In one of the many glowing and highly textured segments that make up “A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s oddly captivating drama about the beginnings of Bob Dylan, we see Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who have had a musical and romantic relationship, do a duet at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. They’re singing Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and their voices blend together so well that it becomes a euphoric sound like a beam of sunshine. For the most part, Mangold allows this song to run through its entirety as he does with many other numbers in “A Complete Unknown” just turning them into literal story elements of his film.
This digit is a glittering illusion, but some of it is the drama that unfolds beneath the surface. Baez, at this point, has had enough of Dylan. He’s a moody, self-centered folk rock star beatnik poet, who always puts himself in the middle of things (but somehow looks like he’s too hip to be there). And since Joan herself, with her shaky soprano voice, is a fierce competitor and a celebrity in her own right she’s no longer willing to be seen as an accessory for Dylan. The song they are singing reflects their feelings about one another (“It ain’t me, babe,/It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe”); however, they perform it with such intensity that makes it seem like a love song. (Elle Fanning, who also appears as Bob’s other lover in this movie gets so caught up in the energy between the two performers that she cries and turns away from the stage.) Folk music is grounded in love for the earth however what Dylan and Baez sing about at that moment amounts to narcissism: new world order coming up. That scene causes your heart to explode out of your chest while simultaneously making your brain spin around its axis hence why you feel like your head spins even as your heart bursts.
It is a drama of shabby naturalism “A Complete Unknown”, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. However, the feel the effect is that of a musical. This might be true of any classic rock biopic one would think, but in this case, it really is about Dylan and his music because of its beautifully haphazard song-cycle structure. Every new song is a dramatic episode like Dylan performing “Masters of War” in the Gaslight Cafe just after the Cuban Missile Crisis or trying out “Blowin’ in the Wind” with Baez in his living room or singing “The Times They Are A-Changin‘” at Newport where by the end, the audience sings along as if it was just another tune they knew.
He wanders from cramped bohemian apartments to recording studios to concert stages to chic parties, always returning to the colorful squalor of Greenwich Village (played by a not-very-convincing Jersey City), connecting up with whoever’s convenient to him Dylan; played by Chalamet with a frog in his throat and an ornery sly quietude that’s so authentic it disarms and then floors you.
He is quick to develop romantic relationships and equally quick to end them. This may happen because he loves his music too much. Dylan’s songs, which he jots down in notepads often at night, define and devour him. This film also touches on that primal force in “A Complete Unknown” that speaks to what Dylan created at that time with songs that would be remembered eternally and seemed to roll from the ages themselves. So, when we see a kind of ‘ladies man’ Bob Dylan, this adds more power to the movie. It speaks so truthfully about how boring an artist who goes all out can be.
In 1961, we first meet him. He is a nineteen year old boy hitchhiking from Minnesota. Arriving in NY City on a cold winter day wearing his cap, coat and scarf with a backpack and guitar case strapped to his back he heads straight to the hospital in NJ where Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is bedridden and unable to speak as he has Huntington’s disease. In the room there is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), Guthrie’s friend, who Bob looks at pensively before entering. But he was bowled over; it was because of Guthrie’s lilting everyman-drawl music that he began doing what he does.
The moment Dylan starts strumming his guitar for “Song to Woody”, something very special happens and I can’t stress this enough. Chalamet sings with a nasal, slightly clenched voice that carries an authority comparable to his gaze; he chants them like an incantation and in that instant becomes Bob Dylan. The voice, the gritty candor, the spiritual toughness turning liquidly into something musical it all lies within this song.
Not much talking from Chalamet’s Bob; he likes his words brief and meaningful. However, that is only because he has already cut through all the bull about communication in his mind. He doesn’t really need it. He’s hooked something else which is more timeless. And Dylan’s prickly charisma, with its half-formed, opposite matter, between-the-lines character is well-portrayed by Chalamet. It is an engrossing performance grounded in Dylan and equally importantly in movie logic itself. We stare at this young mystery man who lights up a room when he sings, and like everyone around him we want to know what makes him tick.
Mangold and Jay Cocks have developed the script in such a way that all the points covered by a usual biopic are there: how Dylan, at Folk City, captivated early-’60s Village audiences as well as The New York Times; his push-pull bond with Baez and the gentler connection he forms with Fanning’s politically-inclined Sylvie (the film’s Suze Rotolo equivalent); Grossman’s role as a cunning manager who outwits him; his friendship with Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), a young country artiste who would eventually catalyze to bad-boy acts of Dylan, and Seeger “played on spot” by Norton as mischievously twinkly-eyed, genuinely folksy political utopian saint.
Folk music may be steeped in Bob Dylan but he is no folk purist. He foresees what is happening that Seeger does not: the new pop audience going gaga over itself. (That narcissism will kill off Seeger’s dream of proletarian exceptionalism.) The story A Complete Unknown tells is about how Dylan departs from folk ‘purity’ because his music begins to open up into something still more beautiful, stronger, grander: expressing back to the world seen around him.
That is the reason why he goes electric. It will upset the true believers, such as Newport Folk Festival organizer-guru Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz). Dylan’s destiny as an artist was to go into unchartered territory and he did it by creating some of the most thrillingly propulsive rock ‘n’ roll ever recorded (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) and some of the most sublime (“Like a Rolling Stone”).
Martin Scorsese’s great 2005 documentary “No Direction Home” covered this transformation brilliantly. However, something that the documentary didn’t capture, which “A Complete Unknown” does- tethered to Chalamet’s haunting performance now hooded, now open, now despairing, now powered by rebel vibes is the anguish in Dylan’s heart and its personal cost on him. He needed to do more than confront an audience of screaming betrayed fans at Newport in order to make this change in his music and in the world. He had to stare down cosmic forces that told him no and replace doubt with faith. This is what his music always was: sound of belief lighting up darkness. With Dylan’s journey from darkness to light captured through watching “A Complete Unknown”, we share in his pilgrimage.
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