A Complete Unknown

I’m one of those weird Dylan guys who has read all the books and seen all the documentaries and poured over even the shitty records, so I considered skipping the “A Complete Unknown” movie entirely because I knew I would annoy anybody who sat next to me with me with nudges and “that didn’t really happen” comments. But I went anyway because I’m a big fan of Timothée Chalamet, and because I heard that Dylan himself had signed off on the movie, which pretty much guaranteed that a lot of it would be bullshit but entertaining as hell. Dylan has been making stuff up about himself since he took on a new name, later explaining that he felt like he’d been born to the wrong parents. Anyway, how this anonymous Jewish kid named Zimmerman from small town Minnesota actually became Bob Dylan is not the focus of the film. That would take longer in the telling than the Corleone family saga.

That being said, the man has been a biographical phantom for over 80 years, and no event has been rehashed from every conceivable angle more than his infamous electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which is the center of the film. The performance either resulted in a cataclysmic civil war between the new and old guard to the point where Pete Seeger picked up an ax to cut the cables, or just pissed off the neighbors because it was too loud. It depends on who you ask. At the time of the festival Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” was all over the radio, so it seemed a bit silly to expect that….what……he’d come out and do the song as a lilting acoustic duet with Joan Baez? Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters had stomped all over the Newport stage already with drums and electric guitars, but all of a sudden Dylan’s Stratocaster causes a riot?

See, this is the type of thing that I was afraid of. I’m already going off on tangents and the movie hasn’t even started yet.

Chalamet is great, and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger is just as good (as is Monica Barbaro as Baez). All are doing their own singing and playing, which stopped the guitarist in me from watching their hands and saying “that’s not really a G chord there….”. Nothing will annoy me faster than an actor portraying a guitar player….and not knowing how to play the guitar. This single-handedly ruined “Eddie and the Cruisers” for me, in which the lead just slid his hand up and down the neck of the guitar like he was cleaning it with an invisible rag. Not that this was the only problem with “Eddie and the Cruisers”, one of the dumbest movies of the 80s, but still. If you can go all DeNiro/Daniel-Day Lewis and lose 100 pounds for a movie, you can learn how to play the 3 chords of “Song To Woody” convincingly enough to not piss me off. Well done Timothée. Well done.

So Chalamet/Dylan shows up in New York City a fully-formed genius. He tracks down his hero Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital, gets his and Seeger’s stamp of approval, and soon, despite having a swell new girlfriend, is tumbling into bed with Joan Baez, who is a bona-fide star at the time, appearing on the cover of Time magazine. She’s in awe of the kid’s talent, though she tags him for an asshole immediately. They sing a bunch of duets and he rides her fame into his own. Seeger considers Dylan the answer to his folkie prayers, the guy who is going to put the entire movement, thus far largely confined to a neighborhood in NYC, on the national map. Dylan’s songs like “A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall” and “Blowing in the Wind” stun his contemporaries, but Bob is soon against-his-will-famous and enters his wearing-sunglasses-indoors phase, which makes everybody a little nervous and gets him punched out in a bar.

Seeger is unfairly treated as a sort of square scold. In real life Pete Seeger was utterly fearless and incorruptible, and was only pissed off about Dylan’s electric set because the sound was so muddy that nobody could hear the words, which he rightly thought was what made Dylan worth the effort in the first place. Anyway, this leads to an utterly preposterous scene in which Seeger tries to talk Dylan into just one more acoustic performance to satisfy the masses, using a folksy metaphor about a seesaw. Whatever effect this has is erased by a drunken Johnny Cash (who wasn’t at the 1965 festival, another nudge nudge) who informs Dylan that he wants the loud stuff. “Track some mud on the floor, B.D.”, says the Man in Black, who, like Muddy and the Wolf, had managed to play the festival with HIS electric band without anybody trying to cut his cables with an ax.

Dylan plays electric. People boo and throw things at him. They call him “Judas”. “I don’t believe you”, Dylan responds. “You’re a LIAR”. This bit did happen, although not at Newport. A vocal minority stayed mad at him for YEARS afterwards, but eventually got over it, although not before going through his trash for clues as to why he “sold-out” the so-called protest song movement. (Thankfully this bit is not covered in the film.)

That’s about it, really. There’s a bit of a love triangle in the midst of all this, which never happened but this is Hollywood so some slack is required. And a final visit to the dying Woody Guthrie, which didn’t happen either. But it ties it all together nicely, the torch officially passed in the form of a harmonica. Dylan rides off into the sunset on a motorcycle, as enigmatic as ever. We’re reminded that he’s still out there, 55 albums into this and heading for another joint. There could be 55 movies made about Dylan since 1965, each one just as equally fascinating and full of shit. Especially if Chalamet is talked into an ongoing cinematic carnival.

This movie is well worth the price of popcorn.

In a bit…

—tf