A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024)

“A hard rain’s a-gonna fall” means something’s gonna happen.

I first heard Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) in high school. The all-American bum from the backcountry who roamed around and wandered his way into Greenwich Village by mistake—trailing after the dust and stover that his all-American bum hero Woody Guthrie reeks of, finding instead bohemians raising hell amongst themselves about Antonin Artaud and Herman Melville all day, getting into fights about Billie Holiday and Leon Trotsky all night. The raspy nasality in his voice, and the prose-like melodic subversions like he’s mooing beat poetry to passing pedestrians and dazed little kids inside a cow costume, were what were putting me off. It’s all flabby drivel passing for art, I thought, with the slight whiff of unawareness that he’s pleased with himself. The pompous damn fools, they told me he was a man, the legend.

Oh, but he was. When I got to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” I remember being immediately transfixed by it. It was different. I don’t want to give you lectures on the historical significance and the profound meaning and the this and the that, except to say that beyond all the stacks of words I was moved in a way that no single piece of lyrics ever, and seldom did again. It’s sprawlingly human, never condescendingly judgmental like “The Times They Are a-Changin’”, or excessively literal and obvious in its consciousness like “Blowin’ in the Wind”, or stinks of the textbook wisdom in “With God on Our Side”, or as repetitively slight as “Mr. Tambourine Man”. When you hear it, lines like “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it”, “I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing”, or “I met a young woman, her body was burning” were no longer just words and meanings. You are embroiled in its force.

The long verses bear witness to the absurdities of the world, made from half-truths and half-metaphors that are altogether more poetic and violent than any truth or metaphor alone. They build and they climb, and the sky’s the limit. Once you’re with the music, you’re no longer just listening to it: you respond with your whole body, feeling as if something’s trying to burst straight out from your guts, being blinded and deafened as the lightning strikes where you thought was only hopelessness and silence. Spring rain pouring down the sick and the poor, we make this very earth our heaven and hell. It’s secular gospel, fermented in primal reason. A human epic. I don’t know of a purer demonstration of lyricism.

When sleepless memories flooded all back as this lesser-known track was played for the trailer of A Complete Unknown, I had thought that James Mangold (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) might actually bring this off. It’s a bewilderingly elusive promise on second thought. Dylan’s persona is a little like Marlon Brando’s, in the sense that he has a theatre about him that’s all to himself. When you see him talk in interviews and documentaries, it’s not Robert Zimmerman who’s speaking and thinking, but a character, a make-belief who stole his name from a Welsh poet. He’s the American of Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway, who’s perpetually reinventing himself, shapeshifting according to circumstance, hiding behind an individual veneer, and constantly charging and turning in directions you didn’t know were there. It’s just about impossible to impersonate someone like him meaningfully, much less decipher him: he’s the “complete unknown”. In Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home (2005), Joan Baez confessed:

Bob is one of the most complex human beings I’ve ever met… I think at first I really tried to figure this guy out. No. I gave it up, and so I don’t know. I don’t know what he thought about, all I know is what he gave us.

An artist’s need for change was less foreign a subject. But the change from where? Where to? And why? A Complete Unknown isn’t so much a disgraceful failure that it doesn’t have an answer, but the answer is such that I wished it never had any to begin with. Growing up in the bluegrass, country, rockabilly and the R&B he heard on the radio and in the record shops, learning to play the songs all by ear, Dylan was never meant to be the folk hero that Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) were. Seeger breathed a kind of romantic fervour into incendiary materials. He sang and talked as straight as the flagstaff, with every note and syllable landing in as gracefully as Greg Louganis, and intoning as appealingly as John Reed was on paper. It’s obvious the protest songs that were so powerful and uplifting in Seeger’s voice, would just sound uncanny in Dylan’s. Topicality was just not in his nature.

It’s no wonder then that he responded more strongly with the dirtbag upright Woody Guthrie. He’s not only rawer and less refined; there’s an attitude of unfazed iconoclasm in him, and his ballads spoke of the common folk from their own point of view, not that of a well-intentioned activist. Still, there’s the moralising simple-mindedness in his songs that Dylan strived away from: he can’t help it. His sensibility was never singular. “Going electric” is not really so much him changing gears as he is growing, as an artist. It’s no question that the Dylan of “Desolation Row” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” is leagues ahead of the preachy “Masters of War” or the spiritually empty “Chimes of Freedom”, and it’s not a matter of folk vs. rock, acoustic vs. electric, individual vs. band, or politics vs. satire, as it is the need to follow creative instinct rather than trying to build on others.

The compositions on Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde were vigorous enough, but it’s his brushy poetry, acerbic free verse, trenchant wit, and shrewd repartee that transformed them into something sublime. He’s no longer just manifesting his perception of society. Now, he’s seeing past the surface world for what they are, and through his uncompromising subjectivity he satirizes them without losing his compassion; instead of making sense out of nonsense, he’s trying to retain his sanity by going insane against an insane world. From “The beauty parlour is filled with sailors, the circus is in town” to “My love she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence”, there’s an inexplicable excitement to his writings, elevated by his unpredictable inflections. It’s a little like watching those old René Clair farce comedies.

