A COMPLETE UNKNOWN Review

Come writers and critics, admit that it's good.

Let’s get something out of the way up front: there will never be a better Bob Dylan movie than I’m Not There. Todd Haynes’ masterpiece captures the changeable, dreamlike myth of Dylan, and that’s the most important aspect of him as a man and an artist. Yes, there are facts to know about Bob Dylan, but the thing you most must understand is that the truth of Bob Dylan is that he spent his life reconstructing himself into new forms, and each of those forms were legitimate and authentic and phony and performative. You have to grasp this paradox at the center of Dylan to really get Dylan as a long-lived artist.

Which isn’t to say you can’t make a pretty standard biopic about Dylan - of course you can. And James Mangold, who directed Walk the Line, has done something approaching that. A Complete Unknown has some of the hallmarks of the traditional musical biopic, but what Mangold (working with screenwriter Jay Cocks, a film critic and Scorsese collaborator) does here is beyond just the standard form. He understands that each era of Dylan is its own unique character; where Haynes took this understanding and made a movie featuring a bunch of different people playing wildly different versions of Dylan, Mangold makes a biopic about one particular manifestation of the man, the Bob Dylan folk hero who ended his time on earth on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

We do not get to know Bob Dylan in this movie. Dylan is experienced from without, through the eyes of three major people in his life - mentor and folk legend Pete Seeger, girlfriend Sylvie (a thinly veiled fictionalization of real life Suze Rotolo) and Joan Baez. Dylan is at the center of the film, but he’s a largely unknowable center. Like the people in his life we project our own thoughts and understanding on to him, something that perhaps becomes too overwhelming for the man.

How much is Dylan experienced from without? We don’t even find out his real name is Robert Zimmerman until maybe halfway through the film. We never learn anything real about him; the movie begins when the man comes to New York City, and it can be argued that this is when Bob Dylan is born. Maybe even more remarkable for this kind of movie, we are never privy to Dylan’s creative process.

You know how it goes in this genre of artist biography - you see the legendary musician at lunch with his wife, and they’re fighting, and she says “You treat me like the sauerkraut!” and then we see a gleam in his eyes and cut to beloved classic You Treat Me Like the Sauerkraut winning a Grammy. These movies too often want to lay bare the inner workings of the process, but as Dylan notes in A Complete Unknown: when someone asks where the songs come from they’re actually asking why they didn’t come to them. Because we want to believe that inspiration is reproducible, artist movies often reduce it to something stupid, something obvious, when the real inspiration is not hearing a sentence but rather understanding why that sentence can become something else.

We do not see Dylan in process in A Complete Unknown. We have a scene that draws a connection between the Cuban Missile Crisis and Masters of War, one his bitterest songs (which is saying a lot), but it isn’t like Dylan hears someone say “Masters of war” and he comes up with the song. We have maybe two scenes where Dylan is seen in the middle of writing a song; most of the time in this movie he just whips out an eternal classic from nowhere, fully formed. But the two times (maybe two times? I may be missing one) are very illuminating.

The first is we see Dylan working on Girl From the North Country while crashing at Pete Seeger’s home. There’s something performative in the scene - Pete’s family is having breakfast and Dylan is still on the couch where he slept, working out this song while they all listen. He wants it to be heard. You’ve seen this bit in the trailer - Seeger hears the song and comes out of the bathroom, toothbrush hanging from his mouth, stunned at what he hears. In the trailer this looks like a standard musical biopic “getting discovered” moment, but in context I think this is a scene of Dylan manipulating the older man, showing off what he can do.

The other is more obvious. We see Dylan writing It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) late at night in the Chelsea Hotel while Joan Baez sleeps in bed a few feet away. Dylan wakes her up, and we realize the real context for the moment: he is trying to both piss off and show off for Baez. Again, when viewed through the prism of the normal biopic this scene is showing a driven artist who can’t help but work on a masterpiece at 2AM. In the context of the movie it’s pretty clear he knows what he’s doing, Baez knows what he’s doing (she kicks him out) and what’s more he’s being kind of a dick about it.

We aren’t even privy to Dylan’s thinking about the film’s big climax. Very famously, folkie Dylan turned to rock n’ roll, and in 1965 he took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival with a fully electric band, a moment that is one of the most important in late 20th century cultural history. The result was chaos and the birth of a new era of music, and the cost was the burgeoning folk revival. In A Complete Unknown everyone involved in the festival suspects Dylan is going to play electric, his band thinks he’s going to play electric, but he never discusses it. In fact, watching the movie you get the sense that he doesn’t even know what he’s going to do until he does it.

This is the apotheosis of everything we’ve been watching; over the course of the course of the movie we saw young Dylan come into the folk scene and master it, become the best and the most popular, take the whole genre to a new level in the public consciousness. But we’re also seeing a guy who can’t stop growing and changing; even the fake version of himself that came to New York City from the midwest - a faux itinerant Woody Guthrie disciple - becomes too small for him, and he needs to molt and become something else. The problem is that this guy is kind of a dick, and the process of molting and changing involves him hurting and betraying all those around him.

Perhaps this is what makes A Complete Unknown most unusual for a musical biopic that is blessed by its subject - this movie presents Bob Dylan as a dick. Usually in this kind of movie the dickishness is included, but it’s always written off as the effects of drugs and alcohol and a single-minded pursuit of art. Here, while drugs and alcohol are present, they are not the cause of the problem. The movie barely addresses them (it even skips Dylan turning the Beatles on to weed), and never lays the blame for Bob’s demeanor on the dope. In fact it’s clear Dylan is a dick from quite early on, once he gets comfortable in the folk scene. This is just who he is, an element that he carries over from his mysterious and obfuscated past. Perhaps this is one of the greatest insights we get into who Bob Dylan is: an asshole and a contrarian.

