A Complete Unknown
One of the challenges of being an artist is seeing how far you can take your audience while you change. Will they follow you down an unconventional road, or will they reject you the further you stray from the art they fell in love with? By the end of “A Complete Unknown,” Bob Dylan is at that point in his musical evolution, and history shows how that went. When he plugged in that electric guitar, he lost much credibility in the minds of a lot of traditional folk artists, but he was following the tenor of the time, as well as his own evolution. James Mangold’s film illustrates that quite a bit.
We begin our time with Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) in 1961, before he was famous. A young kid from Minnesota, he’s travelled to New Jersey to meet Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), the legendary folk artist who’s hospitalized with Huntington’s Disease. The night Dylan visits him, he’s also being visited by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), another folk legend. To them, folk music is a call to social justice and peace, an art utilizing just a guitar and the singer’s voice, and covering other people’s art with one’s own perspective is the order of the day. From the second Dylan plays a song for them, they can tell this kid has what it takes to be a new voice for folk. The question is whether that’s all Dylan wants himself.
As much as has been written about Dylan, or seen of him in documentaries and other cinematic interpretations- most famously, Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There”- there’s still a sense that we haven’t quite gotten into what’s in Dylan’s head, not completely. In adapting the book, Dylan Goes Electric, Mangold and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks continue that in “A Complete Unknown.” We never really get a sense of why, exactly, Dylan went electric after becoming a phenomenon on the folk scene with his original songs. Was he truly following the trends of the time? Did he want to create a new type of folk music? Dylan’s story in this film is not told of an internal monologue; he is always just out of reach, it seems, whether it’s with Woody or Pete, or Sylvie (Elle Fanning), a woman who becomes a lover to him before she becomes disillusioned with the distance between them; or Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), a fellow younger folk icon of the era with whom he shares a connection with. No one can really penetrate that mind of his; it feels like the closest is Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), with whom Dylan shares a pen pal relationship with. In the studio, at the guitar, is where we feel like we get to meet the real Dylan, but even then, trying to break through that persona is difficult for us as an audience.
Mangold (who previously directed “Walk the Line”) is familiar with the tropes of the musical biopic as he navigates the ’60s with Dylan. Even if he leaves Dylan fairly enigmatic as an individual, we still get checkpoints in terms of relationships that were formative (first Sylvie, then Joan); events that are iconic (the Newport Folk Festival, and recording sessions along the way); and important moments of his discovery, and when he feels like he’s going off the rails. And yet, I was captivated by it all, in particular due to the terrific work by Chalamet. He’s an actor I’ve started to warm up to over the past few years, as he’s gotten into his adult persona, and as Dylan, he does a fair enough amount of impersonation, but there’s also something soulful about his work, as well. Watching him as Dylan is penning new songs at any time of day, it feels like- to him- the act of songwriting keeps him alive. For someone who seems to keep his life close to the vest, his ability to write so powerfully, and so seemingly effortlessly, it is remarkable to see happen. Chalamet is just the centerpiece of the film; the other main actors- Norton, Fanning, Barbaro and Holbrook especially- all have wonderful moments that we just feel the desire to inhabit these characters, and be around Chalamet’s Dylan, from each one. “A Complete Unknown” doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s made a pretty damn good vehicle for both subject, and star.
