A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (James Mangold 2024)

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TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET IN A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

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Bob Dylan: the first flowering of a songwriting genius and American icon

Mangold's sort-of-biopic about Bob Dylan, though it may superficially seem to hit some standard beats of the genre, happily avoids the usual wearying cradle-to-grave trajectory, narrowing its focus to the extraordinary four years of exceptional creativity when Dylan became Dylan and rose to stardom and telling its story largely through the songs Bob wrote. That is a blessing, a joy, and an enlightenment to Bob Dylan newbies.

It begins with Bob's arrival in Greenwich Village in January of 1961, four months short of age twenty, and ends shortly after his dramatic introduction of an electric band at the end of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Controversy surrounds this event. Mangold, writing the script with Jay Cocks adapting Elijah Wald's 2015 bookDylan Goes Electric!, fudges around a bit with dates and invents moments to clarify their view of how things went. Hopefully a younger audience will be fascinated by this most talented, mysterious, and poetic of American singer songwriters and want to know more. Bob Dylan's art is a gift that goes on giving.

As in Mangold's previous music tale of Johnny Cash Walk the Line (2005), the artists all do their own playing and singing. Even more so because we not only have Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, who spent five years learning how to play the guitar and harmonica (he plays keyboard too), but also a terrific Edward Norton as folk music overlord Pete Seeger singing and playing the banjo, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash guitaring and belting "Walk the Line," and last but by no means least Monica Barbaro as the silver-toned John Baez. There's a lot of music, a lot of Bob Dylan songs.

There are already many books, plays, films about or featuring Bob Dylan. Why this one? Because it brings this key period to life as nothing else has. Events - though Bob eschews politics and timeliness - are whirling around, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, when for a moment the world was perched on the edge of nuclear war, and the assassination of JFK, red-baiting and defiant leftist activity; and the civil rights movement. More momentous here, there is the future of folk music, which blossomed enormously at this time, but then fluttered back into the background, never destined to be the dominant genre.

Things start with Bob, after his arrival in New York's West Village from Hibbing, Minnesota where he had grown up as "Robert Zimmerman," briefly doubling back from New York to New Jersey to see his idol, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), now in a hospital bedridden and speechless, dying of Huntington's chorea. There, conveniently, he also meets another figure he knows well, Pete Seeger. So when he sings his "Song to Woody," it's for both of them, but Seeger who can tell of it.

The first hour of the film, though sort of biopic stuff, nonetheless flows enjoyably and seamlessly from beat to beat, the editing excellent here, punctuated by iconic and always thematically relevant early Dylan classics, the recreation of the costumes and scenes of the period precise but unobtrusive. In the Village Bob meets Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who stands in for the singer's most important girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who was well-versed in not only folk music but politics, and he starts living with her on West Fourth Street. Emerging from the crowd of folk singers who filled Lower Manhattan cafes at the time, he gains a manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). After getting to play at a major Village venue, through the sponsorship of music-producing great John Hammond (David Alan Basche), he makes his first album for Columbia, mainly of covers, and goes on to bigger venues and, by the second album, pop stardom.

The famous early original Bob Dylan songs, which truly emerged only in the second album, delightfully reveal Dylan's then continual outpouring of poetic, meaningful, sometimes mystifying lyrics that was breathtaking and, Bob has since confirmed, show a genius of invention unique to him only at that one brilliant period of frenzied creativity. The film keeps the songs flowing for us, with Chalamet belting them out convincingly, imitating the urgent, reedy twang.

Chalamet hasn't quite the real Bob Dylan's edge or the quality that made his early performances electric despite the limited voice. Nor can Monica Barbaro, or for that matter, anyone, echo Joan Baez's "achingly pure soprano." But when the two actors play together, the disparity vanishes. Their best moment comes when Joan has a sleepover with Bob in Sylvie's apartment when she's away in Italy and Joan joins Bob in his undershorts on the bed to sing a rough draft of his iconic "Blowin' in the Wind." This is as good a depiction of artistic creation, erotic and youthful, as you'll ever get on film.

In between the musical highlights something has to be happening. It's mainly the revelation that Dylan is unfair to both Sylvie/Suze and Joan and that he is an asshole. As Owen Gleiberman says in his Variety review: this film is "ruthlessly honest about what an obsessive artist is really like." You'd kind of need to be an asshole, and a genius as well, to go from "complete unknown" to being essentially a rock star and America's acknowledged greatest songwriter (his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan Johnny Cash's "most prized possession") in the space of around two and a half years. (There's an acclaimed memoir by Suze Rotolo of these years, as well as Dylan's own 2004 Chronicles: Volume One.)

What was happening was an explosion of folk music, something that started in the late fifties - that crashed, symbolized by Bob Dylan's embrace of a band with ace electric guitarists (which he wasn't), electric keyboard, and organ. The complexity of this "betrayal" is only hinted at here, its intensity magnified or concentrated in a single moment. We see with fame Bob felt corralled into repeating himself. He would never do that, especially not at this time of exploding creativity and self-creation. The bad guy gets to be Pete Seeger, who later (2004, age 84) claimed his desire to take an axe and cut the cord on "Ain't Goin' to Work on Maggie's Farm No More" was due only to the poor sound quality on that Newport set. Sometimes the facts are too complicated to make good movie scenes.

Joan Baez is another villain because she kicks Bob out of her place, feeling used by him. They also were in love for a while, but his songwriting came first. Maybe this also will be a message for the young: art is a stern mistress, and can be rough on girlfriends or boyfriends.

The triumph of electric or of folk rock over traditional folk music - "You won, Bob," declares Joan afterwards - comes with that cacophonous performance. You can watch the 2005 PBS two-part series (208 minutes) directed by Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home to find out more details of what happened; it has interviews with many of the figures involved, includng Bob and Joan. The sound is glorious in "Ain't Goin' to Work," but ear-splitting for acoustc folkies. Bob did get persuaded to come back to mollify the now divided crowd with a solo accoustic guitar rendition of the sweetly innocuous "Mr. Tambourine Man").

You should also watch D.A. Pennebaker's extraordinary 1967 slice-of-life English tour documentary of Dylan touring and being brilliant, a rising star, and an asshole: Don't Look Back. In the 2014 Sight & Sound poll critics voted the latter the joint ninth best documentary film of all time. If you want to see the best footage of Dylan after this period, Scorsese's 2019 doc Rolling Thunder Review. Bob Dylan is forever. A Complete Unknown is an exciting addition to the collection: it recreates a pivotal moment of American musical history, and everyone gives their all, especially Timothée Chalamet, who can be justifiably proud of his dedicated and brilliant performance.

A Complete Unknown, 141 mins., had no festival showings. It premiered in Los Angeles on Nov. 20. 2024 and in New York on Dec 14. It opened in the US Dec. 25, and will open in numerouis other countries in Jan. 2025. Metacritic rating: 7̶3̶%̶.̶. 70%.