We Saw “A Complete Unknown” & My Mind Is Completely Blown

[picture of Dylan from the Bob Dylan Center]

[me - too enthusiastic about & addicted to this film]

I am only an amateur Dylanologist but like all the strange, surreal, & spiritual things that seem to have infected me at a young age & are now fully-wired into my bones, I am way more into Dylan than I even ever realized. When I discovered the news of one-day-only IMAX screenings for the new James Mangold-directed Dylan biopic starring Timothee Chalamet on December 18th, an entire week before its worldwide release in every multiplex everywhere, I knew I had to go. I was willing to pay the jacked-up price & deal with the Opry Mills holiday traffic. That is how much I wanted to finally see this film that folks had anticipated for so long. 

Not only is this the best biopic in a year of great biopics (such as ones about Dietrich Bonhoeffer & Flannery O’Connor), I loved this movie so much, I will see it again on Christmas Day & bring friends & family. I love this movie so much & want to see it again & again. 

The night of our screening, there weren’t many trailers. Strangely, the sizable crowd sat for about 25 minutes past showtime in a semi-dark theater with a gray screen & nothing but the sound of king-size sodas sipped & buttery popcorn kernels crunched. A flash of anxiety hit: what if they don’t have the film or what if their equipment broke! To break the silence, I overheard someone asking the strangers on his row what their favorite Dylan album was. A needed breach. By 30 minutes past the ticket time, my anticipation & nerves settled, & the immersive roars of an IMAX sound system ramped us into commercials & trailers & finally the opening credits. 

So many embellished exaggerations have been shared about the sheer magic of cinema, in person & in the theater. Let me say I get it; I have felt those tremors of awe, from the first Star Wars on the big screen as a child, to the first Avatar in 3D. For a period as an undergrad, I dabbled more deeply into film studies & snagged my dream gig as a film critic for metro Detroit’s alt-weekly. Not to say my adoration of cinema has waned, but like every old codger, maybe I am a little jaded. This is the kind of film to bring one’s love of film back into focus.

From opening to closing, from vanity plate to vanity plate, this film swept me away at that majestic level, & if this sounds like bullet-point blurb-hype, let me add to it. The emotional transportation was real & intimate, & this audience member was all up in it. 

Music biopics are great currency, but they also traffic in tropes & cliches. Keep in mind, Mangold brings us “A Complete Unknown” with “Walk The Line” already on his CV, the same movie that helped spawn the hilarious parody Walk Hard. In an interview, Mangold rejects the idea of a multiverse, a comment that the interviewer solicited, since Johnny Cash is also a character in this new pic, 19 years after “Walk The Line.” To me, “A Complete Unknown” is a singular & transformative achievement, whether you have seen countless music biopics or whether this is your first one. 

A lifelong yet never fully realized love for Dylan & an increasing identity with & abiding affection for the long arc of American folk music, all these notions & more have invigorated my obsession with this film. The film so fully captures a vibe of Greenwich Village & New York City in the early 1960s, it so fully drops us as almost-participants right into the emerging passions of the folk clubs & the folk scene. See, Dylan didn’t just make the scene, the scene made Dylan, & so the significance of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, & Johnny Cash, they all contribute to the historical intensity of this movie. Costumes, set-design, color & light, closeups, & every other device in an expert filmmakers toolkit, they all take part in the audiovisual tapestry.   

Each actor’s embodied performance profoundly represents each character, & this includes authentic live musical performances & a kind of genuine associative affinity that any & every actor aspires to. I have always loved the actor Norbert Leo Butz, & while his interpretation of the late song-collector & curator Alan Lomax is only a small part here & mostly as a constipated, conservative folk-purist-scold, I loved what Butz’s Lomax brought to the film overall, making me feel like we really were in that world. Maybe someone will notice this & go learn more about Lomax’s indelible role in curating the American (folk/blues) Songbook.

But back to the music of the movie itself. So we are not just treated to Timothee Chalamet’s mesmerizing interpretations of the Dylan canon, but also to inspiring & incredible music by Monic Barbaro as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash. The music really moves the movie as the music & movie, they move us! Don’t take my word for the credibility of the soundtrack, because even if you can’t get to the movie this week, the soundtrack was dropped to all the streaming services just a few days ago. The magnitude increases as we simply savor how central the songs are to the film overall, never just an accompaniment to the narrative but integral to the larger story. 

Based on Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties,” the film really allows the physical geography & the counterculture topography to be characters themselves. We move from the early days at Cafe Wha & Folk City (always passing by an unnamed bongo-drum busker-mystic) to countless recording studios & disheveled apartments to the crashing & cacophonous confrontations at Newport, when all-heck-breaks-loose for Dylan as the prophetic folk phenom transforming before our eyes into Dylan-in-dark-shades hipster, Dylan the poetic chameleon, Dylan the rock star.

I honestly never thought of Dylan as primarily a sex-symbol persona, no matter how “romantic” his overall rizz might be. The movie’s erotic tensions between Bob Dylan & his partner Sylvie Russo/Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning) as well as with Baez (Barbaro) are such a huge part of the flick & perfectly powerful of their own merit, but I probably would have loved the film anyways, without this overwhelming romantic aspect & subtext. 

Changing the name of & creating a fictionalized version of a Dylan paramour is not the only ticklish historical tweak. Rolling Stone magazine got some Dylanologist fact-checkers to point out 27 different places in which the film fused, switched, changed, or otherwise manipulated the known historical record to serve the story of this finished filmic project.  

I was also taken by how “white” the folk scene in the film feels, & how peripheral black folks are in the movie, even though the entire folk scene & movement are utterly in debt to black musical artists & black radical activists throughout. I loved seeing Odetta in the movie, but her role is so small, too small. A particular moment in the movie where Dylan is briefly dating a black woman at a charity event comes off especially weird, & I caught similarly uncomfortable vibes for a TV appearance with a fictional Delta Blues singer. Maybe a critic more capable than me can unpack this aspect of the film’s or the folk scene’s problematic racial politics; while it didn’t ruin my deep love for this movie, it did give me pause. Less prickly but just as needed, the film is shaped by references to the civil rights movement & to the Cuban missile crisis as more than source material for great protest songs. The film is at all times overpowered by the Timmy/Bobby inimitable rizz, but he is also an “asshole” as Baez points out. So much fame for anyone so young has got to be wild. But with Bob’s lyrical intimacy & intensity, we fans, we feel a peculiar partisanship to the image & the canon, even if it isn’t in reality warranted.

As I was finishing this installation in what has turned into a multi-part long-form reflection/review, I corresponded briefly with another reviewer & fan of this film. In his review, Daniel Cook Johnson suggests that this is“a film for the ages that transcends the tropes of musical biopics so effectively that it sets a new standard for the form.” I am compelled to agree that the complete project is greater than all its immeasurably accomplished parts, & I hope it generates a long & generous & dedicated fandom community.  

Get to see it as soon as you are able & let me know your reactions & reflections. “A Complete Unknown” opens everywhere on Christmas Day.

-Andrew/Sunfrog, Christmas Eve 2024