Who is Bob Dylan? Not who you want him to be. This is the message of A Complete Unknown, the biopic directed by James Mangold that premiered this past Christmas. The movie follows Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet) over four years, from the beginning of his career in 1961 to his iconic performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
The film opens with aspiring 19-year-old Dylan, who enters Greenwich Village in New York as a lone figure detached from his lesser-known Minnesota origins. He arrives at a psychiatric hospital to visit his folk-music hero, Woody Guthrie, who was suffering from the brain disorder Huntington’s disease. To express his gratitude for Guthrie, he sang to him “Song to Woody”—though, in reality, he wrote the song after the two had spent time together, not on their first meeting.
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know. All the things that I’m a-saying an’ a-many times more. I’m a-singing you the song but I can’t sing enough. Because there’s not many men that done the things that you’ve done.
Early in his career, Dylan tried out different stage names but eventually went by the name Bob Dylan instead of Robert Zimmerman, likely because (but highly contested like many aspects of Dylan’s history) of the main character Dylan from the television series Gunsmoke. The movie depicts Dylan’s roller-coaster relationship with Sylvie Russo (a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo, portrayed by Elle Fanning). Russo was a civil rights activist and introduced Dylan to America’s changing political sphere, influencing the type of music he would later write, like “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” where he argues that the authorities and political leaders manipulate poor White people to view poor Black people as threats.
As the couple’s relationship ends, Dylan begs Sylvie to stay, but she replies that she was along for the ride with him—until she couldn’t be anymore. In this scene she is depicted as a powerful person, and like everyone Dylan’s music has touched, she could understand his work but not everything about him. His more human aspects are understandably appealing to his audience, who treat him like a god, but those closest to him grow frustrated with his enigmatic nature. When asked if he believes he’s God, he replies, “How many times I gotta tell you: yes!” Despite his genius status, he remained too much of an unknown for Sylvie, which ultimately forced their relationship to a close. He describes his remorse for their failed relationship in his song “Ballad in Plain D.”
“The changes I was going through can’t even be used. For the lies that I told her in hope not to lose. The could-be dream-lover of my lifetime.”
Dylan also dated fellow folk singer Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbao), sometimes at the same time as Russo. Already established in the folk industry, Baez was able to significantly boost Dylan’s career by offering him guest positions in her concerts. In her documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, she described their relationship as “totally demoralizing.” As Dylan’s reputation as a one-of-a-kind genius grew, the pair were driven apart. Unexpectedly, the movie’s audience is primarily meant to sympathize with Rotolo and Baez rather than with Dylan himself. Although both women greatly influenced his political awareness and his music, they could never change his character. He is portrayed as unreachable and uncompromising, writing things everyone could understand while remaining somewhat of a mystery. In the film, he tells Baez that people are mainly curious about why his music never comes to them rather than why it comes to him.
The movie’s finale brings Dylan back for his second time at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 in Rhode Island; at this point in his career, he was growing extremely frustrated with his producers, his audience, and his reputation as solely a folk musician. He also didn’t like the immense pressure he faced as the “voice of his generation.” “They want me playing blowing in the wind again, forever,” Dylan says in the movie. He was advised to play the folk hits the audience was expecting to hear. True to himself as always, he did the opposite of this, singing his now iconic rock and roll ballads with an electric guitar, “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” while in the background, folk music purist Pete Seeger desperately tried to cut the power out of his amplifiers.
This was a revolutionary moment for rock and roll since electronic music was regarded by the folk purists as cheap and dirty. Dylan’s performance shattered the notion that he was just a folk musician. Half of the audience expecting his sweet, soulful music booed and threw things at the stage while the other half—perhaps us watching his biopic now—cheered along. As he sings, “I’m not gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more,” he’s telling us he’s refusing to be other people’s versions of himself once and for all. Thank God for that.
“I got a head full of ideas that are drivin’ me insane. It’s a shame, the way she makes me scrub the floor. I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.”
According to Chalamet in his interview with Steven Colbert, the movie’s purpose is to encourage the audience to explore Dylan’s music and world further, for both fans and first-time listeners alike. Dylan’s achievements are enormous, including being the only musician to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (which he finally accepted three months after the awards ceremony he didn’t attend). Yet, despite his monumental achievements, much of his life remains a mystery. A Complete Unknown doesn’t reveal anything about him that isn’t already understood; it simply recapitulates what he was able to achieve during those four primitive years. Perhaps that’s what makes it so endearing.
How does it feel, how does it feel? To be on your own, with no direction home. Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone. (Lyrics from “Like a Rolling Stone”).
