A Complete Unknown (2024): Look Out Kid, It's Something You Did

                         by Len Weiler                       

A Complete Unknown is the eagerly awaited biopic about Bob Dylan and the incredible creative arc of his first years in New York City and his early rise to fame. The movie is by turns informative, evocative, dramatic and musically dazzling, featuring a fabulous performance by Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. Definitely worth seeing.

First, an apology. When I started on this project, I intended to write a fairly shorty, capsule review. I failed. Instead, what follows is on the long-ish side. Hopefully you will find it interesting.  

I’ve been a Dylan fan since sometime in late 1963, when I was 14. On a day trip with my family to New Hope, Pennsylvania – then something of an artists’ colony – we stopped at a coffee house where a folk  trio (very hip, I thought) was singing one of his early songs.  I think it was Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, or maybe A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. They introduced the song with some superlatives about this absolutely amazing musician/songwriter called Bob Dylan.  I was already taken with Blowin’ in the Wind - a huge hit for Peter, Paul and Mary that summer, and I probably had heard their version of Don’t Think Twice, too. But I had never heard about Dylan before. Shortly thereafter I bought The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album and was totally sold. 

I became more intrigued reading the exuberant liner notes on the Freewheelin’ album, written by the already legendary record producer John Hammond – legendary because of his discovery and/or promotion of esteemed musical artists such as Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Pete Seeger, Big Joe Turner, the previously neglected delta blues great Robert Johnson and later on Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and more. Here is how those notes began:

        Of all the emergent singers of folk songs in the continuing renascence of that self-assertive tradition, none has equaled Bob Dylan’s singularity of impact. As Harry Jackson, a cowboy singer and a painter, has exclaimed: "He's so goddamned real it's unbelievable!" The irrepressible reality of Bob Dylan is a compound of spontaneity, candor, slicing wit and an uncommonly perceptive eye and ear for the way many of us constrict our capacity for living while a few of us don't.

        Not yet twenty-two at the time of this album’s release, Dylan is growing at a swift, experience-hungry rate. In these performances, there is already a marked change from his first album, and there will surely be many further dimensions of Dylan to come. What makes this collection particularly arresting that it consists in large part of Dylan's own compositions The resurgence of topical folk songs has become a pervasive part of the folk movement among city singers, but few of the young bards so far have demonstrated a knowledge of the difference between well-intentioned pamphleteering and the creation of a valid musical experience. Dylan has. As the highly critical editors of "Little Sandy Review" have noted, "...right now, he is certainly our finest contemporary folk song writer. Nobody else really even comes close."

        The details of Dylan's biography [are] he was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota. His experience with adjusting himself to new sights and sounds started early. During his first nineteen years, he lived in Gallup, New Mexico: Cheyenne, South Dakota; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Phillipsburg, Kansas; Hibbing, Minnesota (where he was graduated from high school), and Minneapolis (where he spent a restless six months at the University of Minnesota).

As A Complete Unknown points out, Hammond and many others were taken in by the romantic, yet bogus backstory young Bob was spreading about himself as an itinerant musician soaking up influences by hoboing around the country. This myth making was an early example of his gushing imagination and fervid aspiration. The accurate part is that he was rapidly soaking up musical influences and styles like a sponge.

When Dylan first started out singing in the coffee houses and clubs of Greenwich Village in 1961, as a complete unknown not yet twenty years old, he – like most folksingers then – sung mostly traditional songs, what we might now call Americana. On his self-titled first album, recorded in 1961 and released in March 1962, only two of the 13 songs were penned by Dylan. The rest were folk standards like Man of Constant Sorrow, Baby Let Me Follow You Down, and House Of The Rising Sun. Of the two originals, only Song to Woody is featured in A Complete Unknown, near the outset as Dylan sits by the bedside of his ailing idol, Woody Guthrie [Scoot McNairy], who’s slowly dying with Huntington’s Disease.

