I was crying fifteen minutes into “A Complete Unknown”. The scene that did the trick was the first meeting between a dying folk music prophet, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), and a young vagabond in a Dutch boy cap, Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), who rode thousands of miles just to play a song for his hero in hopes of “catching a spark”. The song young Bob plays for the invalid Guthrie, called “Song to Woody”, aches with the wide-eyed aspirations of a would-be rambling man paying tribute to a frail troubadour who lived and suffered the hard truth of every song he ever performed. Chalamet’s performance to McNairy is an intimate profession of unrequited love; a proclamation of devotion so deep it can only be articulated through the soft picks of an acoustic guitar and the reedy imperfections and naivety of a twenty-year-old’s voice. It’s a beautiful scene that hit me unexpectedly. The power of music, and performance, is a transformative thing. If only the rest of the movie lived up to that promise.
I am not sure if I am the perfect or worst possible audience for James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown,” a chronicling of the life and times of young Bob Dylan from his entrance into the folk music scene of New York City until the riotous fallout of his going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. This trajectory was news to me. My cultural understanding of Dylan was mostly through osmosis, some basic song knowledge, and the vague awareness that his plugging in of an electric guitar drove people out of their minds. If I could not grasp the full scope of Dylan’s impact walking in, the film certainly tries its best to visualize that effect by showing audiences in ecstatic awe every time Chalamet picks up a guitar. Sometime in the future someone will put together a super-cut of every time a person or whole crowd simply stares slack-jawed at this skinny kid picking his strings. You’d think Dylan had three heads the way minds are seemingly broken asunder by his lyrics of north country fairs and times that are a-changing. I can’t argue with this reaction to true genius, as my Spotify history can currently attest. Since leaving the theater, I’ve been knee-deep in Dylan’s words, as profoundly modern and prescient as any literature born of a similar age of chaos and strife. But I don’t need a movie to hear those words; records have been doing that good work for over sixty years now. As a film, as a dissection of who Dylan is as a person, and even as an artist, “A Complete Unknown” seems content to let us consider the words and leave it at that, which is a shame.
James Mangold is a filmmaker whose work I am usually lukewarm for at worst and simmering over at best. Even his lesser films (“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”) wrestle with larger themes of corrosive masculinity and the consequences of a life spent in violence or blind pursuit of immortality, as do his best (“3:10 to Yuma” & “Ford V. Ferrari”). With “A Complete Unknown”, a film constructed with the approval of Dylan himself, Mangold attempts to reckon with these forces once again, while remaining polite. So the film certainly shows Dylan’s tumultuous romances with women from the famous, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), to the grounding, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), with his own fear of being tied down by “love” goosing him from bed to bed with reckless, and often cruel, abandon. The film implies that Dylan flows with the wind of his whims; settling into domestic bliss with Sylvie only to abandon her for Baez when in need of a jolt of inspiration. I have no doubt this was the dynamic or that this happened. But I do doubt that, in reality, these women tolerated this behavior with a shrug and the silent resignation of women whom greatness leaves in its wake. Mangold’s narrative also tracks the creative journey of Dylan from a single guitar and harmonica on a basement stage to headlining tours, drowning under the weight of folk music royalty, and attracting the unwanted attention of screeching, cloying fans of the Beatle-Mania variety. At one point, Dylan, scowling behind dark glasses, opines that “everybody says they want to know where the songs come from when in reality they want to know why the songs didn’t come to them”. Such are the labors of those cursed with the voice of the gods. But for an artist whose words present as an unstoppable locomotive raging truth against the immovable force of unimaginable power, Mangold’s depiction of Dylan gives little indication of the fuel which powers that engine. While we flow from artistic inspiration to artistic inspiration, Dylan writes the words a hurting world needs to hear, a stigmata on the altar of cosmic justice, without any indication of why he chooses the places upon which to bleed himself. I don’t care where Dylan found his words but I refuse to believe they erupted fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. Dylan the man, who sang nervously for his hero by his hospital bed, will always be more fascinating to me than Dylan the prophet; but alas that is not in the cards of this film, and perhaps never was.
This style of biopic, almost documentary-like in its devotion to reflecting history back to us in the order it happened, comes into and out of fashion. Mangold himself has done this kind of work before with “Walk The Line,” which then inspired the greatest evisceration of the ‘cradle to grave’ biopic in the form of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.” Watching Dylan’s journey to ultimately going electric has its charms, and the last twenty minutes of the movie certainly subvert expectations in a satisfying manner. I simply wish Mangold attempted some form of innovation to match the weather-worn gospel which he so giddily wallpapers the film with.
If history does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes and recent cultural events have more than proven that we are in a perfect rhyme scheme with the sixties, as fascism, civil rights abuses, and nuclear war dangle Damocles style just above our heads. Dylan’s songs are as relevant today as they once were, and at the very least, I am grateful to the film for inspiring me to seek out those songs’ wisdom. Perhaps the words are what matter in the end, and the film is simply what Dylan accuses Joan Baez’s songwriting of being “too perfect, like an oil painting at a dentist’s office”. In a word, inoffensive. I wonder what Woody Guthrie, who played a guitar that read “This Machine Kills Fascists”, would have thought of the film. I imagine he would know which song we need to hear right now.
The performances are top-notch, with Chalamet cementing his movie star status and holding the film’s center with aplomb. This is the kind of movie any Nana would love, filled with music that rings with nostalgia divorced from the rage that fueled its creation. Check it out if you have a mind, or at the very least go to your local record store, grab yourself a copy of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, and give it a spin.
You’ll be glad you did.
“A Complete Unknown” is playing at The Broad Theater and the Prytania Theater (Uptown & Canal Place).
