A Complete Unknown

Rated R • Theaters

With A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold (Walk the Line and Ford v Ferrari) loosely adapts Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, giving viewers not just a glimpse into the life of the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, but also the musical milieu that he reshaped after it birthed him. Don’t think twice, this movie is all right.

The story takes place over the four years between Dylan’s arrival in New York City in 1961 and his controversial set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. During this brief time span, Dylan went from being “a complete unknown” to being a cultural icon whose mere presence could elicit shrieks from young female fans. Tousle-haired Timothée Chalamet, who provides his own vocals for the songs, offers a gifted, understated interpretation of the iconic troubadour.

The film begins with Dylan making a pilgrimage of sorts to Greystone Park Hospital to visit his idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who’s suffering from Huntington’s disease. While visiting Guthrie, Dylan meets fellow folk singer Pete Seeger (Ed Norton), who takes the young “Bobby” under his wing. Seeger introduces Dylan to NYC’s folk scene, where he meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and finds his agent Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). It doesn’t take long for people to notice Dylan’s genius.

One of those people is Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a fictionalized version of Dylan’s girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who can be seen clinging to him on the album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Sylvie works as an activist, and after meeting Bobby at a church concert, she begins to look upon him as another cause that needs her attention. Part of the film’s plot revolves around the Sylvie-Bob-Joan love triangle. But the action of the film isn’t primarily driven by his love of women. It’s driven by his passion for music.

Throughout the film’s 2-hour-and-20-minute runtime, the young bard constantly scribbles in notebooks and feels out chord changes as he works on new songs. His genius comes through a fearless dedication to his craft, and he craves songs with feeling. At one point, he calls Baez’s songs “too pretty.” It seems as though he’s flirting with the more established folk singer, but he’s actually offering a real critique. An authentic song with grit will move the soul more than beautiful artifice. Chalamet’s Dylan doesn’t mince words when he speaks his mind. Yes, he’s a genius, but he’s also a little bit of a jerk. (The film gets its R rating for some bad language and near-constant cigarette smoking, but Mangold shows admirable restraint in depicting Dylan’s love life.)

But this intense songwriter isn’t just creating music. He’s inventing and reinventing himself. Who is Bob Dylan? We get the sense that in 1961, not even Bob Dylan knew the answer to that question. He had left behind his birth name of Robert Zimmerman, but his new persona was a work in progress.

In the film, the young Dylan isn’t just seeking authentic music, he wants the freedom to live his own life, free from the expectations of others. He finds himself in a perverse situation—wanting to be known, while at the same time wanting to hide himself from fans and friends alike. The more he feels the world constraining him, the more he wants to escape, even though he doesn’t know what he wants to escape to. It’s not long before Dylan feels that folk music itself has become too constraining—which leads to his controversial electric set at the Newport Folk Festival.

A Complete Unknown shows how Dylan almost single-handedly reshaped the American music landscape, and part of the film’s genius is it deftly uses the songs to help tell the story. In the 1950s, folk music was considered subversive: a man (or woman) alone with his guitar speaking truth to power. Folk musicians believed their social movement (much of it tinged with socialism) derived moral authority by singing songs of the people in a stripped-down style. In the 21st century, it’s easy to forget “This Land Is Your Land” was a protest song.

The film sets up the true-believing, soft-spoken Seeger as the foil to Dylan, who’s less interested in social justice than he is in the pursuit of truth through song. Dylan’s mercurial personality and musical experimentation were seen as a betrayal by the folk music scene that had made him a star. It seems the folk establishment had no idea that the times they are a changin’.