Around this time, Dylan began writing his own songs; in fact, he soon was writing at an astounding pace.  Not just a lot of songs, but a lot of GREAT ones. Some say he was touched by God or some other cosmic energy source. The immensity and quality of his output amazed his peers and is still remarkable in retrospect. A Complete Unknown shows us this fervid period in Dylan’s life but doesn’t try to explain it. It’s probably inexplicable. Let me illustrate what we’re talking about.

Starting with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (his second album) from May1963 through his 6th album Highway 61 Revisited in August 1965 – that's five albums in less than two and a half years - Dylan  recorded and released 54 original songs, between 20 and 30 of which are now generally considered to be classics – depending on your definition of the term and your taste.  This amazing period forms a major part of the story arc covered in A Complete Unknown. Among those classics are these (those in bold are sung by Chalamet as Dylan in the movie):

Blowing In The Wind, Girl From The North Country, Masters Of War,  A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, Don't Think Twice It's All Right, The Times They Are a-Changing, With God On Our Side, Only A Pawn In Their Game, Boots Of Spanish Leather, All I Really Want To Do, Chimes Of Freedom, My Back Pages, It Ain’t Me Babe, Subterranean Homesick Blues, She Belongs to Me,  Maggie’s Farm, Love Minus Zero/No Limit,  Mr Tambourine Man, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Like A Rolling Stone, Ballad Of A Thin Man, Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row.

So yeah, if you are a fan of Dylan’s early songs or are curious about what the fuss was/is all about, you’ll get a terrific sampling in A Complete Unknown. The movie’s climax comes at 1965's Newport Folk Festival – when Dylan sent shockwaves through the purist folk music world by appearing with an electric guitar and a blues-rock band, singing Maggie’s Farm and Like a Rolling Stone (see below). But his story certainly did not end there. The following year, he released the double album Blonde On Blonde, with songs like Rainy Day Women, Visions of Johanna, Just Like A Woman, and Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands; then the year after that, 1967, came John Wesley Harding (which some have argued is his best album) featuring stuff like I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine, Dear Landlord, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, and a little thing called All Along the Watchtower. I could go on, but I think you get my gist.

Apart from the focus on early Dylan, one of the things A Complete Unknown does well is to provide a credible illustration of sort-of what Greenwich Village and it’s folk music scene looked and felt like in that distinctly different era sixty years gone. The Cold War. The JFK assassination. The flowering of the civil rights movement. MLK’s “I have a dream” speech.  

And the movie gives us a chance also to meet some of the folks that Dylan was hanging with back in the day. Like Pete Seeger, superbly played by Edward Norton. A prominent figure in and promoter of the folk music scene and a storied musician in his own right, Seeger was one of several influential figures enthralled with the increasingly charismatic young Bob Dylan, and he played a significant role in promoting him as a talent to watch. This included first inviting him to perform at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. Norton captures Seeger’s singing style and mannerisms perfectly, as well as his great chagrin when Dylan famously “goes electric” at the 1965 festival.

Or like Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Curiously (to me at least), Suze is renamed Sylvie Russo in the movie supposedly because Dylan himself insisted that the character not be named Suze Rotolo, out of respect for the fact that Ms. Rotolo  was not a “public person’ – even though she died in 2011 and everyone knows who ‘Sylvie’ is supposed to be. Suze/Sylvie is played by Elle Fanning, who doesn’t look at all like Suze Rotolo or even Italian, but she does a nice job nonetheless.  Suze was featured on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, walking down a Village street arm-in-arm with Bob. She was also a political activist, considered a major influence on Dylan’s turn toward political and socially conscious songs. As he became more and more famous, Dylan began hanging out with other women too, which eventually led to Suze/Sylvie breaking up with him.

