For All the Complete Unknowns
The prince has become a punk.
Grade: A
“I’m not dead yet,” Bob Dylan could (wrongly) complain about the new film about him: A Complete Unknown. Instead he tweeted:
There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric - a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.
It's good Dylan didn’t complain. He’d look like a fool if he did.
It's usually a mistake to make a film about anyone who’s still alive. A filmmaker can’t display an entire portrait of a person when the portrait’s not finished yet. Anyone who’s alive is still painting themselves and they’re only finished once they’re dead. What perspective on Trump would a biopic made before 2016 give you of the man? 2016 was a big year for Dylan too. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. See how one year’s strokes over the canvas of someone’s life can change the picture of them we see.
But director James Mangold hasn’t made a Bob Dylan biopic. He’s made a biopic about a Bob Dylan. Mangold hasn’t tried to cram all the eighty-plus years of Dylan’s life that he isn’t done living yet into one film. He’s focused on the four years, 1961-65, where the young Bob Dylan becomes the most famous folk musician ever and then throws it all away to become something else. As Mangold explained in an interview with The Australian, his approach was to locate a “segment of [Dylan’s] life that has a story sense to it - a beginning, middle and an end.” This isn’t the story of the whole Bob Dylan. His story doesn’t have an ending yet. This is the story of the Bob Dylan who “tramp[s] all the way from Minnesota” to New York to meet his idol, folk singer Woody Guthrie, is embraced by his hero’s peers, becomes their angel-faced drum major, only to turn against them and become their “Judas” when he swaps his wooden guitar for an electric one. That Bob Dylan has a beginning, middle and end. As Dylan said, Chalamet doesn’t play him but another him. It’s a him whose story is done and can be told in full.
Aside from Bob Dylan still being alive, A Complete Unknown had to overcome another problem: its star. How could Timothee Chalamet play Bob Dylan? That’s like Kenneth Branagh playing Elvis, but he does it and he does it well. Chalamet’s glittering, youthful incandescence takes a beatnik turn. He talks with a boy’s chipper tones mixed with a heavy drawl as he walks about behind dark sunglasses and getting mad at those who want him to just sing “Blowin’ in the Wind for the rest of [his] god-damn life.” Where he once resembled Di Caprio, now Chalamet looks a lot like James Dean. The prince has become a punk.
What emerges from the story of the Bob Dylan he plays is that you can meet your heroes, becomes friends with them, even bed with them and then even outgrow them. The film begins with Dylan trekking to Jersey to meet Guthrie. In its middle, he becomes pen pals with Johnny Cash and sleeps with Joan Baez. At the end, on the eve of Dylan performing electric at the Newport Folk Festival, Pete Seeger asks him to please, please not betray the folk music community that’s come to worship him as their standard bearer and please perform his good, old folksy songs, and Dylan asks Seeger if Seeger’s even heard any of the music Seeger doesn’t want Dylan to play. Chalamet begins the film as one small figure carrying a guitar in his hand and pack on his back and walking amongst the high rises of New York. The film’s title appears over the wide shot of him arriving in New York and even the title’s shrimpy and nondescript: A Complete Unknown in small, white, and plain font in the shot’s centre. When Dylan takes that guitar out and plays and more and more people listen to his music, he comes to fill every shot. He was a complete unknown but then he’s the figure on stage the spotlight cuts around and turns into a glittering silhouette. You, me, and all the other complete unknowns out there can do the same.
By zooming in on one cut of Dylan’s life, Mangold has not only overcome the limitations of the biopic but made the film that may inspire the next complete unknown to pick up their guitar, or even their pen or paint brush, and take their place in that spotlight. This is a film for all the complete unknowns.