It would be possible for a film with a main character like that to be insufferable, but the casting of Timothee Chalamet elevates this movie to another level. His performance is all-time tier; tasked with portraying a guy whose voice is very notable and also often parodied, Chalament manages to make Dylan’s speech feel… if not natural, like it’s actually coming from a living person. When I say “if not natural” that’s because it’s never clear how much of the way Dylan talks is real and how much of it is performance, and it’s possible Dylan himself has long since forgotten. At any rate, Chalamet’s mimicry extends to singing; the movie is wall-to-wall musical performances, mostly of songs I have been listening to for fifty years, and Chalamet is frankly astonishing when he sings.

But what makes Chalamet’s performance most remarkable is the physicality he brings to the role. From the way he puts on sunglasses to how he sits on a stool onstage at Gerde’s Folk City to the contempt in his eyes as he looks out at the Newport ‘65 crowd, Chalamet embodies Dylan in a way that feels almost arcane. There’s an uncanniness in how Chalamet submerges himself into this character, and a real fearlessness in the way that he fully inhabits the kind of fuckboi confidence that Dylan had. In the last twelve or so months Chalamet has been spectacular as Willy Wonka, Paul Atreides and now Bob Dylan - frankly a run for the ages. We’re going to be talking about Chalamet’s 2024 for a long time.

He gets some powerful assists from his costars. Edward Norton in particular is phenomenal as Pete Seeger, really capturing the guy’s corny heart and the way he is torn between supporting Dylan and being horrified at how his mentee is destroying his festival. Norton’s Seeger presents a valuable lodestar by which we can track the growth and change of Dylan; at the beginning of the movie he feels like a good-hearted standard bearer of tradition but by the end he comes across like a hopelessly hokey has-been. There’s an incredible scene (utterly fictional, a demand that Dylan made before he would sign off on the script. He wanted a phony scene in there) where a hep rock star Dylan is jamming with a (again, fictional) old Black blues legend and they’re vibing while poor Pete is plucking on his banjo as these two do raunchy, deep blues.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. Barbaro does not look like Baez but I believe she captures something ineffable about the singer. There’s a rock solid self-understanding that she has, which is what makes her romance with Dylan feel tragic - she knows better. Apparently Barbaro does her own singing in the film which is amazing, because she’s hitting Baez notes while also capturing the Queen of Folk’s full-throated style.

I wish I could be as effusive about Elle Fanning as Sylvie. The character is really Suze Rotolo, Dylan asked Mangold to not use her name, but it’s simply her. She’s the woman on the iconic cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, one of the all-time great and romantic New York City photographs. The problem I have with Sylvie is perhaps not Fanning’s fault; the movie seems to need to make her lighter and less consequential than she was, perhaps to contrast her with the more solid Baez. But this is selling Rotolo short, and the movie doesn’t give her the props she deserves. She’s the one who introduced Dylan to Rimbaud, she’s the one who got him into social justice and set him on the path to the protest songs that would make him famous. And she got pregnant and had an abortion, an incident the film simply skips past. Rotolo lived her life in the shadow of that photograph, and the way it made her look kind of girlishly subservient to Bob, but I think she was a titan in his life, and I don’t believe this film does her justice.

Mangold directs the movie in a largely restrained style, but he’s fantastic at bringing us back to early 60s New York. There’s verisimilitude in every frame of the picture, and the period trappings don’t feel like flashing signs trying to alert us to the era but rather just the stuff that’s there, in the background. I think it helps that until the early 2000s the life of the downtown Bohemian in New York was largely unchanged; watching the film I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the dingy apartments we see are now multi-million dollar condos.

I did not expect to like A Complete Unknown. I had been rolling my eyes at the set photos and the trailers. I was baffled that James Mangold, a guy who does not shout ‘understands brilliance’ to me, was directing. The involvement of Dylan made me skeptical as well - very often when the living person consults you end up with sanitized hagiography. To bring it back to Todd Haynes, the reason Velvet Underground is such a masterpiece is that David Bowie didn’t like what he was doing and refused to let him use his songs. That forced Haynes to become clever, but it’s usually the death knell on a musical biopic - you need those songs. Nobody wants to watch a Dylan movie where he’s only singing traditionals.

In this case, though, it worked. Dylan is not precious about how he’s portrayed, except that he would like to always keep it kinda cloudy and uncertain (thus his demand that Mangold add a completely fictional scene). And the fact that Mangold isn’t the guy you might think of as understanding brilliance works because he never tries to depict it, he just shows us what it was like to be in the radius of its glow. Finally, the idea of just doing a four year chunk of Dylan’s life allows the movie to avoid a lot of the biopic fast forwarding that makes them so herky jerky. Sure, there’s still some of that here, but the condensed time period allows more focus. And yeah, there are a couple of clanging biopic moments (a guy taking off his sunglasses, looking right into the camera and saying “I’m Al Kooper” is one such moment) but the movie keeps them to a minimum.

I did not expect to like A Complete Unknown but I really, really did. Again - it’s no I’m Not There. By any means. But for what it is, A Complete Unknown truly works, and as a dork who is interested in this time period it scratched a lot of my itches in regard to minutia. Most of all the movie is held together by the unbelievable Chalamet performance; should he win an Oscar for this one I don’t want to hear any complaining. He earned it.