One of these other women was Joan Baez – already a successful folk music artist and performer – labeled "The Queen of Folk". She was important to Dylan romantically, but not just that. Baez promoted his songs, including several on her albums and in concert performances.  In July 1963, when both were  performers at the Newport Folk Festival, Baez invited Dylan onstage to sing his With God on Our Side with her. She soon invited him to join her tour, introducing Dylan to her vast audience.  Baez is played in A Complete Unknown by Monica Barbaro. Here may be a good place to note that all of the actors with singing parts in the film do their own vocals. Barbaro is a good actress and did a fine job as Baez; and, while she doesn’t have the high, crystalline soprano of Baez, she has a lovely singing voice. 

Dylan’s relationship with the women in his life, as depicted in this biopic, establishes pretty clearly that despite (or maybe because of) his incredible talent, he could be – at least at the time of his meteoric rise to fame – not only extremely self-centered but inconsiderate to those around him and a jerk as a boyfriend.

[Interestingly, one woman we do not meet in A Complete Unknown is Sara Lownds, with whom Dylan was involved by the time of the film's climax and who became his wife not long after.  But leaving her out makes cinematic sense. A romantic triangle is one thing, a quadrangle is an angle too far.  Lownds was a big part of Dylan’s life going forward and would have to be a central character in any sequel (unlikely).]

As I’ve mentioned, the culminating moment in A Complete Unknown occurs on the final night of the1965 Newport Folk Festival. That’s when Bob Dylan – by then the most prominent, creative “folk singer” of the day and the  headliner who will close the show – took the stage at the world’s most important folk music festival and played an electric guitar, fronting a band with electrified instruments: electric lead guitar, electric bass, electric organ, etc.  OMG! they are not playing acoustic!    

It was dramatic in real life and made doubly so in the movie, which goes a bit overboard in fictionalizing what happened and how.  For example, when Dylan and his band launch into I Ain’t Gonna Work On Maggie’s Farm the crowd goes wild with anger, dismay, and astonishment – loudly booing, even throwing things at Dylan on stage. Backstage, the festival bigwigs are acting just as surprised and going nuts too.  Did they not notice that the stage was clearly and purposefully set up for a band with electric instruments?  At the actual 1965 event, there was some booing for sure, but also applause - with several fans shouting for Dylan to play the rock hit Like A Rolling Stone.  

Despite these quibbles, as a dramatic conclusion to a strong biopic about the early years of one of the greatest popular musicians and poets of the age, the scene works just fine. And it makes for a good story that captures the impact of the moment. So, I have no issue with director James Mangold’s exercise of poetic license. 

The real problem in 1965 wasn’t that Dylan had changed, of course. The problem was that the folk movement had painted itself into a corner with its insistence on only acoustic music.  Dylan had already largely quit writing so-called protest songs in favor of a wider, often satirical social commentary, as well as love songs, poetic reflections, and a variety of other, far less constraining topics. Take, for example, my favorite lines from Mr. Tambourine Man, written in early 1964, and recorded with him accompanying himself with acoustic guitar and harmonica:

Take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind 
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves 
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach 
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

 
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves 

Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Protest? No.    Political? No.   Topical? No.         Personal, poetical, and universal? Absolutely!  Did Tambourine Man also make a damn good rock song? The Byrds successfully thought so.

Complete Unknown is a wonderful movie. It’s a joy. And it’s a time capsule. For those relatively unfamiliar with Bob Dylan’s music or, for that matter, with his origin story, it’s an education, and it may be a revelation. It’s got to be a high point in Timothee Chalamet’s already distinguished acting career.  Unless you have to, don’t wait for the streaming release, which may be months away and likely to be an inferior experience compared to the big screen; this one is worth a trip to your local cinema [assuming it’s equipped with decent sound].  

[Also, if you’ve seen A Complete Unknown already and/or are interested in seeing more about Dylan’s life or seeing a film containing all of Dylan’s performances (complete) at the 1963, 1964, and 1965 Newport Folk Festivals, drop me a line and I’ll help you do just that.]  

2 hours 20 minutes                        Rated R - for language

Grade: A

In wide theatrical release.