#47 LEAVE YOUR STEPPING STONES BEHIND: A Complete Unknown

Chalamet as Dylan with “Sylvie”

There’s a moment of exchange about Bob Dylan and fame I heard one day at the Naropa summer writing program that’s always stuck with me.  Marianne Faithful, who’d been a popstar in the mid-sixties, a Mick Jagger and Keith Richards girlfriend, and had revived her career in the 80s, was on a panel with Allen Ginsberg.  They knew each other originally from Allen’s visit to Britain in the 60s when she was, as he said, his “date” for the day.

Contemplating, I think, the Dylan of a later era, Allen commented that he admired how Dylan handled fame well enough to keep it at bay, allowing him “to get his work done.”

This prompted Marianne: “I don’t think he handled fame well at all.”  The emphasis in her voice burned itself in my memory.

How well Dylan handled fame is an issue at the heart of A Complete Unknown (2024), a bio pic examining his 1961 arrival in New York City as a 19 year old nobody folk singer with guitar and backpack through his “going electric” moment at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.  This period has long had a mythical aura about it. Timothée Chalamet sticks an indelible performance of the main character, with a feeling for all the many infamously mercurial shadings Dylan’s personality presents.

Chalamet has Dylan’s angelic, youthful good looks, and shows up early in the movie at protest singer Woodie Guthrie’s bedside.  Guthrie, afflicted by Huntington’s disease, thus obstructed in speech and movement, lived confined to a bed in a New Jersey hospital for his last 13 years of life.  Pete Seeger (an excellent Ed Norton) sitting with him turns to see Dylan come in with his guitar.  Not really accounting him as much, it’s clear to Seeger that Dylan is a heartfelt fan of Guthrie’s, so he tells him to play.  Dylan hesitates, and Seeger asks him if he’s shy about performing.

“Not usually,” he says, humbled by his hero’s presence.  He sings his “Song for Woody,” the first composition of many you’ll hear that blow your mind throughout the movie.  Somehow they get a fresh recast here, despite the movie’s verisimilitude to Dylan’s voice, mannerisms, and performance.  What I didn’t expect was how much the movie centered itself on the music rather than the melodrama.  It’s a smart decision on the part of the director, James Mangold, which focuses us down into Dylan’s greatness as a songwriter and performer.  That’s at the heart of it all, and that’s also what you end up grappling with as you try to understand Dylan and who he is or might be.

Might be seems like the operational language here.  He hesitates at Woody’s bedside, but he’s not someone inclined to hold back on what he can become, at least as a writer and performer.  As you hear in song after song, he’s so good, so brilliant, so at another level, seeing and feeling from a deeper place as an artist than anyone around him, that there’s something genuinely singular and magical about him that immediately astounds Seeger and Guthrie but becomes the enormous swell of his popularity within three years.

Seeing Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) perform for the first time in a small club, she sings an aching, exquisite version of “House of the Rising Sun,” and when Dylan follows her on stage, he turns and looks at her, saying into the mic: “She’s pretty. Sings pretty. Maybe a little too pretty.”  It’s a complicated moment of attraction, admiration, aesthetic criticism, competitive zeal, and plain old arrogance.  He might be nobody, but Dylan doesn’t lack in self-confidence—at least as an artist.  He’s so fully focused that way, he gets up in the middle of the night to write songs.  Everything else is secondary.  With Baez, he immediately disses her at a level I’m sure constitutes his poetics, his artistic philosophy; it’s not about being “pretty,” but going for what’s underneath that, the guts of the matter.  At the same time, it’s a shot fired across her bow in the ancient strategy of who has the upper hand in the game of love.

She’s both insulted and attracted.  Perhaps the insult becomes part of the attraction.  Like I said, it’s complicated.

He rises as a folk and protest singer to the point he eclipses everyone else.  Even Baez gets up there to sing his songs.  Interestingly, to this day many people think of Bob Dylan as a protest/folk singer.  But if you’re watching this movie and know his story, you know already that he’s not only going to abandon folk music for rock’n’roll, he’ll go on to so many phases of manifestation as a musician and poet, it’s too many to even bother to list.

On his first album, the fuddy-duddies at Columbia force him to play old folk songs.  On his second record, he prevails with his own compositions, and gets rewarded in his starving artist mode with a check for 10,000 bucks (no small amount in 1963).  Suddenly his fortunes change, and he does too.

By ’64/’65 he’s morphed into a hipster in black who roars everywhere on his motorcycle.  He’s recognized on the street but ignores his fans, though he does throw out the occasional bon mot.  Here’s something the movie could stand to have explored a little more—Dylan and his reaction to crowds pressing their faces into the windows of his car as he’s trying to leave the venue.  Something happens that makes him withdraw and affect more distance, hidden behind dark glasses and chain-smoking.

