By Kelly Vance
From its casting to its settings to its all-important musical choices, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is an electrifying, irresistibly engaging portrait of one of America’s unique originals, Bob Dylan. Covering the years from Dylan’s 1961 arrival in New York City from Minnesota to the time just before his serious 1966 motorcycle accident, the film depicts the artist’s life and times in sumptuous detail.
Director-writer Mangold and screenwriter Jay Cocks—working off a book by Elijah Wald—their crew and a well-chosen cast portraying mostly real-life characters, inhabit their Greenwich Village and Newport Folk Music Festival environs with livewire creative energy. The young singer-songwriter leaps off the screen with maximum appeal, like a living legend should.
The moment 20-year-old Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) first steps onto MacDougal Street, he wears an innocent expression on his face. That doesn’t last very long. As he makes the rounds of Village folk clubs and interacts with the bohos, Beats, guitar-pickers and various ambitious entertainers, our hero acquires wised-up eyes.
He spends his time playing gigs (Chalamet does his own singing), couch-surfing and post-midnight songwriting in the company of such fellow performers as Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). But there’s always one other folkie in mind: Dylan’s idol, legendary Dust Bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy, in a marvelous performance), now laid up in a New Jersey hospital bed.
From Guthrie, Dylan has learned the common touch, a musical empathy with downtrodden people. It’s a feeling/tone that stays with the young artist and makes him attractive to socially minded musicians like Seeger and Baez.
And yet there’s more to Dylan than protest songs. As of today he has written more than 600 tunes—his career is ongoing—and was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. In A Complete Unknown we observe him in the throes of creativity in “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Like a Rolling Stone” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” in a body of anthems and rockers that flow out of him like the Mississippi River.
Dylan’s musical taste provides the film with its central dramatic conflict. His would-be mentor Seeger, trapped in political idealism, envisions young Bob as a civil rights crusader with a backpack full of catchy melodies, rallying crowds with his acoustic guitar.
But Bob was raised on rock and roll, and prefers Black R&B and the Nashville Country & Western sound of his admirer Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) as a necessary complement to the more academic folk ballads.
When push finally comes to shove one night at Newport, Dylan blows some of his older, tweedier fans’ minds with high-powered blues-rock (“Maggie’s Farm”), but simultaneously picks up a younger, hipper crowd. The popular new sound is Cash Box-style music to the ears of Dylan’s manager, impresario Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler).
For the bitterly disappointed Seeger, it’s a sell-out. He wants his one-time protégé to perform “the right way”—without amps and Fender Stratocasters. The old authenticity argument.
Meanwhile, Dylan shuffles his romantic cards. Who’s going to be his main squeeze, visual artist Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, portraying a surrogate for the real-life Suze Rotolo) or his regular duet partner, Barbaro’s bestselling Baez? Both Fanning and Barbaro have exquisite moments as the drama plays out.
A Complete Unknown is salted with a treasure trove of ’60s-era pop-culture tidbits. Gerde’s Folk City music club in NYC. Anxiety over the Cuban Missile Crisis. Johnny Cash’s comical drunk-driving stunt in his enormous Caddy. And the age-old musical question: “Where do your songs come from?” (Dylan’s riposte: “They’re really saying, ‘I wish I could write songs like you.’”)
Chalamet handles a tricky role adroitly. Before the film ends, he’s fully in Dont [sic] Look Back mode, as a sharp-tongued, often mean-spirited headliner who everyone adores. The song list is gorgeous and generous. Best of all, this movie will create new Bob Dylan fans.
