A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan goes through four breakups in A Complete Unknown. The ugliest and most violent one is when he dumps the folk music nerds. 

That probably sounds harsh for the folk music nerds but honestly, I’m on their side.

As a country music nerd I fully believe that everytime a great country artists releases a pop, rock, punk, rap or EDM album an angel loses its wings. 

It isn’t easy to make any kind of movie but music biopics like sports dramas, seem to me, an outsider, to be a genre permanently set on the lowest difficulty level. 

If you like the artist, you likely will enjoy the songs and background scenes between songs will be interesting because fans can’t get enough of this stuff. 

A Complete Unknown is a little better than most of the rest for a host of reasons. 

The first, of course, is that Director James Mangold and writers Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald fill the film with early Dylan hits. 

There is other music here too, of course, but mostly the movie gives you the early catalogue of one of the world’s greatest songwriters. 

As Aces go, that’s not a bad one to have up your sleeve. 

Also, I’ve heard all of these songs thousands of times but the movie gives them context (whether true or not I can’t say) that brings even more meaning to the tunes. That’s standard music biopic stuff but it’s still wonderful to experience it with say Master’s of War, It Ain’t Me Babe and finally (spoilers) It’s All Over Now Baby Blue. 

The next solid choice is that the movie is mostly unafraid to present Dylan as a paranoid jerk. I’ve never met Mr. Dylan but paranoia and jerkitude radiate from him at least as much as his singular musical genius. 

Timothy Chalamet plays him – after he becomes famous – with a permanent snarl. And that pretty much jives with what I gleaned from all of his records between 1962 and 1979 when he found Jesus and released Slow Train Coming. 

The movie gives enough time to the music legends in Dylan’s orbit, Peter Seeger (Ed Norton), Joan Baez (Monica Barbara), and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) to give you a sense of their lives at the time. But it never strays far from the main course — Bobby Zimmerman conquering the world. 

You get to see the most famous photo shoot in rock music history with Dylan and his then girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning).

And you get Dylan’s love life, the 1960s folk scene and a picture perfect New York City.  The flick also builds to its central conflict; that Dylan is too big for folk music and is going to leave the genre for rock and roll. 

If Woodie Guthrie was Jesus and Pete Seeger was the Apostle Paul then Dylan is Seeger’s child in the faith. The movie opens as Dylan seeks out Guthrie, finds him in a hospital and also meets Seeger. 

One impressive song at the foot of a hospital bed later and Seeger adopts the new kid and helps him get his start. 

Seeger and the Folk crew see Dylan as someone who will finally take their vision of music and politics to a wider world. Dylan succeeds beyond all reasonable hopes and then … 

Well, what’s next after you have conquered the world? Especially, if you are permanently paranoid and unsatisfied no matter how good life gets. 

And, it ain’t like anybody anywhere is asking Bob Dylan was he wants. Dylan discovers that fame is just a host of people who want something from him in every moment of his life. 

And he wasn’t exactly Mr. Sunshine before that revelation. 

One of the tough lessons I learned from my father is that unhappy people are going to remain unhappy no matter what you do. 

Money, fame and relationships just won’t cut it when you’re a guy like Bob Dylan. 

Like any good ‘historical’ movie A Complete Unknown never lets the facts get in the way of the legend. My favorite bit of lore is that guitarist Al Kooper inserted himself into Dylan’s recording of Like A Rolling Stone by pretending he could play the organ even though he had never touched the thing in his life. 

The organ part in Dylan’s signature song is amazing. And in this telling Kooper somehow plays it just after someone shows him how to turn the machine on! 

Did that really happen? 

Well, by that point it didn’t matter. I wanted to believe. 

Don’t think twice, it’s alright.