Film: A Complete Unknown

A film review of the new Dylan biopic

A Complete Unknown

Director: James Mangold

Veritas Entertainment / Searchlight Pictures

I knew that I had to go to A Complete Unknown — the biopic of Bob Dylan’s early years, so loosely based on a book about Dylan “going electric” that the author of that book is like Homer Simpson, Smiling Politely — hopefully he got a nice holiday out of it at the least, and a reprint. I had to go because people would ask me what I thought.

I am a colossal Dylan Bore. But something of an anomaly perhaps, because my least favourite thing about being A Bob Dylan Fan is (most) Other Bob Dylan fans.

Every time I hit up a biopic, I remind myself I’m (generally) not the target market. But that barely helps, I still leave with a list of grievances. And if I could be bothered, I’d list a bunch about this — but several wags will have done so already.

Just quickly though: Bob Dylan never bought a police whistle off the street so that he could add it to his song Highway 61 Revisited, organist Al Kooper brought it with him and suggested Dylan blow it on the song, Hollywood stop thinking your shorthanding of the story provides clever little anecdotes for the people that never listened beyond the greatest hits! Oh, and Joan Baez wasn’t at the Newport Folk Festival to duet with Bob, most of the songs the film suggests he played there weren’t played, some weren’t written when he was claiming to show them off — he never played Song to Woody to Woody, he wrote it after meeting him. And Joan and he never fought on stage about the set lists.

But you know, truth getting in the way of a good story and all that.

There’s plenty more details you could fact-check, I was curious to see Pete Seeger (played by Edward Norton) delivering takeaway coffees with plastic lids. That surely could not be right? I had to Google it after, and yes I’m a giant nerd, but sure enough that was a movie-mistake, they didn’t do the quality assurance check, and some people really hate that. I don’t hate that so much, but it feels like a clue there are other aspects, more crucial to the true life that informs the story, that will also be wrong.

I find biopics absurd, largely, but I want to like them. I get what they’re for, and why they’re not really for me — someone that’s watched the docos, listened to more than the hits, and read the books. As a set-collector though, I still wanna see the biopic too!

The Dylan biopic was never one I was excited to see, I couldn’t quite understand the, erm, Desire. I mean, he’s a guy that’s tried to create his own mythology, and then to purposely avoid the spotlight for longer than he was ever in it. He’s a guy that’s had relationships, and children, but no huge, career-haltering scandals, and there’s nothing you can really pick out nor manufacture there. So where is the story?

Enter the notion of “Dylan going electric” — it meant a whole lot more 50 and 60 years ago. Dylan was embraced by the folk movement, and wrote several anthems for it. He was a rock ‘n’ roller at heart, and in the mid-60s he moved to band work, and his decision to plug in an electric guitar on his European tour and at the Newport folk festival had some fans upset. Many of them were won over again, some almost instantly. And a whole bunch of new fans gathered to take the place of any folk fundamentalists.

To turn this into a biopic — still not really much of a story, and really only likely to appeal to someone that bought a Starbucks Dylan compilation, or likes a few of the most popular tracks on Spotify — there’s this weird decision to name everyone and have a cast of players, even producer Tom Wilson is correctly cast, although not always correctly placed, arriving to oversee sessions he didn’t actually produce in real life, and manager Albert Grossman arrives in this story a whole year early. But girlfriend Suze Rotolo is here named Sylvie Russo. We don’t know why. Rotolo was famous enough to write a memoir about her time with Dylan, she’s there on the record cover with him for all time, but she’s technically not in the biopic. We then get a sort of love triangle setup between Rotolo and Dylan and Joan Baez, which wasn’t really there in the way that it is posited here. Rotolo goes overseas for a lot longer than the movie’s few weeks. Baez stays for longer than a night at a time. The two women are not eyeballing each other at a festival Joan never played at.

You start to feel like a truther pointing this shit out. People saying it doesn’t really matter. Of course this shit matters, this is a film based on a life. This is purporting to be some sort of true story. I know Dylan would enjoy the fact there’s more fiction than truth, since he has been playing a character called Bob Dylan for 65 years now and probably could not care to seperate fact from fiction, but still.

I somehow enjoyed this film a whole lot more than I thought I was going to. I just kicked back and decided to not let it bother me that Pete Seeger was there in the hospital when Bob was visiting Woody and that’s how he and Pete met (also inaccurate). I just decided to enjoy Timothee Chalamet’s efforts — genuinely pretty good — and the amount of songs, peppered throughout since there’s really no great action beyond following a songwriting genius developing at his craft.

I was baffled that so many people posted up nice things to say about this and felt that anyone ready to shit on it was nitpicking. But then, as I watched it, I kinda did fall a little bit under the spell of the situation. These are good performances. This wants to be a movie that has something to say. James Mangold is a journeyman filmmaker with a diverse range of interests, and this is maybe more accurate than his other big entry into the biopic sphere, Walk The Line. If it does even half as well, he’ll surely be pretty happy.

So, you know, I couldn’t hate this — but I didn’t learn a thing, I laughed at some of the desperation for the movie to have something to say when there was nothing to say. But I did like Elle Fanning (Suze/Sylvie). And I really like Norton’s turn as Seeger, and Monica Barbara as Joan Baez nearly stole the show for me. No one could ever sound like Joan but she gave it a bloody good go, right?

There’s all sorts of issues around the women in Dylan’s life being there as bit parts to support the story of him — it’s his story, I guess — and mostly I just wanted a Joan Baez biopic, if anything.

There’s a Boomer desperation to this film too, it has to be said. Some reminder that they lived through these moments and had these icons that were created at the time, almost as if they all had something to do with it. Dylan might have used the folk movement for inspiration, for acceleration, for access, and audience, and motivation, he might also have really meant at least some of it, but he was going to happen anyway. He’s the sort of once in a lifetime talent that is so utterly undeniable as to not need a movie to do its earnest best to not cheapen him but to utterly trivialise him at the same time.

A better title might better have been called No Direction.