Review: A Complete Unknown

Walking out of A Complete Uknown and into the streets of New York City, not far from where Bob Dylan tramped about in his vagabond days of the 1960s, I felt empty and unsatisfied. Far from unlocking the secrets of the widely heralded singer-songwriter's heart, co-writer/director James Mangold's biographical drama keeps the man behind the legend and lyrics a mystery. But as I've gotten distance from that night, I've come to appreciate in reflection that this was precisely Mangold's purpose.

Dylan's lyrics in songs like "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Blowin' in the Wind" spoke to his generation and generations to follow. Now 83, he is still a massive influence, not just on folk music but also rock and American music as a whole. Because so many relate to his lyrics, we like to think we could relate to him. As we do with all celebrities whose work we admire or whose personas we envy, we yearn to confirm that they are who we imagine, and in some way are like us. And yet, they don't owe us this interiority. Dylan, even in his decades of fame, even as he chaotically tweets, is still — after 60 years in the spotlight — an unknown in many ways.

The title of this film, pulled from Dylan's lyrics for "Like a Rolling Stone," warns audiences at the outset. A Complete Unknown, despite its immersive and rigorous re-creation of the 1960s folk era and a star-studded cast committed to capturing the specifics of luminaries like Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, and Joan Baez, refuses to play by the expectations of a standard Hollywood biopic by demystifying its subject. From the first scene to the finale, Dylan (as portrayed by Timothée Chalamet) is a man who is of the people and yet apart from them. He refuses to be held down by social norms, romantic obligations, genre conventions, or community pressures. Perhaps he is sincere. Perhaps his mystique is a pose. Perhaps we don’t really want to know.

Adapted from Elijah Wald's book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, Mangold's movie begins in 1961 New York City, where a scrawny, scraggly man struts through Manhattan's downtown streets, a newspaper clipping in his hand. Bob Dylan (Chalamet) is seeking out the hospice where his idol, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), idles, partially paralyzed and voiceless but not alone. Tracing him to Jersey, Dylan comes upon another folk star, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who not only walks the walk of singing political songs but also defends them against a government terrified of the voice of its people.

The three become fast friends, the thrumming of their connection as instant and enchanting as the song Dylan plays to impress his heroes. Soon, he'll find not only his place in the folk scene and Greenwich Village but also in the bed of a beautiful artist and activist called Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). (She is based on Dylan's ex Suze Rotolo, who is pictured along the musician on 1963's album cover for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.) But once Dylan hits his groove, the film launches forward several years to 1965, when he's an established megastar whose emerging interest in electric guitar threatens to outrage his fanbase at the Newport Folk Festival, and his early allies.

Timothée Chalamet is perfectly earnest yet irritating as Bob Dylan.

This, too, is the point. Whether flirting with Sylvie or playing for Woody, young Bob is devotedly constructing his own mythology. To his fellow male musicians, this is easily accepted; the construction of his stage persona is as valid as his scribbling lyrics or building his band. However, Dylan's female lovers suffer the friction where fiction meets real life. (...)

Because Mangold's script binds his audience to a protagonist who willfully distances himself from everyone, it's essential that the supporting players erupt with the emotions Bob could never dare express. Norton, Fanning, and Barbaro do so in a symphony of feelings, which carry the film. (...)

Each of these performances masterfully fleshes out these figures so they exist beyond their connection to Dylan. You can see how they tie together, how it hurts when he cuts that tie, but also that each is a tapestry even without him. This, above all else, makes A Complete Unknown remarkable, setting it apart from countless dramas about an abusive (and always male) creative genius whose bad behavior is effectively shrugged off as the cost of art.

by Kristy Puchko, Mashable |  Read more:

Image: Searchlight Pictures; Wikipedia

[ed. Don't know about Chalamet as Dylan (although he did spend five years preparing for the role), but always had an interest in Suze Rotollo, who died in 2011. Very complex woman. See also: Memoirs of a Girl From the East Country (O.K., Queens) (NYT); and, Bob and Suze: Words of meeting, words of parting (Peter White).]

***

"They lived together in a small apartment on West Fourth Street and fed each other’s ravenous hunger for meaning. “We created this private world,” Ms. Rotolo recalled over lunch in an Italian restaurant on Waverly Place. “We were searching for poetry, and we saw that in each other. We were so ultrasensitive, both of us. That’s why it was a good relationship, but also why it was difficult.”

Mr. Dylan has been a gnomic figure for so long that it’s sometimes hard to recollect the Chaplinesque aspect that characterized him in his youth. His boundless enthusiasm proved a delight for the more reserved Ms. Rotolo. For his part Mr. Dylan soaked up her passion for the likes of William Blake, Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Rimbaud; he inscribed a paperback edition of Byron’s poems to her “Lord Byron Dylan.” Equally important, her political activism, particularly in the civil rights movement, spurred his thinking and writing about those issues. (...)

Their romance, then, began on the basis of an equality that became impossible to sustain. She would soon feel overwhelmed by the obsessive attention the world focused on Mr. Dylan. Having made the symbolic journey across the East River to discover herself and what she might become, she felt lost once again, reduced to being Mr. Dylan’s chick and urged even by her most well-intentioned friends to accommodate her life in every way to his genius.

In approaching Ms. Rotolo about doing the book, Gerry Howard, an editor at Broadway Books, mentioned “Minor Characters,” a memoir by Joyce Johnson, who had been Jack Kerouac’s lover at a similar stage in his career. “I’m a great fan of ‘Minor Characters,’ and I thought Suze stood in exact relation to Dylan as Joyce Johnson did to Kerouac,” Mr. Howard said. “They were present at liftoff and then had to live in the backwash of all that.”