Movie Review: ‘A Complete Unknown’

If you’re going to see A Complete Unknown to see an historically accurate portrayal of the folk scene in the  Village in the early 1960s or a doggedly factual picture of Bob Dylan’s early years and increasing rise to fame and prophethood, don’t. Stay away, for you’ll be disappointed. There’s even one laughable scene toward the end of the movie in which a Burlington store (Burlington wasn’t established until 1972) appears at the end of a street down which Dylan is walking in 1965. At its worst, director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown fills the screen with pretty people playing at being Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning)—in the film Rotolo is called Sylvie Russo; Dylan apparently requested that Rotolo’s real name not be used in the movie—in sanitized, gauzy versions of the Village, New York City, and the Newport Folk Festivals of 1964 and 1965 meant to evoke an overly sentimental and hazy nostalgia. To paraphrase an article in Time from 1963, A Complete Unknown is “semi-pure” in its telling a story that’s been told many times before, sprinkling in a few flakes of history here and there only when necessary in an attempt to provide a chronological framework. (Time called the singers and songwriters emerging on the folk scene as “semi-pures,” those like Baez and Dylan performing songs from folk traditions as well as writing their own songs that were innovations, and sometimes departures, from that tradition.)

If you are going to see A Complete Unknown to witness the transformation of Bob Dylan from Woody Guthrie acolyte to inscrutable songwriting genius, you’re also apt to be a little disappointed. However, that’s a limitation that all films face when they must squeeze a years of living and growth into roughly 145 minutes: the film either focuses on romance—plenty of that here—or on abbreviated versions of conflicts that lack context for understanding (here the fist fight between Dylan’s manager, Al Grossman, and folk archivist Alan Lomax at Newport 1965 erupts out of nowhere and is even historically misplaced).

A Complete Unknown opens with a young Dylan landing in Greenwich Village in 1961 in search of Greystone  Park Psychiatric Hospital in order to visit his idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). When Dylan arrives and makes his way to Guthrie’s room, he finds Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) visiting Guthrie; Seeger invites him in, and  Dylan plays “Song for Woody” for Guthrie, astonishing both Seeger and Guthrie with the young man’s talent. Seeger takes Dylan under his wing, eventually introducing him to the folk scene in the Village. In short order, Dylan meets Russo and charms her with his tales of being a carnival barker. Like the carny he’s made himself out to be, he’s a  traveling storyteller, never settling twice on the same tale of his origins and reveling already in the freedom of  inventing himself endlessly. In an early scene, Dylan and Russo take in a showing of the film Now, Voyager (1942), a film starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains. Almost immediately, Dylan adds another layer to the shroud of his identity by mimicking Rains’ romantic actions with Russo.

Since the pace of the film must move quickly, Joan Baez almost floats onto the scene; we see her only from  the back, her long black hair shimmering gossamer-like as she walks toward a Village club. She finishes her song at  the open mic night, and Dylan takes the stage, introduced by Seeger, as she is walking out. On hearing his voice, she stops and turns back to watch him; it’s not long before Baez has replaced Russo in Dylan’s affections—or at least in his canny formulation of his own identity and his need for a foil. As the film unfolds, Dylan moves from singing traditional folk ballads and blues to singing the songs he has written himself, and in this the film captures Dylan’s evolution. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, he and Seeger are in Seeger’s car and Dylan turns on the radio and finds a channel playing a Little Richard song. In that moment, he tells Seeger he listens to all kinds of music and he talks about how much Little Richard has influenced him and how much rhythm and blues adds to music.

In its rapid pace, A Complete Unknown moves from Dylan’s arrival and early club engagements to his sudden rise to the darling of the scene in 1963, having moved from simply performing the songs of others to writing and performing his own songs, such a “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” Although Chalamet’s performance borders on the superficial winking and nodding at playing Dylan, he manages to capture Dylan’s creative restlessness and his search to recreate himself in almost every moment. Chalamet’s Dylan lives up to Dylan’s own lines in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”: “That he not busy being born/Is busy dying.” As the movie  unfolds, Dylan becomes increasingly disenchanted with his fans, himself, his management, Seeger, and chafes at being unfree to make himself or to be able to know himself—which in the film he never does. In a scene in which Dylan plays at the Newport Folk Festival, Chalamet’s Dylan looks out at the crowd with an inscrutable grin that cleverly signals that, like a carny barker, he holds the crowd, and his fans, in his hands and can sell them anything he wants; they’ll buy it. The stare also signals, though, how disgusted he is with other people making him into what they want and not what he wants to be.

In the climactic scene in the film—the night at the Newport Folk Festival 1965 where “Dylan goes electric”— Chalamet’s Dylan and his backing band roar onto the stage and romp through “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” The crowd, as we know, screams its disapproval and members of the festival board scramble to deal with this unfolklike, in their minds, performance. As Dylan screams the final lines of the chorus of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the film underscores what it’s shown us all along: Dylan is a “complete unknown” both to himself and to his fans; they’re the ones who have refused to allow him to be busy being born. A Complete Unknown succeeds, at least, in illustrating that by 1965, Dylan had well-crafted the enigmatic shroud with which he covers himself. The ending of the film itself is even more haunting, given what happens in Dylan’s life just one year later.

If you’re going to see A Complete Unknown, go to see it for what it is: a confection, spinning sweetness and light into a fairy tale replete with one-dimensional characters who seldom achieve complexity. In the end, we care very little for Dylan, Baez, Rotolo, or anyone around them, although Edward Norton’s portrayal of Pete Seeger is substantial, and he illustrates a feeling of heartfelt betrayal and disappointment as he witnesses Dylan’s rise (though in Norton’s portrayal Seeger seemed to see this in Dylan from that first meeting). At its best, A Complete Unknown will send viewers to Dylan’s music, as well as to Elijah Wald’s excellent Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties—on which the film is based, according to the credits—and even to David Browne’s Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital for fuller, and more complex, portraits than the film allows.