A Complete Unknown: Chalamet Successfully Channels Dylan - Artist, Lover & Enigma
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
How do you make a movie about a living legend, a pivotal figure in American music, whose persona is so enigmatic that it’s a defining characteristic of the man?
Judging by online comments, it’s a worry expressed by a lot of Bob Dylan fans in the lead up to the release of A Complete Unknown. It’s kind of a collective concern that a traditional biopic would portray the musician in a conventional way, directly interpreting his motives and making enough false steps to tamper with the very things that make his music holy.
Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and girlfriend Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning) in A Complete Unknown
The good news is that director James Mangold has made a rich, vibrant movie chronicling four key years in Dylan’s life and career without demystifying either the man or his creative process. Together with a uniformly brilliant cast, he’s made one of the best films of 2024.
A Complete Unknown is based on the book Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties, by Elijah Wald. It tells the story of Dylan, from the time he arrived in New York until the famous set at the Newport Folk Festival where he turned the folk world on its head by “going electric.”
The film begins as 19-year-old Dylan, played by Timothée Chalamet, arrives in New York, after hitchhiking from Minnesota to pay homage to his hero, the folk superstar Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy).
Guthrie is in a nursing home, in the late stages of Huntington’s Disease, which has rendered him bedridden and unable to speak.
Dylan finds another luminary, folk star Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), visiting his friend. Guthrie wants to hear one of Dylan’s songs, and it’s immediately evident to the two men that this kid is impressive.
Seeger takes him home for a few nights, giving him a place to stay, and hearing more songs from this young folk singer and recognizing the talent, becomes his mentor, introducing him around to key players in the New York folk scene, and lining him up with a showcase gig at Gerde’s Folk City.
It’s an auspicious night: Joan Baez, (Monica Barbaro), already on her ascent in the folk world, is on stage before him. We get more of a sense of him when he both compliments and lightly insults Baez from the stage before wowing the audience. In the crowd is the influential manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), who is looking for a major folk singer to add to his stable, and to sign to Columbia Records.
Baez is one of two women who become romantically entangled with Dylan through this time period, and important to his life and work. At another gig he meets Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning), who is based on Dylan’s girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. Russo is an activist, committed to her work. She’s a strong minded independent woman in a changing era, intellectually an equal and not afraid to challenge him. Dylan is smitten, and soon they’re living together.
Dylan also begins an on-again-off-again affair with Baez. There’s a click there, both personally and artistically. She recognizes the brilliance of his songwriting, and he recognizes that letting her record his songs give him, a still relative unknown, more profile.
At the same time, Dylan goes into the studio, begins his recording career and starts to build confidence. His first record is, at the direction of the record company, mostly made up of traditional folk songs. That goes nowhere, and so he begins to record his own songs, with his astounding songwriting getting attention.
Dylan’s ambitious, but he’s also resistant to being creatively limited by anyone. He has a restless creative drive that makes him bristle at the expectations that the folk community and his mentors, especially the gentle, idealistic Pete Seeger, have for him.
The record company is expecting acoustic recordings to continue. Dylan, growing creatively, wants a band of young musicians he wants to work with leaning into a kind of bluesy rock sound. He’s hearing a new sound in his head and pursues that in the recording studio, all leading up to the concert at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, a festival specifically created to celebrate acoustic and traditional folk music. There, Dylan and his band rocked and shocked the folk world by playing an electric set.
A Complete Unknown is a lot of things: Bob Dylan as songwriter. As genius. As a maverick. As observer. As a lover. As a cad. As someone so committed to their vision that they won’t let history, tradition or obligation shut him down. As his star rises, Dylan becomes more detached, unwilling to compromise to please anyone in his professional or personal life. It doesn’t sugar-coat the impact that has on the people around him.
The film doesn’t attempt to delve into his creative process. But it does look at the forces around him.
It stands back and looks at him from a bit of a distance, as an artist who is at a transition point in American history. He pulls on the history of folk music, and responds to the times, morphing the music and the approach to lyrics and creating a new style of music, in spite of opposition. This was a changing America, from the Cold War to the Kennedy assassination, the folk music era, a new generation and the things that it embraced: peace movement, civil rights, environmentalism, the beginnings of the women’s movement
And while it admires the artist, it doesn’t make him out to be heroic, or easy. The Dylan of A Complete Unknown is clearly not just a singular talent but a game changer, completely committed to his songs. But to the people in his life, the people who love him, a flawed person. One of the film’s most poignant moments comes when Sylvia, watching Dylan perform on stage with Baez, realizes that his relationship to his music and career will always eclipse what they have.
The adaptation of the film, co-written by Mangold and Jay Cocks walks lightly, but gets a lot done. It captures the feel of the era, and manages to pull a lot of cultural and social threads together without screaming about its ambitions.
And at the centre is a terrific cast. A lot of the film, of course, relies on the lead performance, and Chalamet is superb. He disappears into the young Dylan, finding the posture, the look, Dylan’s nasal mumble, without ever becoming a caricature. Chalamet learned guitar and much of Dylan's repertoire. There are bits and pieces of something like forty songs in the film and Chalamet played them all live, evoking Dylan’s confidence and charisma. The other performances are also all live, and equally engaging,
A Complete Unknown is an enjoyable ride, a deceptively easy-going film about one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.
We spent a lot of time watching the artist, and how he moved through those key years in the ‘60s. And ultimately, happily, Bob Dylan, the man, and the artist remains an enigma.
A Complete Unknown. Directed by James Mangold, written by James Mangold and Jay Cocks. Starring Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Edward Norton, Monica Barbaro, Dan Fogler. In theatres December 25.