You don’t have to be a Bob Dylan fan to enjoy this terrific biopic which takes us through the early years from his arrival in New York City in January 1961 to the Newport Folk Festival of 1965.
Newport 1965 was when Dylan notoriously went electric. Angry fans booed and hurled things at him when he embarked on a set from his then forthcoming album Highway 61 Revisited, starting with the classic Like a Rolling Stone, from whose lyrics the movie’s title comes.
Dylan was just that – a complete unknown, 19 years old and penniless, when he arrived in New York with nothing but a guitar and enough coins for a taxi to the hospital sickbed of the dying Woody Guthrie, the great folk poet of the Depression. Woody’s follower and musical cheerleader of the protest era, Pete Seeger, happened to be there too.
Dylan plays a song he wrote in tribute to Guthrie. The two veterans are impressed, and Seeger takes the young Dylan under his wing, giving him a roof over his head, a surrogate family and an introduction to the bohemian clubs and bars of Greenwich Village, hub of the folk/protest movement then at the peak of its popularity and influence.
Seeger is the reigning king of the scene and Joan Baez is its queen. She too takes Dylan under her wing, offering a more personal comfort as well as professional collaboration.*
Dylan’s talent is quickly recognised. He becomes a fixture on the scene, gets played on radio, gets on TV and records an album. He’s arrived just at the moment when the folk/protest movement is ready for something a little more edgy and forward-looking than Seeger’s singalong socialistic sermonising and Joan Baez’ sweet soprano folk covers. The times they are a-changing, and it’s Dylan who captures the zeitgeist with angry songs like Masters of War and Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.
It’s not only writers and critics, senators and congressmen who need to be urged not to stand in the doorways and block up the halls. Pete Seeger and Joan Baez want him to stay true to his folk roots but Dylan is his own man. This is the central motif of A Complete Unknown. In one early scene he is in a car with Seeger driving. Dylan turns on the car radio and rock ’n roll is playing. Seeger turns it off. Dylan turns it on again: That’s Little Richard, he says reverently. I thought you were a folk singer? Says Seeger. I’m a musician, says Dylan.
As the 1965 Newport Folk Festival approaches it becomes clear to the keepers of the sacred flame that Dylan is going seriously rogue. Baez gets angry, Seeger pleads with him, festival organisers threaten dire consequences, but he is unmoved. ‘You want me to spend the rest of my life strumming a guitar and singing Blowin in the Wind,’ he says scornfully at one stage to Pete Seeger.
Not that he needs it – he has complete confidence in his own creative choices – but he does have some support, most pleasingly from Johnny Cash, another Dylan hero and himself a bit of a wild card. ‘Make some noise, track some mud on the carpet’, Cash advises.
Timothy Chalamet is nothing short of brilliant as Dylan. His face isn’t particularly alike, but he captures the Dylan demeanour so well – the tousled hair, the dark shades, the signature slouch, the often surly public demeanour. (Dylan’s rise to fame was so swift he was unprepared for the sometimes scary attentions of crowds of avid fans.)
Most amazingly, Chalamet sings all the songs himself as well as playing the guitar and harmonica. I’ve heard several people say he’s a better singer than Dylan. That wouldn’t be hard and I agree, but Dylan’s importance in popular culture comes not from his singing but from his words. He’s the only songwriter to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.**
Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, and HE does all his own singing and playing too! Seeger was never much of a singer, and his songs sound very corny now, but it was no mean feat on Norton’s part to learn the banjo for the role. The same goes for Monica Barbaro who taught herself to sing and play guitar like Joan Baez.
We don’t learn much about Dylan’s past, but this is true to the man’s enigmatic character. There’s a scene where he gets cross when his girlfriend finds an album of photos from his childhood and starts looking through it. But he doesn’t want to be Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota, any more. He’s left that nondescript hometown and identity behind and and taken the name of the world’s most celebrated poet. This theme of creating oneself in a chosen persona recurs throughout the movie.
That girlfriend, played here by Elle Fanning, is named here as Sylvie. This was at the request of Dylan himself, because ‘Sylvie’ was not a public figure.
In this Dylan was being gentlemanly, even if his youthful behaviour towards women was not always so. Like any young man on the road to fame and fortune, he wasn’t big on monogamy. It’s interesting to note here that Dylan approved A Complete Unknown, even to the extent of contributing to the script and checking his own lines, so we can safely assume the accuracy of this portrayal.
Dylan’s attitude towards women was a mixture of tenderness and need alongside a combative insistence on sexual and emotional independence. It comes across in his songs: It Ain’t Me Babe, Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright) and Like A Rolling Stone. Listen to the latter again and be reminded of its gloating belligerence, addressed to a woman. You could say that as well as setting a new direction in political protest music he did likewise with the honest, adult, unromantic love song.
I loved A Complete Unknown and I’m not the only one. It’s already earned a swag of awards and has earned eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Director (James Mangold), Best Supporting Actor (Norton) and Best Supporting Actress (Barbaro). Director Mangold previously directed the Johnny Cash story Walk The Line, which I also loved, but then I adore a good biopic.
*Baez’ lovely 1975 song Diamonds and Rust is a reflection on their early years.
** I’ve always thought that Dylan is more poet than singer. From the magical lyricism of Love Minus D No Limit to the gritty mean-streets passion of Hurricane and any number of songs in between, he deserved that Nobel.
PS: Actors are credited for playing the parts of Peter, Paul and Mary and also Maria Muldaur. I barely registered P, P and M, who were on the way out anyway, and I totally missed Maria Muldaur.
