A Complete Unknown (Range Media Pictures, The Picture Company, Searchlight Pictures, Veritas Entertainment, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Wednesday, December 30) my good friend Cat Ortiz and I went to the Landmark Hillcrest Theatres (which are closing for good in just five days, alas) to see the new movie A Complete Unknown, a biopic about Bob Dylan in general and in particular the first four years of his major career, from his arrival as an unknown would-be folk singer from Hibbing, Minnesota (his home town) in 1961 to his scandalous performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, in which he played an electric guitar and played three songs (“Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”) with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The shocked reaction of the crowd – as if Dylan had abandoned the One True Faith of folk music and turned his back on equality and justice to chase commercial success – is well dramatized here (though the person in the audience who cried out “Judas!” was actually from a later Dylan concert in Manchester, England in 1966) – and so is Dylan’s return to safety when he walked off the stage and returned with an acoustic guitar to play “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” (When PBS showed a documentary of all Dylan’s appearances at the Newport Folk Festival, the audience hostility made a lot more sense. The performance was pretty mediocre; Dylan and the Butterfield band had obviously had too little time to rehearse, and audio engineers in 1965 had no idea how to mix a rock band “live” so vocals and instruments could be heard clearly instead of congealing into an unpleasant wash of sound. If you went to a rock concert in the 1960’s you expected that you’d have to play the band’s albums first just to have an idea of what the songs were about.) A Complete Unknown was directed and co-written by James Mangold, who’d already done a musical biopic, Walk the Line (2006), about Johnny Cash, who appears as a character in this movie too. (Joaquin Phoenix played Cash in Walk the Line and Boyd Holbrook plays him here.) His co-writer, Jay Cocks, used to review rock music for Time magazine.

As he’d done with Joaquin Phoenix playing Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, director Mangold had the actor who played Dylan, Timothée Chalamet, do his own singing and guitar playing, and he made that demand on the other actors playing musicians as well: Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, Joshua Henry as Brownie McGhee, Steve Bell as his performing partner Sonny Terry, and a stunning performance by Big Bill Morganfield (son of blues giant Muddy Waters, who was born McKinley Morganfield) as fictitious blues musician Jesse Moffette. I could have quibbles with the script – the closing credits contain a disclaimer that some of the incidents have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes, and I muttered under my breath, “You can say that again.” The film depicts Dylan signing with his first manager, Albert Grossman, before he got his contract with Columbia Records (it was really after), and shows both Grossman and Hammond scouting Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City. Hammond actually signed Dylan after another folk artist he’d signed, Carolyn Hester, brought him along to play harmonica on three songs on her album, and Hammond was struck by him and his playing and decided to give him an audition. The film also blames Hammond for Dylan’s first album being mostly covers of old folk and blues material – of its 13 songs, only two (“Talking New York” and “Song to Woody”) were Dylan originals – but the evidence is ambiguous and the Wikipedia page on Dylan’s first album describes him frantically listening to previously released folk albums by other artists searching for material. In fact, singer Dave Van Ronk (who’s depicted briefly in the movie and is played by Joe Tippett) complained that Dylan ripped off Van Ronk’s arrangement of the old New Orleans folk tune “House of the Rising Sun” for his first album after Van Ronk wanted to record it himself. Van Ronk said he could no longer perform the song once Dylan recorded it because people would think he was ripping it off Dylan. He got his revenge when British blues-rock singer Eric Burdon recorded “House of the Rising Sun” with his band, The Animals, and from then on Dylan found he couldn’t perform the song because people would think he was ripping it off of Eric Burdon! (The song is in A Complete Unknown performed by Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and quite frankly it makes more sense sung by a woman.)

