This image released by Searchlight Pictures shows Elle Fanning, left, and Timothée Chalamet in a ... [+]
There’s a moment in A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic from James Mangold, where Dylan, as channeled by Timothée Chalamet, bitterly remarks that when people ask him where his songs come from, what they really want to know is why didn’t the songs come to them. That’s as close as this magnificent film comes to nailing down one of the most fascinating popular figures of the past century, a man whose words and voice shaped American culture, the subject of dozens of biographies, a shelf of scholarly books and several movies, yet whose true self remains, well, completely unknown.
A lot of Bob Dylan’s story is mythology, some made by him and some by his admirers. But enough of it is true to make his arrival in New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s and subsequent rise to global fame an irresistible subject. What do we make of a scruffy 20 year-old kid from the Midwest hitchhiking across the country to meet his idol (in Dylan’s case, the great folksinger Woody Guthrie), immediately impressing him with his talent, and within a few years, transcending Guthrie’s populist-bard persona far beyond anyone’s imagination? When we ask “how did this happen?” perhaps we are really asking “why didn’t this happen to any of us?”
To this day, Dylan probably understands that’s what people really want to know. It’s something he likely couldn’t explain even if he were inclined to do so (he took a stab at it in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume 1 and in the uncharacteristically straightforward 2005 documentary No Direction Home), because it’s a question for us, not for him.
A Complete Unknown gets the essence of this paradox. Dylan is the subject of his own story, but the object of ours, and he knows it. He seemed to know it from the very beginning, and any accurate portrayal of Dylan has to start from that point. That’s why the greatness of the movie hinges on Chalamet, who perfectly captures the combination of distance, calculation and suspicion that hides behind Dylan’s eyes both as he engages with others and as he performs his music. You can see this in archival footage of Dylan from the 1960s, which Chalamet not only studied carefully, but completely internalized for his role.
Even early in the film, young Bob is guarded and deliberate. There’s something transactional and performative in all his personal interactions that borders on sociopathy, before fame gave him good reason to be paranoid. He seemed to know before anyone else that what he wanted was within his reach, and he was not going to let anything distract him from accomplishing his purpose. This portrayal rings true with most of his biographies, and with his own accounts of feeling like he was destined for something different than his background might suggest.
What set Dylan apart from other ambitious youth was his otherworldly talent, combined with a tireless work ethic. After all, if the songs weren’t so great, no one would care about the rest of the story. Nothing will ever explain the true mystery of creation, but A Complete Unknown at least gives us a front row seat to one of the most fruitful periods of individual artistic blossoming ever.
It’s quite a trick keeping that fresh. These songs are “classic” to a fault. Most older people have grown up hearing Bob Dylan songs as part of the cultural wallpaper; many younger people have not heard them at all because they had already receded into the firmament. A Complete Unknown accomplishes the nearly impossible by putting us in the thrilling initial moment of discovery over and over again, giving us chills each time. Here’s Bob singing his early masterpiece “Song to Woody” to his invalid inspiration Woody Guthrie; here’s Bob in his boxers, presenting the freshly written “Blowin’ in the Wind” to an awestruck Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro); here’s Bob debuting his rabble-rousing anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’” while lefty troubadour Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) looks on in ecstasy at seeing his highest ambitions for folk music realized.
When we see these moments, we realize instantly why the people close to Dylan nurtured him in spite of his penchant for deceptive, manipulative and cruel behavior, and why the wider world flocked to embrace his music despite his rough-edged and homespun presentation. We also see how this cycle of ambition, accomplishment, adulation and impatience feeds Dylan’s career-long tendency to challenge his audience with a succession of controversial stylistic moves, the first of which serves as the climax of the movie.
The only part of the Dylan story that gets short shrift in the film is the role that his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie in the film, portrayed by Elle Fanning) played in his artistic development. A Complete Unknown gives us glimpses of the arc of their relationship, but Sylvie’s only dramatic purpose in the movie seems to be to showcase Dylan’s callousness. A brief caption at the end of the movie acknowledges her role in developing his political consciousness but there is never a scene that shows that.
Like every film about Bob Dylan from D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal Don’t Look Back to Todd Haynes’s kaleidoscopic I’m Not There to Martin Scorsese’s documentary-esque Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story to Dylan’s own films Renaldo and Clara and Masked and Anonymous, A Complete Unknown underscores the extent to which the Dylan persona itself is an artistic creation, where fact and fiction become inseparable. Mangold gives us glimpses of the truth behind the self-mythologizing, as when Dylan’s old high school yearbook and memorabilia arrive addressed to Robert Zimmerman (Dylan’s real name). There’s also a scene where Sylvie confronts Bob about never talking about his past, a subject that irritates him because of its irrelevance to his larger project. Again, the theatricality and artifice are part of an authentic portrayal of what makes Dylan Dylan.
In the end, A Complete Unknown gives us the best possible answer to the enduring question “why him?” It also shows how that answer remains fundamentally unsatisfying in the face of the black box that is Bob Dylan’s internal life, the source of his endlessly fascinating art and restless career. The answer to that, my friends… well, you know where it’s blowing.
