Chalamet shines as an onerous Bob Dylan

Image: Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown (Universal Pictures).

Before this year, the last concert proper I had attended was on Nov. 2, 2019, when Bob Dylan and his band stopped in my college town of Muncie, Indiana. Four months later, the COVID-19 pandemic would upend my time at Ball State University; at the time, though, I considered myself enough of a bohemian to be into Dylan’s early years. Bringing It All Back Home had been my soundtrack driving home, windows down, from nights working at the local drive-in. Dylan is an American institution — heck, he’s won a Nobel Prize (even if he refused to accept it in person). I talked a friend into coming with me for that concert, and the range in ages among those also attending left me energized, encouraged for the lasting influence of this performer. 

I don’t know what I expected, but Dylan did not deliver it that night. Simple me, I had not yet heard of his insensate, alienating stage personality. We were greeted by mannequins in the stage’s shadows who seemed unsure as well why they were there. Never once did Dylan address the crowd — no “hello, Muncie,” or “thank you for having me in your town.” The then-78-year-old stumbled around the stage with his harmonica, leaving you wanting to reach out to keep him from falling. His voice was less gravel, more an unpaved country road you took at 5 m.p.h. just to stay steady on. There was no introduction of his fellow talented musicians; no intermission; no acknowledgment, really, of an audience at all. Leaving Emens Auditorium, I overheard a grad student I knew express his disappointment that Dylan had eschewed the five most popular songs on his Spotify page. My friend who went with me was similarly ambivalent. Much later, when I was hired as an usher at that same auditorium, I learned that night had been notorious among the staff working there. I’ll stop short of libel and just say, anecdotally, the conduct backstage reflected what we perceived onstage. Everyone seemed disappointed, but that was the point. Dylan acted like a god who need not cower to a force as meager as his fans. We mere mortals had had the skies part wide enough to let him touch down in our small Midwestern town — were we not humbled to have been in his presence?

A Complete Unknown, released on Christmas Day, should remind the world that this has always been Dylan’s style, at least for as long as he’s known fame. Following Dylan’s journey from his 1961 arrival in New York City to his norm-defenestrating set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the movie does not pretend to paint a flattering image of its focal point, even if it treads many familiar tracts in the Zimmerman mythology. 

At the same time we see Dylan (played [and sung!] by a convincing Timothée Chalamet) molding his stage presence amongst New York’s underground, we also see his dismissive, crass, and faithless behavior towards girlfriend Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo, at Dylan’s request, for the film, and played by Elle Fanning) as well as Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, who showcases her singing skills in this breakout role). He rebuffs manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) and his own adulating audiences, culminating in Newport ‘65, where his reshaping of folk signals his cultural influence at its peak. He’s arrogant and opaque, yet — as a member of my family pointed out after we left the theater — he keeps blowing back to his first love in Sylvie. These slips back into her Greenwich home show his sensitivity and his desire, as his star rose, to return to someone who had been a major source of inspiration (despite this coming at Sylvie’s expense). Dylan, as portrayed by Chalamet, is a source of loathing and love in equal heaps. What American doesn’t adore a radical in the face of ideologues? Who could condone a man who keeps singing against the boos?

Edward Norton as Pete Seeger was another stand-out performance, accommodating each character’s eccentricities alongside an admirable passion for traditional folk. In an industry rife with big personalities and even bigger intractabilities, Norton’s Seeger takes Chalamet’s Dylan under his wing and serves as arbiter between him and the rest of the industry right through Newport ‘65, at which point the bereft Seeger almost breaks in an apocryphal bit of cord-axing. Several women play key parts in this telling of Dylan’s life, too. This includes Toshi Seeger working behind the scenes in promoting these American folk traditions and preventing her husband from taking that ax to the proverbial cords as well as Baez, who calls Dylan out for his shit. Even then, everything wraps back around to Dylan, whose influence we see encouraging more political pinings out of Baez’s performances. 

That was one aspect of the film that did surprise me, that despite on its face being a glimpse at Dylan during this critical period in his career, I was left with many questions remaining about the origins of his craft. A Complete Unknown is not here to tell you where lines like “I got forty red, white and blue shoestrings / And a thousand telephones that don’t ring” come from. It is not here to show you where Dylan picked up his guitar-playing skills, which impress everyone from Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) to fictional bluesman Jesse Moffette (“Big Bill” Morganfield). There isn’t one answer to where his music came from. The movie does, however, present the larger political and social context Dylan was responding to. One of the most moving scenes was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we see hundreds of New Yorkers panicking in anticipation of mutually assured nuclear annihilation. Baez is one of those trying to flee the city, but when she hears Dylan singing about the times and war to a pacified night club crowd, we catch a hint of, if not the cause, then at least the effect of these songs at this moment in American history.

Any origin story is tainted with nostalgia, both at who we cover and how we look back at them. What if Dylan had failed, either on the commercial level or in the grander scheme of bridging folk and rock? Who would he be, and who would we discuss in his stead? Who are our heroes in absence of our heroes? Any recollection of these idols, especially one who is still alive, must circumvent fundamental people and places, as A Complete Unknown ultimately does. Despite this, director James Mangold’s shimmering cinematography and the film’s critical look at Dylan lets A Complete Unknown stand on its own, saving it from falling into a pit of adulation that fails to escape its contemporary moment for explaining the past. My family’s overall impression: we liked the film and even the contrarian spirit it promoted, while acknowledging that Dylan was, and remains, an ass. I’ll say for myself that I would rather see Kacey Musgraves, who broke my five-year concert drought, and hear her acoustic set before experiencing the boy from Duluth again unfiltered.