Timothée Chalamet has rightly earned plaudits for his portrayal of Bob Dylan, and there also many other strong performances by, for example, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, a character who plays a big part in the film. It follows the D.A. Pennebaker directed documentary “Don’t Look Back” in 1967 which focused on Dylan’s controversial 1965 tour of England and a different kind of biopic altogether, “I’m Not There”, from 2007 which took a prismatic approach exploring six aspects of Dylan’s life and music through six different characters. “A Complete Unknown” is more factually based and covers the period of Dylan’s career from his early days meeting Pete Seeger and visiting his hero Woody Guthrie in Greystone sanatorium.
The film rouses emotions and is well played. The change in Dylan from a shy, deep-thinking character to a more complex and aloof individual as he finds it difficult to deal with success and ‘celebrity’ after his breakthrough album “The Freewheeling Bob Dylan” in 1963, is well portrayed. This culminates, of course, in his uncompromising conversion to electric music which divided opinion so much in the final setting of the film, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
However, I do have a number of qualms about it. Why use a limited source material as its basis, and one book in particular when nobody outside The Beatles has been more written about and documented? Leaving aside a more minor point about Suze Rotolo’s name being changed to Sylvie Russo (at Dylan’s request), why the need to change the true story when in itself it is larger than life? Of course, this is done for dramatic effect and to be fair to director James Mangold the script was read through with and signed off by Dylan himself with the words, “Go with God” (of course, the final cut is not known at that time).
But I can’t really understand Mangold’s comment “The dates don’t matter so much” in the film. The appearances of Johnny Cash are particularly troublesome: my understanding is that (and this is by Dylan’s own recollection) that Dylan and Cash had met as early as 1962 and certainly not at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival as the film suggests (after an exchange of letters). The final moments of the film are disappointing with a drunken Cash staggering around outside their hotel the morning after the calamitous reactions by some parts of the audience and some of the organisers after Dylan and his band’s insistence on playing an electric set at high volume. Then Cash manages to hit two other cars in adjacent spaces in the car park while trying to reverse out, but seems totally unphased by this. Whether or not anything like that this even happened it comes across as rather farcical and adds absolutely nothing to the film. Also, the shout of ‘Judas’ in protest at Dylan’s ‘electric conversion’ came during a tour of England and not at the Newport Folk Festival. There are also mixed opinions about the reactions of Pete Seeger to Dylan’s musical epiphany but I’m afraid to say that Dylan’s attitude towards Seeger becomes increasingly disrespectful as the film wears on: I have no idea why Dylan would want to be portrayed in that way, unless of course it was authentic.
The ending is inconclusive, Dylan riding off into the sunset, almost with a shrug of the shoulders. So “A Complete Unknown” is a film that anyone remotely interested in Bob Dylan’s life and music will want to see but still I think there is another film to be made, perhaps continuing the story or one covering more of Dylan’s highly creative and most fascinating life. We’ve gone down the road quite aways, but no quite reached our destination yet!
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