Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown,” opening Christmas Eve. (Searchlight Pictures)
As a slice-of-life biography of a cultural giant, director James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown” must walk a line, as it were, between two audiences.
One comprises those in our midst and of a certain age who have absorbed the ever-changing sound and legend of Bob Dylan over the last six decades. The singer-songwriter from nowhere Minnesota in the early 1960s willed himself to transmogrify into the guise of a singular performer, finding enormous fame, and, as we know from his recent global touring, staying at it all these years later. This audience tends to be quite familiar with Dylan’s origin story and will be alert for and not too forgiving of fakery and sleight of hand.
But as a vehicle for a young movie star like Timothée Chalamet, Mangold’s challenge was also to speak to a generation of fans and celebrity stans who likely know next to nothing about Dylan let alone the social and political ferment and the musical upheavals of the first half of the ’60s. Maybe Chalamet — whose ongoing Dylan cosplay seems oddly obsessive, if we can believe the social media photos — can do for Bobby what pop superstar Taylor Swift has done for pro football and the Kansas City Chiefs. Or maybe he doesn’t have to.
In any case, after watching “A Complete Unknown,” I can report that, as a longtime member of the oldster audience, the movie struck me as entertaining, enjoyable, emotionally moving (there were numerous choke-up moments), and strikingly faithful, without too many seriously offensive factual violations, liberties, elisions, and inventions.
And it’s quite possible that the younger audience of Chalamet followers will not only appreciate the throwback music but also identify especially with the movie’s larger theme of generational conflict, rebellion, and ultimate triumph over those who can’t get out of the way of changing times. Tall order, but doable.
Mangold and writer Jay Cocks based the script of “A Complete Unknown” on “Dylan Goes Electric,” Elijah Wald’s terrific book from 2015. Wald does what Mangold can’t possibly do within the confines of a Hollywood movie’s running time, which is to provide the often-nuanced context of Dylan’s entry into the music scene and the climactic collision caused by his choice to plug in a band and play loud at the vaunted and genteel Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Wald’s opening portrait of Pete Seeger, for example, was masterfully thorough and engaging.
After reading Wald’s details of what we know and don’t know about the chaos of that Newport night, “A Complete Unknown” seems not only to incorporate details from other rowdy Dylan shows but to skip the nuance entirely in order to hype up and overemphasize the conflict. Oh well. That’s Hollywood. I can deal with it.
But the heart of the movie begins at the beginning and carries us most of the way toward the very end.
Yes, Chalamet, as has been reported all over, absolutely inhabits the Dylan role, informed by upwards of five years of training and learning the guitar (and harmonica and piano) and to sing in the master’s manner.
After arriving in New York in January 1961, the 19-year-old Dylan, formerly known as Bobby Zimmerman, makes a guitar-toting pilgrimage to a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey where he visits with Woody Guthrie, who’d long been stricken with a degenerative nerve disease. Guthrie is the towering troubadour and writer whom Dylan so desperately wanted to emulate. Though this experience is the first of many narrative conflations, we can be mesmerized by the sheer emotional intensity in Chalamet’s face as he sings the newly penned (although it probably came a bit later) “Song to Woody” to his bed-bound hero.
That fictional hospital scene also establishes Dylan’s vital relationship with the paternal and gentle Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton with staggeringly sensitive restraint. As Seeger drives Dylan from the hospital to his hand-built Hudson River home, his passenger fiddles with the car radio, lands on the rocking sound of Little Richard and sets off the mini-explosion that foreshadows the story’s thematic arc.
Chalamet can be rightly applauded for how he presents Dylan’s music as it evolves from traditional and bluesy roots through topical commentary toward surreal and biting narratives. (Listen for how the word “curse” sounds in a line from “Just Like a Woman.”) As much as Dylan has been covered over the decades by an enormously wide range of musicians, and as much as I love so many of those respectful Dylan versions, in the end I doubt I am the audience for the movie soundtrack, which offers not an interpreter but Chalamet as an imitator. I’ll stick with the real thing and its more creative offspring.
Nevertheless, Chalamet also nails Dylan’s mumbling incoherence, his shambling social awkwardness, and his fragile relations with girlfriends Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo and played effectively and weepily by Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, who provides credible renditions of the Baez sound).
The movie offers what feel like authentic slices of Greenwich Village streets and coffee houses, the cauldrons that produced the vaunted “folk revival” that Dylan walks into and transforms. And from time to time the cultural backdrop includes conversation and televised images of the news of the day — the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Martin Luther King’s march on Washington of 1963 (with a noticeably CGI’d Chalamet briefly singing in Dylan’s stead), Walter Cronkite’s ground-shifting announcement of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The more Baez tries tugging Dylan toward standing up for social justice, the more he resists, so we can be sure to understand how he didn’t want to be the “voice of a generation” or a protest singer or whatever kind of thing someone else wanted to lay on his shoulders. As those who followed him know, Dylan went on to become whatever and whoever he wanted to be in the moment. How does it feel?
“A Complete Unknown” does not try to make Dylan likeable or uber-heroic as, say, the biopics of Hollywood’s past might have done it. And for many he may remain unknown. But the honest portrayal of his defiance and self-reliance may yet become another way that today’s generation can see themselves in his remarkable and still often mysterious story.
