Notes on "A Complete Unknown"
I am by no means a movie or culture critic, but I am prone to throw out some thoughts about particular movies I have seen, especially when they are as goof as the Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown”. Not really a biopic. More the story the remarkable slice of his life between arriving in New York as, truly, a complete unknown, through his meteoric rise on American charts, his movement toward rock n roll, and the break with the anodyne and traditional American folk scene, exemplified by his riotous electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Bob Dylan has been a presence in my life for a long time. I am much younger than he (I was 5 when he moved to New York City) and I missed most of his 60s work in real time. I was 12 years old in 1970 and living with my family in Duxford, England, sharing a room with my two older brothers, when I was introduced by said brothers to Dylan’s Blond on Blond double album, which had been released in 1967. The music immediately grabbed me and hasn’t let go for more than 50 years. (I still count it as one of my “Top Ten” rock era albums). As I became more broadly immersed in mainline music culture it began to dawn on me just how much amazing music this man had, and has continued, to generate.
In a sense Bob Dylan is too big a subject, too large a presence, to attempt to capture in a single film. I found the slice of Dylan offered in A Complete Unknown to be just about perfect. It was a key inflection point in his life, a storyline as old as stories, a manageable cast of characters, but enough variety and change around him to keep things interesting and avoid repetition or boredom.
Here are just a few thoughts about the movie, kind of a “Good, Bad and Ugly” format.
The Good:
Timothee Chalamet does a pretty remarkable job as Dylan. He really brings across the restlessness and artistic ADD that Dylan had. He clearly studied his movements and body language, and well as his voice and speech mannerisms. He does a very solid Bob Dylan singing voice which, despite the hordes of men who are compelled to break into a Dylan imitation every time Like a Rolling Stone some on the radio (me) is really quite difficult.
The Dylan portrayed by Chalamet is bracingly a bit of a jackass. And is told so to his face by multiple people in his life. He comes across as the uber-artist: by turns annoying, arrogant, charming, maddening, inspired, self-centered and charismatic. He had to be a difficult person to stay close to (as the movie indeed makes clear).
Edward Norton plays folk legend and despised commie Pete Seeger. I think his portrayal is excellent, even Oscar worthy. He underplays the role perfectly. I don’t know enough about Seeger to know if he indeed was an insecure, supercilious, passive-aggressive asswipe, but Norton convinced me.
Dan Gogler as Dylan’s manager Albert Hoffman provided excellent comedy relief. He was part of pretty much everything at this stage of Dylan’s career, and his goofy, portly presence provides a leavening ingredient. I doubt he was like that in real life, but as a movie character he was a lot of fun.
He left Minnesota at the age of 19 as Bobby Zimmerman, and showed up in New York City as Bob Dylan. The film does not delve into Dylan’s past, except to take indirect note that he had come from Hibbing, MN and changed his name. I think that is a good thing. The Dylan that showed up in Greenwich Village was in fact a complete unknown, a cipher without a past, and a fabulist telling tall tales with an almost sociopathic ease. If the film had tried to force a plot connection to Dylan/ Zimmerman’s past it would have been tied down and constrained by the weight of that past. Instead we are treated to a story arc that stretches powerfully upward from his mysterious appearance to his final motorcycle ride away from “the scene”. It is perfectly self-contained.
The storyline as a whole holds together. It is based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald, and the screenplay was put together by Producer James Mangold and Jay Cocks. The pacing is good, the characters are contained enough so that we get to know them, there are no big surprises or plot twists.
One can tell this is a serious film, because they are unflinching in showing the fact that everybody smoked cigarettes, all the time. A lot of boozing as well, which I am likewise sure was accurate. No drugs though, not even pot. I find that suspect. This was the folk scene in the early 60s in Greenwich Village. There was pot being smoked. Maybe it just didn’t fit unto the plot pieces we got to see.
I learned some things. I am no expert on Bob Dylan, but I was taken by surprise by his apparent close relationship and mutual admiration for Johnny Cash. (Cash calls him a “pen pal” at one point). Cash also appeared as a regular at the Newport Folk festival, which is kind of surprising. Similarly, I didn’t know that, when he got to Ney York, Dylan hunted down Woody Guthrie to pay homage. That apparently really was the first thing he wanted to do when he got there. The film took some liberties with Woody’s condition (see below) but the connection and interactions between the two was very powerful.
The Bad:
It seems that every film set during the early to mid 60s feels obligated to have grainy black and white televisions in the background with images of Martin Luther King, or perhaps Malcom X, often with the dull avuncular tones of Walter Cronkite narrating. One would think there was nothing else on TV - even in bars. I understand that the producers wanted to show that the NY folk scene was very engaged with civil rights, but the way they chose to illustrate this by creating a caricature of a cartoon of what was going on in early 60s America. An even more egregious example is the brief scene about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It showed the crisis unfolding in close to real time (it lasted almost two weeks) and showed panic in the streets as people ran for safety. The Cuban Missile Crisis was real, and it was tense. People were scared. But there was no craziness in the streets. But the producers needed a dramatic lever to drive Joan Baez into Bob Dylan’s arms (and bed) and that did the trick.
Let’s provide some missing clarity: Pete Seeger was a communist. A dedicated communist. An active member of the American Communist Party until he “renounced” his membership in 1950. Joan Baez was not a communist per se, but she was as hard left a radical as one could find in early 1960s America. The movie never explores these aspects of the main characters except to position Seeger as a victim of redbaiting and to summarize Joan as caring about Civil Rights and Social Justice. Failure to address the ideologies of the main characters is a flaw in the film. Dylan himself seems to have been significantly apolitical, despite adopting the prevalent squishy progressive attitudes of his world. His focus was on music. The eventual break with the folk scene crowd was perhaps as much about ideology vs. music as it was about folk vs. rock ‘n’ roll.
I found Monica Barbaro playing Joan Baez to be underwhelming. She is bland, soft and generally unconvincing. Which is a shame, because Baez’s relationship with Dylan stands at the heart of the film.
The Ugly
Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash and, much as Dan Gogler’s Albert Hoffman veers perhaps a bit too much into comedic relief, so Holbrook’s Cash is consistently over-the-top wisecracking and drunk, a veritable Tasmanian Devil churning through each scene he is in. Maybe a kernel of truth in there, but too one-dimensional for such a pivotal and complex character as Cash.
Dylan did seek out Woody Guthrie upon his arrival in New York. He found him living in East Orange, NJ, and he was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. The film takes this factual situation and pumps it full if dramatic steroids. So now, when Dylan meets Guthrie he is laying, unable to speak, in a gothic dungeon of a “hospital” with Pete Seeger sitting at his bedside. Guthrie did eventually end up in that hospital (I would bet my mortgage it was nothing like the dark, cold horrorshow portrayed in the movie) but apparently the producers figured the actual meeting story was too underwhelming to shove the plot forward.
Obviously a whole lot of good and minimal bad. The soundtrack was (obviously) fantastic, the cinematography was very good. Perhaps most importantly, it offers younger audiences who are not familiar with Bb Dylan the chance to get some exposure to his life and music. I highly recommend the film.