The movie was supposed to have tackled the conflict that’s risen from his evolution, between his endeavour at redefining himself and the resistance from the folk establishment on the Old Left. But it frames that conflict as little more than a disagreement in creative preference, with no understanding of a people’s entrusting of their ethos and aspirations—so much so that his songs were said to have tapped into the American collective unconscious, articulating what an entire generation had felt but couldn’t put into words (it was never just the folk world who resisted his change)—or an artist’s desire to break free of categories and restraints, which was misunderstood as selling out for commercial appeal. Like David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, and Björk after him, Dylan understood that he needed to constantly reimagine himself in different styles and qualities to really explore all the possibilities that were available to him. His energy and inspiration had to come from somewhere, and it can’t all be the same place.

But you’d never understand why he felt the need to change, why he otherwise couldn’t function as an artist, or why he was consequently willing to risk his love, friendships and fan base, when all that the movie was saying was: he’s fatigued at the mere mention of “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and now likes Johnny Cash better (who was himself grossly miscast, as Boyd Holbrook hasn’t an ounce of the engrossing depth in his voice and his flavor of congenial country-club intonation). But even in his fondness for Guthrie and Cash, we don’t get a sense of why he admires them, or how that is personal to him. We don’t know what their names mean to him. Genuine handwriting of Guthrie’s “I ain’t dead yet” from when Dylan paid him a visit at the hospital was instead printed on a hackneyed card in the movie. The film belittles Dylan’s roots in the folk world, which it understands so little of, as a rigid, narrow-minded obstacle he had to overcome. It’s giving the audience the impression that Dylan dumped them because they were annoying as hell. Alas, the price you have to pay when you dumbs down everything into baby food for mass consumption.

When the god-awful Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) announced to the entertainment world that music biopics are now in vogue, I wanted to hide under a desk and pray that those cashing in on the success of Bryan Singer’s Queen film will have more sensibility than just the commercialism of staccato-fake dazzles. So far, there hasn’t been any luck, and I hope I won’t get lectured on hogwash about how “the lord works in mysterious ways”. A Complete Unknown isn’t as repulsively distasteful as Bohemian Rhapsody or Elvis (2022), but it has inherited some of their worst traits. James Mangold is one of those studio directors that worked better with materials and franchises that weren’t their own. 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Logan (2017), and Ford v Ferrari / Le Mans ‘66 (2019) all began as someone else’s creative initiative, but it was Mangold himself who commissioned A Complete Unknown in 2020, based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric! Dylan himself was also involved as an informal counsel, which raises still more red flags: in biopics, the involvement of the subject depicted or their estates who had a vested interest in the creative side, almost always overshadow and undercut the filmmakers’ vision.

It’s Mangold’s tribute to the man, but he seemed so much more interested and preoccupied with reproducing his music and performances than exploring, or even merely showing, what made Bob Dylan. I mean who was he in the movie? A broke friend of Allen Ginsberg who stole all the Guthrie records he could find? A nightclub regular who competed with Dave Van Ronk and Maria Muldaur? No, he was just some handsome schmuck from the Midwest, no idea whether he listened to more Lead Belly or Bill Monroe, who randomly came up with masterpieces out of thin air, landing his gigs and signing his deals and, before you know it, he’s a star. See, it’s for those of us who weren’t born yesterday or lived under a rock our whole lives. Still, a mythologised, predestined fate right when he was in reality struggling to get by seemed a shameless cheat.

So often in biopics of artists, their brilliant artistry is assumed at the outset. When you’re shown an actor who’s playing a painter, and then you see the painting, your mind goes blank when you try to place them together in one picture; you don’t feel the connection between said artist and their art, and that’s not a question of how close the actor looks and behaves to the original. The story is almost always about how the artist achieves fame, and how they maintained or lost it. You know, the stuff that would interest an obituary profiler for the press release. You can’t get a sense of what went into their art, and their personal relation to it, or why millions responded to his art so strongly that they booed him offstage when he went the way of Buddy Holly. I mean, it’s a crime to not have even acknowledged the Symbolist poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine that Dylan was so enthralled by. It’s one of the things behind his deviations from the Guthrie-Seeger-esque literal songwriting for which he was known for in The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a-Changin’, and Another Side of Bob Dylan. Indeed, this movie could also have been called The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent: he’s such a savant that we don’t even know what his own words meant to him, or his followers. One could take relief from the fact that it only covers half a decade in a half-century-long career, but you have no illusions about the bravado piece of affectation that it all is. One greatest hit ends where you immediately start to wait for the next, you can tell that the movie is straining, and it’s the worst thing.

