Film Review: A Complete Unknown, Veritas Entertainment, 2024. Directed by James Mangold. Starring Timothee Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, and Edward Norton.
A Complete Unknown is a celebration of Bob Dylan’s songwriting genius.
The film selectively covers the years 1961-1965 in Dylan’s life, starting with his arrival in New York City, aged 19, possessing a guitar, a pocketful of nothing, and a headful of songs. The film is based on Elijah Wald’s 2016 book, Dylan Goes Electric, and chronicles the young musician’s rise from penniless unknown to beloved folk singer to mega-rock star to polarizing force at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The film gives but a sketchy presentation of Dylan’s life in these early years of his career; for it omits his drug addiction, it neither shows nor mentions Sara Lownds, the woman he married in 1965, and pays only the scantest attention to his leftist politics. For example, the film shows Dylan’s close relationship with folk-singer Pete Seeger but only tangentially references Seeger’s earlier, years-long membership in the Communist Party USA, an organization that took its orders from Moscow.
Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings, this is a brilliant film. It gets the most important point right: It portrays the youthful Dylan as a quenchless fountain of songwriting originality. In the film, the songs pour out of him; he rarely sleeps; he is up much of the night, chain-smoking cigarettes, strumming his guitar, writing songs. And what songs! “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Girl From the North Country,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” are several. Folk songs, country songs, rock songs—they pour continuously out of his fertile brain. The film reminds us that and why Bob Dylan is generally acknowledged as the greatest songwriter of the last 60-70 years. The movie shows his extraordinary ability to focus on creative work: In one scene, as he hitchhikes into New York City, he sprawls, cramped and uncomfortable, with pen and paper in the back seat of a car, a football game playing on the radio, composing a first draft of “Girl From the North Country.” In a later scene, he has spent a night with Joan Baez. She discovers a paper with something he has scrawled on it, presumably in the dead of night while she was sleeping. She asks him to play it. This is the first time in the film we hear the haunting melody that becomes “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a hugely successful hit single several years later for the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary. Several years later, he spends the night with Baez in her New York hotel room. In the middle of the night, while his lover sleeps, he gets up, turns on the lamp, smokes cigarettes, jots down notes and lyrics, and strums her guitar. It is no wonder that an irate Baez wakes up and throws him out. On the one hand, his utter lack of consideration for others is sad. But the reason that Baez and so many others love him is also manifest here: He is like an Olympian with extraordinary gifts and single-minded focus; the songs are inside him, bursting to get out; he is driven to write them. In the grip of creative fervor, he is not malicious toward others, he is simply oblivious to all else but the gestating song. He is like a force of nature: Others admire, respect, and love him but, in effect, are confronted by the question: How do you have an intimate relationship with a hurricane? As a viewer, I was simultaneously awed by his protean genius while empathizing with Baez’s frustration and her inability to forge more than an on-and-off again relationship with him.
The lyrics of many great Dylan songs often tell stories whose meanings are incomprehensible but whose imagery is vividly stunning. For example, consider one stanza from “Desolation Row” on his seminal 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited:
“Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn,
Everybody’s shouting ‘Which side are you on?’
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row.”
As a lyricist, he churned out such unintelligible but evocative poetic lines relentlessly…in song after song after song. This is the reason he was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, the only time in its history it was won by a musical composer. The Nobel Committee stated its reason: that Dylan “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
Timothee Chalamet gives an inspired performance as the young Dylan, capturing his passion for songwriting, his unbreachable commitment to his own inner vision, and even his distinctive singing voice, guitar licks, and harmonica style. It is an astonishing performance by the young actor. Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (a character based on Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s long-time girlfriend), and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger are uniformly excellent—but Chalamet’s riveting performance is unforgettable. He properly portrays the young Dylan as a flawed hero. Like the brilliant architect Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, Dylan is portrayed as possessing an internal compass that directs his creativity and from which he will deviate by not a scintilla. Nobody—not friends, lovers, record companies, or concert organizers—tell Bob Dylan what he will write, record, or perform.
But a flaw is there.
“What do you want to be?” another character asks him at one point in the story. “Whatever they don’t want me to be,” he responds.
In truth, rebelling against others is as much a form of dependency on them as is conformity; for a man then reacts against them instead of pursuing his own loves. Others thereby set the terms of life for either a conformist or a non-conformist, one to comply, the other to defy. Chalamet portrays Dylan’s rebelliousness as a secondary element in his soul—but it is there. His startling creative work is utterly self-initiated and self-sustained but his relations with others are too often driven by angry defiance at imaginary attempts to control him. One example is a concert he gives with Joan Baez. The paying customers are avid Dylan fans who clamor to hear “Blowin’ in the Wind” and others of his earlier folk compositions. Baez is ready to play the folk songs. But Dylan refuses and insists on playing new material. Rather than give his paying customers some of the songs they want to hear, he walks off the stage and leaves Joan Baez to perform the songs by herself. There was no set play list for the concert and he could have easily mixed in some of the fans’ favorites with new material. But Chalamet makes vividly clear a secondary but still important point of the film: Bob Dylan regarded any efforts by outsiders—of any kind and under all circumstances—to influence what he would compose, sing, or record as attempts to control him and curtail his creativity. He met all such attempts with defiant rejection.
A more egregious example was the (in)famous scene at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the film’s climactic episode. It was a folk festival and always had been; Dylan knew this and had played there in earlier years. But he was moving brilliantly toward rock by now and was already an international superstar. The organizers, including long-time friend, Pete Seeger, pleaded with him to play folk. There were easy solutions here: Dylan could have played the beautiful folk songs he composed and that the event organizers and attendees wanted to hear—and then, spend the rest of his life composing, singing, and recording rock songs. Or he could simply have refused to perform at a folk festival in the first place. Instead, he angrily rebuffed all pleas as attempts to control him. He and his band played an electrified set of Dylan’s rock compositions—as contrasted with traditional acoustic folk songs—they cranked the amps and played fortissimo a brilliant rock set to a largely disgruntled audience whose members booed and, in some cases, hurled debris. Sitting in the theater, watching the film, I truly did not know whether to cheer or to weep at this point. It was the act of a courageous originator who would let nobody control his creative energies but who, sadly, could not distinguish between legitimate and arbitrary restraints on his artistic freedom. Chalamet’s presentation of his character is pitch perfect: Regarding music, Bob Dylan would do anything he damn well pleased.
It was a flaw in Dylan’s character, perhaps even a major one. But the greatest virtue of the film is that it shows this flaw in brutal honesty but never loses sight of, indeed endlessly emphasizes the self-driven, immense creativity of this musical giant. Whatever harm Bob Dylan the defensive jerk did, was vastly overcompensated by the enormous musical value that Bob Dylan the artistic genius bestowed.