"A Complete Unknown" Gets It Right
This thing has a heart.
I have spent so much of my career as a music journalist documenting and correcting the historical record. I wrote an acclaimed series for Salon that fact-checked Vinyl, the Martin Scorcese/Mick Jagger show about the music business in the 70s. As a teenager my father used to threaten me with not being allowed to watch music shows on television because I’d get so upset when some documentary or awards show overstated or mis-stated a fact. So to say that I walked into an early screening of A Complete Unknown, where Timothée Chalamet portrays Bob Dylan, with a fair amount of trepidation is 100% accurate.
Media created about rock and roll, whether fictional or factual, generally don’t get rock and roll right because most people don’t know the difference and because it’s expensive to attend to the small details. But they also don’t get it right because most people don’t understand why it matters if it’s the wrong guitar or if that hadn’t happened yet or if the club isn’t on that street and didn’t look at all like that, or if that musician stood in a different place onstage. I am very sure there are mistakes in A Complete Unknown, I am sure someone has probably already written about them, I hope that there are wardrobe geeks and equipment wonks who will do a deep dive on what glaring mistakes were made. But this thing has a heart. It is joyful, it is funny in the right places, it has attitude and style, and it is clear that everyone who worked on it gave a damn about getting it right.
A Complete Unknown isn’t a documentary, and dramatic license is taken all over the place. There are composite characters, there are representative situations. But the difference is that there is context and they are believable. The kinds of careless obvious errors that I am accustomed to chronicling because they take me out of the story being told and communicate that these are not reliable narrators are not present in this film. So instead of constantly being yanked back into present tense you get to spend 2 hours and 21 minutes present and joyfully living in this world, the time between Dylan arriving in New York City and the time he went onstage at the Newport Folk Festival and turned the world upside down by playing electric.
Notice how I said “errors.” We’re going to have to accept that Chalamet isn’t going to exactly sound like young Bob; there’s no point in going to see this movie if you aren’t willing to suspend that particular belief. He succeeds in this film because he is an excellent actor who was able to inhabit the spirit of that Bob Dylan and is effective at conveying believable emotions. It’s not over the top, it’s not a parody, and he doesn’t overdo it. None of us know Bob Dylan so it’s all kind of a make-believe game anyway, but to someone who has spent a lot of my life paying attention to Bob Dylan he made it very easy for me to be willing to believe him and to fully come on board this particular train.
It was harder for me with Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez, because Baez’ voice is so absolutely pristine, there’s no give, no leeway. But she’s another very good actor who made it easy for me to temporarily accept her as Baez. The scenes I liked best were watching the interaction between her character and Chalamet when they were performing; it felt the most authentic, the most believable. But again there was nothing that she did in character that took me out of the story.
I knew Ed Norton was in this movie but it probably took me 20 minutes to connect that he was Pete Seeger, because he was so fully in the role. He had to learn to play banjo for this film, which is insane. Pete Seeger was an amazing human who embodied a kind of virtue and principled living that both made you want to be a better person but could also get under your skin, and you get all of that in this character. Other standout roles are Will Harrison as Bob Neuwirth and Dan Fogler as Albert Grossman – they play those characters as you have imagined them behaving in your mind. The minute either is on screen you know immediately who they are (if you know who they are). If you don't, the story will help you figure it out.
My screening featured brief bonus interview footage from a premiere and this is how I learned that Dylan asked that Suze Rotolo’s character have another name, so she’s called Sylvie here (played by Elle Fanning) and it’s meant as a composite. I realize I have strong feelings about Suze Rotolo because she is, after all, the woman on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the person we all wanted to be, but she was very much a fascinating individual and very much her own person -- if you have not read her memoir [A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties | Amazon | Bookshop] I strongly recommend that you do. (I kind of love Bob a little more knowing that he came to her defense in that way for this film.)
I can’t tell you what it’s like watching this movie if you do not know about this time in Bob Dylan’s life, if you don’t know New York City, if you don’t know who the ancillary characters are or why they’re important, if you don’t recognize places like Town Hall or Carnegie Hall or the Kettle of Fish or Folk City or the Hotel Chelsea or Cafe Wha? or the Monterey Fairgrounds on sight. (I’ve never made it to Newport.) I’m not saying this to brag, I’m saying this because what the movie does for you if you are that person is that it just sweeps you inside of it instantly.
Caryn Rose
I was overwhelmed at times, thinking of all the years I read about this particular history and how you’d try to imagine what it was like to actually be there, what you would see, what you would hear, what it would feel like. I would walk by all of those places in the Village and mentally catalog their place in history – not just Dylan, music history in general – but I have those tangible connections and so watching this film connect the physical location with the a story that was so easy to immerse yourself in was a sort of homecoming. I was not anticipating experiencing anything like that with this film. It’s the kind of thing that I’d stopped hoping for with any kind of media based on rock and roll history because I’m pretty much always deeply disappointed. It was so unfamiliar and so cathartic to finally be able to watch someone care enough to get it right.
[Before I left NYC, one of my oldest friends - who is an enormous Bob fan - was visiting and I made her do this with me.]
I am sure that when I see it again (I am going Christmas day, as is the tradition of my people) I will find all of the Things That Are Wrong with this movie, but I also think both of these experiences are true and correct and can both coexist. I always try to walk in with a willingness to suspend disbelief and let the experience unfold however it is going to. I also try to avoid advance press because I don’t want to risk having my subconscious influenced before I’ve had a chance to process it, but it was hard to avoid bumping into random statements, and I was cautiously optimistic from what I had seen about A Complete Unknown that I wasn’t going to cringe the entire time. But there’s a huge difference between “okay, I didn’t hate that” to walking out of this film with a full heart.
I also want to talk about how well this film conveys the passage of time. Chalamet's subtle morphing of his character from just-arrived Bob to polka-dot shirt and Ray-Bans overnight sensation is brilliant. But the tension leading up to Newport in 1965 and then the way director James Mangold is able to viscerally convey how tightly wound everyone was leading up to that performance so that you are able to appreciate the anger and frustration from everyone involved is absolutely genius. Because I can see a bunch of people who aren't familiar with the story thinking, Why was everyone so upset? I know this story and man, it was physical: goosebump-inducing, sitting on the edge of your seat. Stunning.
The audience tonight was seemingly a mix of boomers and groups of 20-somethings – there was a duo where each dressed as a different Bob, one in a perfect suit, one in a vest and a fisherman’s cap – but as the audience dispersed into the parking lot after the showing, someone was driving around in a slow loop, blasting “Like A Rolling Stone” out an open window in the December cold. It felt good, it felt celebratory, it felt solid, like one of our stories was finally told right: the right intention, the right spirit.
Caryn Rose
