pointlessness of online fame, Kimya Dawson on meth labs and small-town abuse and Devendra Banhart writing a song with the most disgusting beliefs he could think of in order to keep his album off coffee shop playlists.
But A Complete Unknown suggests Dylan’s musical aim wasn’t nearly as noble. Seeger tries to use the electric young Dylan to achieve his progressive goals, but true to form, Dylan fights it — as virtually every movie biopic about a modern male musician depicts its star as doing — by playing the music that executives, fans and the world didn’t want him to play.
It’s a stereotypical theme for a surface-level production. Though Chalamet goes to some pains to show off a passable affectation of Dylan’s unique spoken voice, a better interpretation of his singing voice and a spot-on impression of his sauntering walk, his Dylan remains as mysterious as the movie’s title suggests.
The Cuban Missile Crisis and civil rights movement blow by as Dylan himself walks right by them. Chalamet flits through the established story of a rags-to-riches rocker without revealing or examining anything related to where Dylan’s songs, or he himself, came from.
Director James Mangold is more concerned with showing us the impressive efforts of his set designers and the genre-necessary name-drops — everyone from Neuwirth to Al Kooper stumble into scenes designed solely for them to introduce themselves, so Dylan-heads can point at the screen and nudge their seat neighbours.
Given Mangold’s recent efforts in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, there’s reason to assume the lack of depth is simply due to missed opportunity. But beneath the formula-heavy structure, A Complete Unknown manages to sidestep many of the stereotypes that hamstring the genre, exactly by keeping its Dylan shallow.
From August Rush to this year’s Bob Marley: One Love, movies about modern musicians tend to descend into hero worship. The primary reason A Complete Unknown avoids this is the irreverence it displays toward the character at its centre. Dylan is depicted as something of a narcissist — instead of the martyred Jesus-like depiction so often seen in the genre, he devolves from a mysterious, gifted troubadour into a self-obsessed adolescent.
Boring biopics
It’s an interesting if baffling depiction, especially compared to the vast sea of music biopics necessarily reduced to hagiographic, authorized retellings by their subjects — or their estates — in order to acquire the rights to the songs needed to make a movie about a musician in the first place. A Complete Unknown was somehow okayed by its still-living subject, even though the central theme undercuts his devil-may-care detachment with a more soulless motivation.
Regardless of his place as a progenitor of some new-folk revolution, this Dylan has virtually no depth. Unmotivated by love of music, a morbid past or disillusionment with the free-love ’60s or war-fatigued ’70s, A Complete Unknown makes the case that Dylan really did just want to be famous.
He alternately bounces between emotionally depending on the women he encounters, then deriding or ditching them when they get too much recognition from the world — or too much insight into the lack of depth behind his mask. He walks unbothered through crowds of panicking New Yorkers — terrified of imminent nuclear strikes, presidential assassinations or racial attacks — to find a crowd to preen and play in front of.
After we witness the self-sacrificing Seeger defend himself against bogus charges from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, we see Dylan grow so big for his britches that he cringes at the prospect of being seen with him.
Despite Dylan’s constant posturing, in all but one pivotal moment he caves to the demands of the crowd. Whether it be ad executives’ demands to play covers instead of originals, partygoers’ requests to entertain them, Seeger’s eager pleas to do an on-camera interview or a rabid audience ordering an encore, A Complete Unknown argues there’s nothing too complex under the surface. This Dylan really just wants you to know his name.