Mangold had unwisely used “Altman-esque” in a podcast last year to describe his vision for the project, and many took it to mean that it would be a naturalistic, ensemble depiction of a time and a place larger than any one individual like Dylan. Well, rest assured that the result was more soulless and colourless than even the investors had hoped. Mangold’s daydream about a Nashville (1975) transposition to the bohemian capital may have been a reaction to D.A Pennebaker’s cinéma vérité documentary Don’t Look Back (1967), which covers Dylan on and off stage in his 1965 UK tour. Part of the lifelikeness of Altman films, besides the fly-on-the-wall documentary aesthetics, was that look of chance, the sense that the overarching narrative (if any) was merely a front for vivid character portraits. Pennebaker’s film opened with Dylan randomly asking for the whereabouts of a cane—stuff that doesn’t contribute to anything else. We’re carried along with him throughout, casually whining “London Bridge Is Falling Down” with his crew while walking across an airport bridge, kicking back with Joan Baez with a room full of small talk, typing lyrics compulsively and playing Hank Williams songs or those of his that he’s still working on, putting up with groupies stalking and chasing after him, and outsmarting idiot reporters with patronising questions like “Do you care about what you sing?” and their endless ingratiating talk that’s much ado about nothing.

By contrast, A Complete Unknown was practically anything but Altman-esque. It’s too grand for the small talk and trivial things that gave us a way into Dylan’s world in Don’t Look Back and his own Eat the Document (1972). The Greenwich Village scene never came alive. It didn’t even amount to a background, only surface attractions. How many of the poets that Dylan knew even ended up in it? Did you see Chalamet’s Dylan engage with anybody in it like they’re a friend of his? The whole look of it is so false and manufactured from beginning to finish that you might just suffocate under all its muted colours and caricatured pedestrians and onlookers, who were never in focus. If Mangold had half the sensitivity for actors and acting that Altman had when he was at his worst, perhaps the cast wouldn’t be as wooden as if they’re all fighting drowsiness and paresis.

I wasn’t as sceptical of Timothée Chalamet as some people were. He has the freewheelin’ poise and flat charm that Dylan’s got. But he’s not a great method actor, and I wished he didn’t try as hard as he did here, draining out any odds there were of verisimilitude. There was no sign of the agonising self-consciousness he exhibits here in Call Me by Your Name (2017), Lady Bird (2017), Bones and All (2022), or even the period piece Little Women (2019). He has less conviction now as he was in the Dune (2021-24) movies and Wonka (2023) because he doesn’t channel himself into these roles the way he did for Luca Guadagnino and Greta Gerwig—he’s crawling into somebody else’s skin, which fits him like a straitjacket. And that somebody else here isn’t Dylan exactly, but a Dylan that’s reduced and pigeonholed for something more digestible for the mass market.

When Dylan got angry in Don’t Look Back, he held himself together and dominated the arguments. Here, he seemed only irritated, pretentiously, with no charm or psychology. “Two hundred people in that room, and each of them wants me to be somebody else. They should just shut the fuck up and let me be”, he said in an elevator after being passed around a party room. “Be what?” Someone asked. It was ironic not in the way that the movie meant: Chalamet’s Dylan had no interiority even as an enigma. The point of interest for the audience is the celebrity, to be admired from a distance, not the artist as a character. Had Dylan been entirely this movie’s invention, this characterisation work would’ve been a failure from tip to toe. There’s no spontaneity, no play about him, no sense of the joy and freedom that both he and the real Dylan radiate. It’s hard to think of someone with his talent with more stupor and misery in his face: he’s doing what Brando was doing in A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) and Adam Driver in Megalopolis (2024), namely not knowing what they’re doing.

Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez, and without her songs and others’ referrals I’d never have recognised her. The very first thing we saw of her was a performance of “House of the Rising Sun”, arguably her drabbest in her self-titled debut album. The real Baez had a bitingly frisky sarcasm to her that was only sour when Barbaro tried to emulate it. She loved a send-up. She’d stop in the middle of a song to pose for a photoshoot: it’s her way of scolding those in the audience who can’t stop taking pictures and distracting others in doing so. She also loved to make faces. Asked by the reporters to “pose”, she gets her arms up and does a schoolgirl smile, then spits out her tongue before anybody realises. Barbaro’s Baez however was something to the effect of a polar opposite: since she’s but a love interest for our hero, and never her own person, no attempt was made to liven her up.

Elle Fanning is Sylvie, who is really Suze Rotolo. Her role description consists of staring blankly and lovingly into Dylan. Norton did a good imitation of Seeger, but the man talked in such a straightforward manner that it wasn’t marvellously difficult to replicate. As for the rest of the cast, there was nothing particularly remarkable. I saw a Letterboxd review by author Megan Abbott, and she’s exactly right:

OPEN ON: Dylan as he starts to sing very famous song. 

PUSH IN on listener, instantly awestruck. 

FADE OUT 

*** 

OPEN ON: Dylan as he starts to sing very famous song. 

PUSH IN on listener, instantly awestruck. 

FADE OUT 

***

USA | 2024 | 141 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: James Mangold.
writers: James Mangold & Jay Cocks (based on the book ‘Dylan Goes Electric!’ by Elijah Wald).
starring: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz & Scoot McNairy.