Every so often in “A Complete Unknown,” an enjoyably easy-listening and -watching fiction about Bob Dylan’s early road to immortality, Timothée Chalamet lowers his gaze and sends a shiver up your spine. It’s as startling as it is welcome because Chalamet has never seemed especially threatening, even in his more darkly messianic moments in the “Dune” series. He seems too anodyne to play a disruptive trickster like Dylan, yet Chalamet proves an ideal conduit in “A Complete Unknown” because the music and its maker have such power. As with any great cover band, it’s the original material that carries you through the night.
There are so many Dylans — poet, prophet, lost-and-born-again genius — that choosing just one feels futile. True to its title, “A Complete Unknown” shrewdly doesn’t try. Instead, anchored by Chalamet, who like the other principals, does his own (fine) singing, it offers Bob the Enigma, a seer who’s mysteriously delivered from beyond, a.k.a. Minnesota, to a needy world. Awkwardly charming, sometimes cruel and altogether confounding, this Bob writes like an angel, with rhythms that move bodies, choruses that worm into ears and lyrics that seem like urgent questions. He becomes the rasp of a generation, but he isn’t “alright.”
Directed by James Mangold, the movie takes place over an eventful four years, culminating with him shocking the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by going electric, a seismic music event. In Dylan catalog terms, it begins around the time he writes “Song to Woody” (“Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”). It continues amid romances, drama, record deals and youth-quakers like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (“Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden”). Then the plugged-in Bob goes loud and hard at Newport with “Maggie’s Farm,” and that’s a wrap (“Well, I try my best/ To be just like I am/ But everybody wants you/ To be just like them”).
Dylan arrives in New York on a gray, wintry day, and is soon strolling through the bohemian fantasy known as Greenwich Village, that creative Valhalla where artists, dilettantes, tourists and would-be saviors are rubbing elbows. It’s an inauspicious introduction in part because the whole scene looks and feels overly tidy and art-directed. It gets worse when Bob passes a busker hitting a tambourine (hey, mister!), if only because the image evokes Twyla Tharpe’s 2006 Broadway fiasco “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which literalized Dylan lyrics with performers rolling, yes, stones. Hagiography can be perilous.
Things improve considerably once Bob starts finding his place in the city’s bustling folk scene, and he and the movie get into a fluid groove. He’s been traveling light for a future heavyweight, with just a rucksack and an acoustic guitar with a sticker that reads, “this machine kills fascists,” the same words that his idol, Woody Guthrie, had on his. Bob has come to New York, among other things, to visit a now-mute Woody (Scoot McNairy), who’s dying in a New Jersey hospital. There, Woody’s only other regular visitor is the saintly Pete, as in Seeger (Edward Norton), a true folk believer who takes an early shine to Bob.
“A Complete Unknown” is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 nonfiction page-turner “Dylan Goes Electric!,” which is helpfully subtitled “Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.” The movie, written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, touches on these biographical fundamentals, shaping them into a smoothly streamlined and familiar heroic journey of towering ambition and predictably bittersweet success. It’s an ascension that, as Bob hits the folk scene — which welcomes him as a savior only to later condemn him as a traitor — surges with a series of oppositional forces: authenticity versus fabulation, artistic truth versus commercial imperatives, a humble banjo versus a solid-body Stratocaster.
Much of the movie is given over to a less satisfying opposition that effectively sets a watery-eyed blond activist, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a veritable our Lady of Suffering, against the cool, honey-voiced brunette sensation who’s already famous when Bob meets her and will soon be on the cover of Time magazine. That would be Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), one of the marquee names who move in and out of his orbit, happily and not. From the way that Bob looks at Joan, it’s obvious he desires her, but as Chalamet’s shivery, ice-pick gaze suggests, he also seems to want her success. (Russo is a stand-in for Dylan’s ex, Suze Rotolo, who’s arm in arm with him on the cover of his galvanic second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”)
Mangold, whose movies include “Ford v Ferrari,” is good with actors, but Fanning is ill-served here by a character who torturously morphs into a martyr to Bob’s genius. The problem isn’t Sylvie’s tears, which are well earned, especially when Bob and Joan’s duetting turns intimate and then humiliatingly public; it’s that Sylvie and her pain primarily reflect the wily, elusive, at times callous Bob. Worse, she and Joan — who’s better rounded partly because she is a music great in her own right — spend a lot of time looking at Bob with the kind of awe that suggests they’re witnesses to a miracle (if one who doesn’t know how to make his own coffee).
“A Complete Unknown” probably won’t please Dylan purists or anyone, really, who’s a stickler for documentary facticity in fiction. The movie blurs and plays with years and events, creating a generally seamless narrative out of a messy life as it glances at the larger world (the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement). Some of these global affairs affect the characters more directly than others. Yet while the world’s sorrows and outrages help fuel the folk scene, its finger-pointing (Dylan’s term) protest songs, its politics and concerns, are subsumed by vague notions of authenticity, which are embodied by the suffocatingly sincere Pete and the more openly strident musicologist Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz).
It’s no wonder that Bob rebels against the folkies, whose purity in the movie finally feels more tangible and important than the righteous causes they’re advocating for. Notably, they come off as more square than even the uptown squares who discover Bob after his second album takes off and want a piece of him, as he finds in a Fellini-esque party full of clawing rich gargoyles. Those admirers are bad, but Pete and the folkies can seem worse because they’re dogmatic and because, well, they’re not cool. That seems the point of a scene in which Pete is performing on a low-rent TV show, his wife, Toshi (Eriko Hatsune), supportively, quietly hovering nearby, when Bob walks in looking like the rock star he’s about to become.
Chalamet does look cool, if not as otherworldly as Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’s 2007 film “I’m Not There,” in which she also plays Dylan around the same transformational era. Neither look, sound, feel as cool as Dylan once did. One of the hurdles in biographical movies about contemporary idols is that we know them from the get-go (or think we do) because, like Dylan, they’ve been in mass circulation. And Dylan has been in a lot of movies, including documentaries from D.A. Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back,” 1967) and Martin Scorsese (“No Direction Home,” 2005). I imagine that Chalamet has made a close study of these great films; he looks and sounds as if he has, even if he never appears pharmaceutically assisted.
The most pleasant surprise in “A Complete Unknown,” and why it works as well as it does, is that even as it builds a realistic world with sweep and detail — the sickly institutional gray-green paint in Woody’s hospital alone will teleport older viewers straight back to the 1960s — it doesn’t try to make Bob palatable, nice or, finally, comprehensible in the usual dreary biopic fashion. For the most part, his genius remains unknowable as does his back story, which is hinted at only in a nod to the surname Zimmerman and a glimpse of a scrapbook. Bob may be a Jesus or a Judas (or both). As this movie underscores, he is very much a beautiful dissimulation, and sometimes there is nothing more authentic than an entertaining con.
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