By Tim Jackson

Focusing on the years between 1961 and 1965, director James Mangold turns Bob Dylan’s creative journey into a better-than-average cinematic biography in which the singer ends up riding off on his motorcycle and into history.

A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold. Screening on screens around New England beginning December 24.

Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Photo: Searchlight Pictures

In Bob Dylan’s imaginative memoir, Chronicle, he begins: “I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.” It is an apt summary of James Mangold’s film A Complete Unknown. With a script by Mangold and Jay Cocks based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric (Arts Fuse review), the film covers Dylan’s arrival in Greenwich Village in January 1961 and ends with his legendary performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The reinvention of Bobby Zimmerman into Bob Dylan was swift; he took the city and the folk world by storm. Mangold gleans Wald’s book for references and details, painting a clear if occasionally fanciful portrait. Dylan was already an obsessive songwriter at twenty. His songs and lyrics were highly personal, unlike the traditional songs performed by his peers. His performance at Newport with electric instruments was transformative, a radical departure from what was the standard for ‘folk music’, which was resolutely acoustic.

Playing Dylan, Timothée Chalamet might earn his first Oscar. There is a passing physical resemblance between the two of them; but more important, the actor plays the guitar and meets the challenge of duplicating Dylan’s nasal vocal style. (The rest of the cast also perform their musical numbers.) Chalamet suggests that Dylan’s mumbling speech might be the way the man used to emotionally distance himself from the world and close relationships. That reticence is understandable. As Dylan sings in “Maggie’s Farm”, ‘I got a head full of ideas that is drivin’ me insane’.

At age 20, Dylan is seen in the film moving into her apartment with a New York girlfriend, where he writes compulsively. Soon after that, Dylan shacks up with the already famous Joan Baez. (As Baez, Monica Barbaro has an unaffected singing voice that resonates with Baez’s, though the original is a tough act to duplicate.)  Initially, Dylan had commented to manager Albert Grossman that Baez was “pretty,” adding “maybe too pretty”. Arrogant, unshakably confident of his own vision, Dylan later tells Baez to her face that: “Your songs are like oil paintings at the dentist’s office.” Baez’s understandable response: “And you’re kind of an asshole, Bob.”

The narrative’s accuracy regarding times and places is shakey. It is true that Dylan met and played with the legendary Woody Guthrie during his first week in New York. A Complete Unknown places his initial visit at New Jersey’s Greystone Psychiatric Park where Guthrie, played by Scoot McNairy (also in this year’s Nightbitch), lies in bed, unable to speak, his career cut short after a long battle with Huntington’s disease. But it is film fiction that Pete Seeger was at Guthrie’s side at the time. Edward Norton’s fatherly demeanor and vocal inflections imitate Seeger perfectly — his performance is among the film’s highlights. After Dylan plays “Song to Woody” in the hospital room, the pair sit without comment. The silence of this moving scene makes a dramatic point: we’re left to infer that both of the older artists recognize that this young minstrel from Duluth might be the pioneer for a new generation of folk artists.

Grossman soon signed Dylan into his stable of artists, which included the biggest stars of the scene, such as Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. A Columbia Record contract followed. Grossman was a music industry powerhouse, but Dan Fogler’s interpretation of him is a bit clownish. Grossman soon recognized that his other artists could cover Dylan’s quickly expanding repertoire, earning all concerned a fortune in royalties.

In the film, Dylan falls into a relationship with activist and artist Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning. This character is a substitute for Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s actual muse, the woman who graces the cover of 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. (It is one of the few name changes in the film.) In Chronicles, Dylan describes meeting Rotolo: “We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.” He later wrote the song “Ballad in Plain D” about their separation. In 1985 he said ”Oh yeah, that one! I look back and say, ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that.’ Of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.” After recording it, he was never known to have performed it again.

Monica Barbaro, as Joan Baez, and Timothée Chalamet, as Bob Dylan, in A Complete Unknown. Photo: Searchlight Pictures

The fine supporting cast includes Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash and Norbert Leo Butz as Alan Lomax. Many key figures are skirted over in this telling, such as journalist Bob Shelton and folk singers Phil Ochs and Peter Yarrow. Others, like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, receive peripheral cameos. One notable scene comes when Dylan makes an unexpected appearance at a TV show hosted by Seeger, in which the guest is a mythical Delta Blues singer named Jesse Moffett. The blues guitarist Big Bill Morganfield was brought in to play the role. Moffett and Dylan play a wonderful duet; it’s a made-up performance, but it adds some blues bona fides to the film.

