A Complete Unknown

By James Cullingham

The cinema in downtown Nogojiwanong – Peterborough, Ontario – was almost packed for a noon screening of A Complete Unknown on the second day of its general release. That Bob Dylan fellow still pulls.

The film is the latest cinematic effort to unravel the enigmatic genius of Bob Dylan. It has been greeted by generally favourable critical response, particularly due to an excellent performance by Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. Edward Norton as Pete Seeger also proffers a performance that has been widely commended.

The script zeroes in on the period between Dylan’s 1961 arrival in New York as a nineteen-year-old from Minnesota – previously known as Bobby Zimmerman – and his controversial appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where ‘Dylan went electric,” much to the dismay of some folk enthusiasts including Pete Seeger. The film chronicles his encounter with the young singer’s hero, an ailing Woody Guthrie, and Dylan’s rise through the Greenwich Village folk scene into a Columbia Records studio under the production guise of the legendary John Hammond Sr.

The film has many charms and strong points, but it also has weaknesses.

The female characters are not terribly well developed. The public record demonstrates that Joan Baez, portrayed by Monica Barbaro, and the late visual artist Suze Rotolo (named Sylvie Russo in the film and played by Elle Fanning) were more complicated, accomplished and intriguing than these cinematic portrayals.

Mitch Greenhill, musician, agent, and author, knew many of the principal characters during the Greenwich Village days. In a Facebook post about the film, Greenhill states that Suze Rotolo was “more interesting” than the “suffering ingénue” portrayed in the film. He thinks there is an absence of complexity in the depiction of Joan Baez. He also points to a lack of humour in the film. Both Baez and Dylan were “hilarious” in those days, Greenhill notes, and Baez has a “wicked sense of humour.” Greenhill also regrets the absence of a portrayal of musician Dave Van Ronk who many, including Mr Dylan, have acknowledged as a pivotal figure in his development.

In this regard, the relevant chapter in Bob Dylan’s autobiographical account and the late Ms. Rotolo’s memoir are well worth reading. The young Dylan’s encounter with Rotolo and her leftist Italian-American family marked him artistically, politically, and romantically. Of her, he once wrote,

Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. 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… (Chronicles, 265)

The film fails to capture that kind of romantic electricity, or the intellectual impact the young artists had on one another. Dylan recounted the bitter end of the relationship in his emotionally brutal Ballad in Plain D

I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze
With the innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn
I courted her proudly but now she is gone
Gone as the season she’s taken

Through young summer’s breeze, I stole her away
From her mother and sister, though close did they stay
Each one of them suffering from the failures of their day
With strings of guilt they tried hard to guide us

Of the two sisters, I loved the young
With sensitive instincts, she was the creative one
The constant scapegoat, she was easily undone
By the jealousy of others around her

Among her many talents, Joan Baez is a superb guitarist. Both Dylan and the late Jerry Garcia commended her influential finger picking method. The film imagines Baez as a strong singer with great stage presence, but doesn’t adequately convey her virtuosity and capacity to delve into musical traditions in both English and Spanish.

As Greenhill observed, Greenwich Village is depicted as a much cleaner place than it was in the 1960s. Also, the lack of frankness about drug use is a dramatic flaw in A Complete Unknown. 

The extended Newport Folk Festival scene in the film ends up being almost cartoonish. The script seems to be a mash up of Newport and the Manchester UK show with The Hawks. Fair game dramatically, but aside from Timothée Chalamet’s performance, it doesn’t quite work.

Historically speaking it’s pause worthy to wonder how a folk movement made up of self-described progressives could have been so upset when Dylan showed up with members of the multiracial Paul Butterfield Blues Band, featuring Mike Bloomfield, a virtuoso guitarist – politically progressive in some respects perhaps, but musically retrograde. Folk purists who considered themselves champions of civil rights were offended by a band comprised of musicians of Jewish or African American heritage.

Dylan and his cohorts were about to revolutionize popular music. In addition, those who were offended overlooked that Dylan had his professional start in Minnesota with pop star Bobby Vee and consistently professed an admiration for rockers Buddy Holly and Little Richard, as much as he wanted to emulate Woody Guthrie.

The recordings of Dylan and The Hawks from the infamous tour of Europe and the UK are galvanizing despite whatever offense, some but not all, audience members took from the electric performances. By 1965 Bob Dylan had already recorded electric music on his Bringing It All Back Home album and the generation defining anthem Like A Rolling Stone was released just prior to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It became Dylan’s first hit record.

Reading superb histories of this musical era by writers such as Barney Hoskyns and Dennis McNally, as well as listening to recordings of Dylan’s early electric appearances are illuminating. The electric Dylan at Newport and his shows with The Hawks featuring Canadians Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson (of what became The Band) changed musical history and tastes. What is often recycled in many places is the official volkie history. To its credit A Complete Unknown improves on and complicates that reductive saga.

In sum, A Complete Unknown is entertaining and well worth seeing, but it’s too antiseptic and reverential. It is a good, but not great film. Perhaps the only great Dylan film has already been made in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back. In drama, there is the idiosyncratic, sometimes even bizarre I’m Not There directed by Todd Haynes. In addition to its other virtues, viewers will witness a gobsmacking performance by Cate Blanchett among the six different actors who play Maestro Dylan. Finally, Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home also makes for compelling viewing. It features clips from a lengthy interview with an uncharacteristically candid Dylan.

Perhaps an epochal, shape-shifting, genre defying, multitalented artist such as Dylan is not the best fit for a conventional biopic. A Complete Unknown is a competently made motion picture. However, Bob Dylan is a brilliant, challenging, contrarian, elusive and defiant artist. In that regard, Pennebaker’s and Haynes’s efforts are, in this writer’s opinion, superior forays in advancing narratives that better reflect the many sides of Bob Dylan.

James Cullingham is a filmmaker, historian and journalist. He is an adjunct graduate faculty member of Trent University and founder of Tamarack Productions.