Movie Review: A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown was released in December, but I only saw it last week.

I wasn’t in a rush because I’m not really a Bob Dylan fan. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see it anyway, but a line used in the trailer got my attention:

Timothée Chalamet as Dylan says:

“For anyone who’s going to hold your attention on the stage, you got to kinda be a freak. You can be beautiful or you can be ugly, but you can’t be plain.”

That’s good advice for any aspiring young artist, and I hoped for more. I didn’t really get those insights, but I got a good story and great music.

I also went to see it because I enjoyed Becoming Led Zeppelin so much, and I’d hoped lightning might strike twice. They’re very different movies, of course.

Where the Zeppelin film is a documentary, A Complete Unknown is a biopic.

It takes liberties with the truth, which I think Dylan would admit to doing from time to time himself. Some events are out of order or didn’t actually happen, and it invents some characters who didn’t exist and leaves out people who did, all in the name moving the story along.

The story is mostly moved along by the music. I’d guess the movie has more songs than dialog, but it might be 50/50. And that’s not a bad thing.

The musical performances are terrific, especially considering that some of the cast weren’t singers or musicians before getting hired.

Monica Barbaro had to learn how to sing and play guitar in her role of Joan Baez. And Chalamet had to improve his slight guitar skills as well as learn to play harmonica.

Neither of them –

– Nor Edward Norton as Pete Seeger,

Or Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash – can be seen trying to sound like their character.

They just do. None of them do an impression or an imitation, but they somehow become who they’re playing. Chalamet embodies Dylan so well that when I saw a photo of a young Dylan after seeing the movie, I was shocked that Dylan isn’t Chalamet. He’s that good.

The amazing voices and performances are all the more remarkable considering that they’re not lip syncing to pre-recorded tracks. They’re singing and playing live as the camera rolls. Songs you’ve heard for years have a new life here. 

I’m not fond of Dylan’s voice and could never stand Baez’s shrill soprano.

So it’s kind of a shame that Chalamet and Barbaro sound so much like them, but that’s my problem, not the movie’s.

Be that as it may, the scenes where Dylan and Baez sing in harmony are thrilling. 

Dylan and Baez aren’t in love when they sing “It Ain’t Me, Babe” in closeup shots — in fact, they’re angry with each other – but they’re in love with the music they make together. They’re holding two emotions at once. That’s complex storytelling.

This level of excellence in acting and singing is matched by the story, following Dylan from his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961 to his legendary performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

He starts as a 20-year-old with nothing but a guitar and rises to a celebrity artist with a devout following. Their overexcited devotion reminds us that the word “fan” comes from “fanatical.”

It’s also the story of Dylan’s relationships with Baez and Sylvie Russo, who is a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo. She’s an artist, Dylan’s girlfriend, the person who got him involved — though maybe not invested — in politics and activism.

And she’s the woman on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Director James Mangold renamed her at Dylan’s request. Rotolo avoided the limelight for the rest of her life, until her 2009 book A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. She died of lung cancer two years later, and Dylan wanted the movie to respect the privacy she maintained. 

Both women are smitten with his talent but angered by his reluctance to reveal anything about himself.

A complete unknown, indeed.

We viewers don’t really get to know him, either. There’s no moment where we can say, “Aha! That’s why he’s like that.”

As with the real life Dylan, we can only guess.

What we do see, however, is his growth as an artist.

The Folk music scene takes him in as one of their own, but he’s a freewheeler, never stopping in one place for long. He moves on to the next genre or sound, going where his interest takes him. He follows creativity, not fame or any particular ideology.

That becomes the conflict of the third act, where he’s invited to play the Newport Folk Festival and is expected to play Folk, but shows up with a Rock band. The festival officials urge him to stick to traditional Folk, but his hero Johnny Cash suggests otherwise. 

There’s no need to warn you with a spoiler alert here. Most regular TNOCS readers are music buffs so we know what Dylan chose to do.

He went electric and the chaos around his set is the climax of the film.

In the movie, Cash encouraged him and someone in the audience shouted “Judas!” Dylan aficionados know that Cash wasn’t there that night. He had played two days prior. And no one in the audience shouted, “Judas!” That happened months later in Manchester, UK. Those facts made it a little hard to suspend my disbelief.

Facts aside, it’s a kinetic scene with the great music, backstage hostility, and the audience throwing bottles. And just as Dylan may lose the women in his life.

The movie’s final shot is of Dylan riding his motorcycle.

It’s a reminder that a year later, he would crash that bike and, according to Robbie Robertson of The Band, spend six weeks in a neck brace. He became reclusive and wouldn’t tour again for eight years.

Some think he just wanted some time off, and the accident never actually happened. With all things Dylan, the details are vague.

A Complete Unknown is nominated for 8 Oscars, and deservedly so.

It’s an excellent bit of filmmaking – from the acting to the costumes to the set of Greenwich Village in 1961 – and is frustrating but only because Dylan is frustrating. Music fans should see it, whether they like Dylan or not, but I don’t feel like I know him any better than I did when I bought my ticket.

Which is how he wants it.

Can we really call this a biopic if we don’t get to know the guy? It doesn’t matter.

The story is engaging, the performances are sublime, and the music is magically good. 

Dylan doesn’t want to be known anyway. 

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