Dylan’s wealth and status came fast. By 1964, he was a star. The civil rights and anti-war movements embraced the performer as their premier spokesman-troubadour. But soon a a radically altered Dylan would emerge, one that alienated many of his fans and admirers. That’s the subject of the second half of A Complete Unknown, which leads up to Dylan’s infamous appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

George Wein began the folk festival in 1959 with Grossman. It was to serve as a platform for live performances in the acoustic tradition, the lineup structured to include emerging folk artists (Joan Baez and the Kingston Trio), traditional bluegrass acts (Flatt and Scruggs), aging blues masters (Son House, Odetta, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee), and many more. Wein was creating a community made up of musicians who were dedicated to the progressive ideals of a generation, artists who had come of age amidst the battles against racial segregation and McCarthyism. There was also the assassinations of John Kennedy and Malcolm X, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. War was escalating in Vietnam. At the center of the movement and its ideals was the perpetually engaged Pete Seeger. But Dylan was a musician and poet first, not an activist. His sudden fame made him uncomfortable; he resented being labeled or pigeonholed. He had a working knowledge of a vast range of American music and loved rock and roll as much as folk. Given that his songs and lyrics were being interpreted by many as speaking for the conscience of anti-establishment culture, a conflict was inevitable.

In March of 1964, Dylan recorded an electric album, Bringing It All Back Home. Dylan, backed by members of Paul Butterfield’s Chicago Blues band, opened at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric version of “Maggie’s Farm”. Many in the crowd booed: it was seen by some as an affront to the acoustic roots of folk. They shouldn’t have been so surprised. The truth is, Dylan always wanted to be a rock star. Unacknowledged is the fact that the Butterfield Band had performed loudly that same afternoon with electric guitars. But Dylan’s performance ended up creating an angry division between Seeger, the traditionalist, and Dylan, who was upset and confounded by the hostile reaction. The folk world was forever changed.

The performance was not as much a revolution as an evolution, a change that is at the heart of A Complete Unknown. As befits a Hollywood biopic, it fabricates and simplifies details for the sake of creating drama out of Dylan’s break with the past. There’s added soap opera: an awkward episode about a romantic break-up. Nevertheless, by focusing on the years between 1961 and 1965, Mangold turns Dylan’s creative journey into a better-than-average cinematic biography in which the singer ends up riding off on his motorcycle and into history.

Given that America today is being ripped apart by another traumatic political divide, this is a story worth telling. Particularly for generations only vaguely familiar with the embattled evolution of one of America’s visionary artist poets,

Dylan aficionados will no doubt grumble. Chronologically, songs are performed before they were actually written; there are incidents that never happened, and various events have been consolidated for dramatic purposes. Rolling Stone magazine has published a list of 29 fictitious events and/or details in the film. Purists should turn to numerous books on Dylan’s life and music. Besides Dylan Goes Electric and Chronicles, it is worth looking at 2022’s Philosophy of Modern Song, in which Dylan analyzes and riffs on tunes over the course of over 60 essays. In film, there are Martin Scorsese’s documentaries, 2005’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and 2029’s The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story. Also worth taking in: Todd Haynes’s terrific I’m Not There and D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, which covers Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in England.

Dylan, who is on record as admiring Chalamet’s performance suggested on X, “After you’ve seen the movie read [Wald’s] book”. The book and film fit together well; they present a complete picture. In a recent interview with Zane Lowe, Chalamet explains: “This is interpretive. This is not definitive. This is not fact. This is not how it happened. This is a fable.”

Footnote:

I was at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. I had just gotten my driver’s license and I drove to Newport from Connecticut with two friends. We slept in sleeping bags in the dirt and washed at the local YMCA. I owned the double side 45 RPM record of “Like a Rolling Stone”. That electric version, along with British adaptations of American standards, such as The Animal’s version of “House on the Rising Sun”, were blowing our young minds. All day, you could attend what were called ‘workshops’ with roots artists from America and around the world. The most vivid of those in my memory: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Doc Watson and his son Merle, Rev. Gary Davis, Son House, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. In those days you could gather informally around a folk singer like Taj Mahal singing under a tree in the afternoons. I’ll never forget an impromptu performance featuring Peter Schumann, co-founder of the Bread & Puppet Theatre, who did some improvised storytelling while Eric Von Schmidt unrolled a long sheet of paper attached to a fence and drew illustrations as he went along.

That evening, we expected Dylan to “go electric.” We had been soaked by the rain and couldn’t afford the ticket price, so we listened from outside the gates. We were pleased to hear the electric guitars cranking out “Like a Rolling Stone”. A decade later, working with folk singer Tom Rush, I wrote a piece for Black Sheep Magazine called “The Folkie’s Fear of Drums”. A positive letter of response was later published from none other than – Pete Seeger!

Tim Jackson was an assistant professor of Digital Film and Video for 20 years. His music career in Boston began in the 1970s and includes some 20 groups, recordings, national and international tours, and contributions to film soundtracks. He studied theater and English as an undergraduate, and has also worked helter-skelter as an actor and member of SAG and AFTRA since the 1980s. He has directed three feature documentaries: Chaos and Order: Making American Theater about the American Repertory Theater; Radical Jesters, which profiles the practices of 11 interventionist artists and agit-prop performance groups; When Things Go Wrong: The Robin Lane Story. And two short films: Joan Walsh Anglund: Life in Story and Poem and The American Gurner. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. You can read more of his work on his blog.