He starts remaking himself as a Beat poet and (for those days) hard rocker.  The movie makes the Seeger character the prime representative of the folk movement which discovers its transcendent artist about to slip away.  All the things that the folk movement meant to stand for, not the least being Woody Guthrie’s working man and social justice anthems, got brought into bright focus by Dylan’s brilliance.

And then, before you know it, he’s gone on to something else.

Cate as Bob

Perhaps the amazing thing was that he really did become that person, at least in terms of his art.  What crystallizes it all better than “Blowin’ in the Wind”?  Of all the music made in the 60s, and for that matter, in the succeeding decades, how many of those songs will people still be singing a thousand years from now?  Maybe “Blowin’ in the Wind” and nothing else.  It’ll be as true then as it is now.

But within a year or two, he didn’t want to play it anymore.  He was on to his new work; in fact, the three “electric” rock albums he produced—Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited (both 1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966)—almost single-handedly changed rock into an adult mode of music.   He brought a biting, exuberant, edgy  intelligence to what was now formerly “kids’ music.”  He had already burned through the hipster mode by the end of 1966—just as the whole hippie thing came into focus—and didn’t tour again for eight years.

The movie gives us only this one iteration, but it’s enough for you to sense that you don’t really know where he’s coming from.  When his girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (a pseudonym for Suzie Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning) confronts him about his fictive descriptions of himself employed in a traveling carnival, you can hear his defensiveness and insistence on his freedom to create the past, just as much as he’s claiming a freedom to create the future.  He’s resentful of fans wanting him to be their version of him, and if there are a thousand fans, there are a thousand versions they want him to be.

Well, that’s food for thought right there.  Yes, you have to concede, that each of those screaming people see someone they want him to be.  This is his unavoidable, life-long, existential issue.  When asked who he does want to be, there’s a distinct gap in his mind.  That’s not so easily answered.  But he’s very sure he doesn’t want to be reduced to anyone’s conceptual box or easy label (like “folk singer”).  It’s not so different with his girlfriends Joan and Sylvie.  He has no taste for being controlled.  He has a stubborn, rebellious, contrarian streak that adamantly protects his shifting creative vision, and also erects walls around him that isolate him, something he’ll play out in one way or another throughout his career and life.

It’s striking that his sense of creative avocation extends to who and what he is.  It’s all in motion; it’s all a potentially creative statement.  And it’s all potentially a giant ego that will not kowtow to other people’s feelings or needs.  So who is he at the center of this?  There’s your “complete unknown.”  He’s both a sharply defended territory and a creative force that an ego—his or anyone else’s—can’t truly contain.  There’s an inscrutability that lives at the core of great art, and in Dylan you see that playing out in his personality as well.

A previous Dylan biopic, the very good I’m Not There (2007), imaginatively accepts his many personas and puts six different actors in the Dylan role, including Cate Blanchett in the hipster phase (which got an Oscar nomination), rather than struggling to cohere his personality into a reductive definition.

The climax of A Complete Unknown comes when Dylan takes the stage at the finale of Newport Folk Festival, its breathlessly awaited performer.  He seems to suspend his furious self-determination around revered heroes, like Guthrie and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook, in a good turn).  Cash gives his blessing to taking the stage with the electric guitars, and so Dylan does it, seemingly ready for the chaotic rage it will provoke in the crowd.  It’s as punk a moment as you could want, turning up the amps and blasting away at “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”  I think the movie gives the short shrift to the coercion Dylan got generally from the folk scene and what it wanted him to be.  He wasn’t their trained monkey, that’s for sure, and they got a big middle finger for it.

The movie presents Seeger as trying to get Dylan to understand that they had been building this situation up for years until they were filling this big venue, and that he could easily destroy it.  But destroy it he does, as the crowd descends into booing and fist fights.  So much for all that peace and love stuff.

I guess I had always accepted that taking the guitar, turning up the testosterone, and rocking hard constituted a valid response, a meaningful gesture of freedom.  Watching it here, I found myself thinking that a little kindness to this situation that had supported him wouldn’t be wrong.  When he comes off the stage, Cash hands him an acoustic guitar, getting him to go back out for one more number to mollify the very upset crowd.  Since it’s Cash asking, he submits, and does “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” appeasing the crowd, which maybe doesn’t fully grasp how elegiac and ironic it is.

At the end of the movie, he visits Guthrie and sings to him, for what must be the last time, before he races off on his motorcycle towards his epic, ever-mutating future.  Guthrie’s left alone in his bed.  Dylan is, after all, still a very young man with a long way to go through ego struggles and the weird interactions great fame produces and the many terrific songs still to come.  He will somehow manage to remain a viable rock musician into his 80s, able to perform live and produce a decent album (Rough and Rowdy Ways, 2020).  There’s a kindness, had he had it in his youth, that might have helped him sort through much of what was to come (Taylor Swift could teach him a few things about that).  He girded himself in leather and blasted ahead, the artist living out his vision, and don’t stand in the way.

Bob Dylan, folk singer