Even though he is the subject for dozens of books, released 40 albums (not counting the 17 volumes in the “Bootleg Series” and the nearly 20 officially released live albums), and has appeared in or been the subject of a dozen movies, Bob Dylan remains one of the most emotionally opaque performers. Arguably one of the reasons his career has lasted more than seven decades, it makes him a tough subject for a biopic.
Thankfully, James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown” manages to avoid most of the problems that dog biopics. Mangold and his cowriter Jay Cocks made the smart decision to limit the story to the time between Dylan’s arrival in New York from Minnesota in 1961 and his controversial appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where, playing a Fender Stratocaster and backed by members of the Butterfield Blues Band, he declared his independence from the folk scene that nurtured him.
It’s also somewhat inoculated from fans decrying the movie’s factual and chronological liberties by the fact that Dylan is among rock music’s most enthusiastic self-mythicists. When he first arrived in New York, Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota became Bob Dylan, itinerant folksinger, and told all kinds of tall tales about his background (in the movie, he insists he travelled with a carnival and learned to play guitar by watching the cowboys), his memoir “Chronicles, Volume One” has enough fabrication to be filed under fiction and Martin Scorsese’s documentary of 1976’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” includes a fair number of outright lies, most memorably actress Sharon Stone’s tale of her flirtation with Dylan. As (an unmasked) Dylan told Scorsese in the Netflix movie, “When someone is wearing a mask, he’s going to tell you the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” It’s hard to complain about the script’s ahistoric inventions when its subject doesn’t feel the need to hew to the truth.
“A Complete Unknown” is somewhat inoculated from fans decrying the movie’s factual and chronological liberties by the fact that Dylan is among rock music’s most enthusiastic self-mythicists … It’s hard to complain about the script’s ahistoric inventions when its subject doesn’t feel the need to faithfully hew to the truth.
Their other smart move was to make the film more about the Greenwich Village Folk scene of the early 1960s. Pete Seeger becomes Dylan’s Jiminy Cricket (or, on a more high-minded note, the Virgil to Dylan’s Dante), a guide and his conscience. As the blacklisted Seeger, Edward Norton gives a wonderfully nuanced performance that steals the show. His Seeger is a gentle but determined soul who has devoted his life to folk music who immediately notices Dylan’s talent and sees him as the conduit to make folk contemporary. Monica Barbaro is fine as a steely Joan Baez who gradually becomes tired with Dylan’s increasingly high-handed attitude, and Dan Fogel is a dead ringer for Dylan’s blustery manager, Albert Grossman. Elle Fanning does what she can with the thankless role of Sylvie Russo, an obvious stand-in for Dylan’s girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo. Her name was changed at Dylan’s request, but Mangold and Cocks take advantage of it, deploying her as a composite character who shows up anytime they need to show Dylan’s sometimes cruel treatment of women. (It’s amusing to see SNL’s James Austin Johnson — who does a wonderful Dylan impression — show up as an MC at Gerde’s Folk City’s open mic night.)
At the center of “A Complete Unknown” is Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. It’s a stunning performance, not just dramatically, but musically (like Norton, Barbaro and Boyd Holbrook — who plays Johnny Cash — Chalamet does his own singing and playing). But there’s something missing. Chalamet looks and sounds like Dylan, managing to capture the change in Dylan’s rough-hewn singing on his debut to his more mature, controlled Dylan of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” But there’s something too soft, almost too engaging about his performance. Yes, he’s charismatic and yes, he wrote incredible songs, but there were many others working the Village clubs you could say the say the same things; there’s little in Chalamet’s Dylan that helps you understand why he was the break-out star. He’s less mercurial than unformed. He’s too much of a naif for someone who was determined to become a star; once he becomes famous, the anger (along with the increased amphetamine intake, which is more or less glossed over) that ran through Dylan’s music and life is reduced to mere petulance. It’s hard to imagine his Dylan tearing into a Time magazine reporter as seen in “Don’t Look Back.”
Thankfully, “A Complete Unknown’s” doesn’t try to recreate famous moments. You don’t see Rotolo (oops, sorry, Russo) and Dylan photographed arm-in-arm for the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” or the 1964 British tour chronicled in D.A. Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back.” While some of the scripts inventions — transferring the audience calls of “Judas!” and Dylan’s instruction to his band to “play it loud!” from the famous Manchester Free Trade Hall concert in 1966 to the Newport show a few months earlier — make sense, but some of them —Dylan riding in a car with Seeger and turning the car’s radio to a Little Richard track, leading to a discussion about folk versus pop — are the clumsiest kind of foreshadowing. Chalamet and Norton play against each other wonderfully, whether Seeger joining Dylan to sing “When the Ship Comes In” at a party or having to deal with an arrogant Dylan who first cancels then shows up for Seeger’s local TV show then ignoring Seeger to play with the drunk and profane bluesman Seeger booked to replace him.
While “A Complete Unknown” is better than recent movies about musicians (“One Love” about Bob Marley; “Walk the Line,” about Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, also directed by Mangold; “Get on Up,” about James Brown) But like them, “A Complete Unknown” smooths out the life, making for a less interesting movie. You’re left with a movie whose title works two ways — a valiant effort with a blurry center.