Mangold and Cocks also muff the great story Al Kooper told about his participation as an organ player on “Like a Rolling Stone” (the Dylan classic that generated the titles for both this movie and Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary, No Direction Home). He showed up expecting to play guitar on the session, but during rehearsals he started noodling on the studio organ and Dylan liked what he heard and insisted Kooper play organ on the record. The producer, Tom Wilson (one of the few Black people who had that job for a major label, along with Clyde Otis at Mercury), didn’t like that idea. “He’s not even an organ player, he’s a guitar player.” “I don’t care,” Dylan said. “I like the organ. Turn it up.” The result was that Kooper made it to stardom as an organ player, and Tom Wilson got fired as Dylan’s producer and Bob Johnston took over production of the rest of the Highway 61 Revisited album. (We see a bit of that in the movie but not enough of it.) Also so much of the movie is dank and dreary-looking – Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael have a bad case of the past-is-brown syndrome, and when we finally get a bright outdoor scene at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, we sigh with relief. But what’s wrong with A Complete Unknown pales by comparison with what’s right with it, starting with Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Dylan. His impersonation of the young baby-faced Dylan is uncanny, and he catches the voice almost perfectly (though his vocals seemed less convincing during the closing credits sequence when we only heard them and didn’t see Chalamet’s utterly convincing visual performance as well). The script is also well constructed even though Dylan, like so many other artists, comes off as a heavy-duty asshole, casually having affairs with his girlfriend “Sylvie Russo” (Elle Fanning) – her real name was Suze Rotolo, and she was active in the civil-rights movement and supposedly introduced Dylan to Left-wing politics (though he’s already depicted as an admirer of Woody Guthrie, whom he visits in a hospital in New Jersey – Guthrie, who’s played in the movie by Scoot McNairy, suffered from Huntington’s disease and for the last years of his life lived in a hospital; his one source of joy was hearing aspiring singers like Dylan and Phil Ochs visit him and play his songs for him) while also pursuing an affair with Joan Baez. (The real Suze Rotolo refused permission to be depicted in the film, so Mangold and Cocks just called her something else – like the makers of the 1946 film The Jolson Story dealt with Jolson’s ex-wife Ruby Keeler’s refusal to let them depict her by calling her “Julie Benson.”)

I especially love the scene in which some of Dylan’s folkie friends find his scrapbooks from Minnesota, which “out” his real name, Robert Zimmerman. There’s a clipping in one of the scrapbooks advertising the “Winter Dance Party” tour of the Midwest in early 1959 featuring Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper – all of whom were killed in a plane crash. When Dylan received his Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 1992 he mentioned having seen Holly on that tour, though he didn’t mention that the Holly show he caught had been his next-to-last one, just a day and a half before Holly died. Between that and Dylan’s professed admiration in his Minnesota days for Bobby Vee (who actually was one of the local artists invited to fill in on the next stop on the Winter Dance Party tour after Holly, Valens and the Bopper were killed, and went on to record an album with Holly’s backup band, The Crickets) – he actually went around town telling people he was Bobby Vee – the point of this story was he’d always been interested in rock ‘n’ roll and it shouldn’t have been such a shock when he bought an electric guitar and started playing rock in public. Also the many shots of Dylan riding a motorcycle, often appallingly recklessly, make a lot more sense if you know that a year after the 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance, Dylan was involved in a severe motorcycle crash that nearly killed him and incapacitated him for a year and a half. A Complete Unknown is a haunting movie, especially for people like me who were alive in the 1960’s and lived the history. My mother introduced me to Dylan when she bought his album The Times They Are a-Changing in the mid-1960’s, and when she first played the opening track I had one of my apocalyptic reactions to the effect that my world would never be the same again; that hearing this voice would be a life-changing experience. (I had the same feeling when I first heard Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront,” David Bowie’s “Five Years,” Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up,” and more recently when I first heard the amazing country voice of Rose Maddox – and if you’ve never heard of Rose Maddox, just look her up on archive.org or YouTube and see if you don’t react to that killer voice the way I did.)

It’s always a challenge for an actor to play someone who’s been filmed as much as the real people this movie is about, and Chalamet, Norton and Barbaro all rise to the challenge. In fact, this is the first movie of Chalamet’s I’ve really warmed to; I didn’t like his breakthrough movie Call Me by Your Name (2017), though not because of his performance but because Armie Hammer’s character was so obviously a sexual predator and Chalamet his victim. And though Chalamet did well enough as Paul Atreides in the two Dune movies (so far) directed by Denis Villeneuve, I’d always imagined Paul as more butch than that. But he’s near-perfect as Bob Dylan, and he moves through the movie with power and authority even though he seems at first to be almost terminally naïve. Mangold and Cocks keep it ambiguous whether Dylan actually wanted and sought out stardom or just stumbled in to it, and one thing about the real Dylan that comes through in the movie is his refusal to be pinned down, to change abruptly whenever people thought they had him categorized. No sooner had Pete Seeger and the people at Broadside and Sing Out! magazines proclaimed him as the successor to Guthrie and Seeger as the next great Left-wing “message” songwriter than he made an entire album of non-political songs and, to make sure people got the point, called it Another Side of Bob Dylan. Though Dylan hasn’t done the wrenching physical changes David Bowie did, he’s certainly gone through as many phases, including his bizarre embrace of born-again Christianity in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and his more recent emergence as a crooner of 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s standards (at which he’s frankly terrible). But Bob Dylan remains a compelling figure in not only American but world culture (he was the first and so far only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, though true to form he didn’t attend the ceremony), and this movie does his remarkable story – or at least the crucial four years of it from 1961 to 1965 – justice.