5. Notes on A Complete Unknown

Notes on A Complete Unknown  Mick Gold

I thought the musical interaction of Dylan and Baez was really good. The performances, the vocals and finger picking guitar of Chalamet and Barbaro (Baez), were convincing without sounding like earnest copies so there’s a lot of music in this film.

All this musical verisimilitude is in the service of a fairly pedestrian plot in which Bob is shown being a two-timing “asshole” (Baez’s word) towards his women. In the film, Suze Rotolo – the girl who is arm-in-arm with Dylan on the cover of his Freewheelin’ album – is given the name Sylvie Russo. In the Q&A after the screening, director James Mangold said this was a request from Bob. The reason given was that Rotolo was a private individual, not a celebrity, so she shouldn’t be named. Yet Bob chugs with great artistic integrity towards his musical triumph (or nemesis) at Newport, when his electric guitar caused mayhem in the Folk Garden of Eden. If Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There gave us six versions of Dylan as an exploration of the impossibility of pinning Bob down, this is Dylan’s life from his arrival in New York to Newport ’65 ironed into a conventional Hollywood biopic framework.

If you have hang-ups about Dylan’s chronology, there are a few absurdities. We see Bob buy a toy police whistle from a sidewalk stall and take it to a recording studio where he records ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. Then he staggers to the Chelsea Hotel and into Joan Baez’s apartment (?) where he begins earnestly writing ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ in the early hours of the morning and an exasperated, sleep-deprived Joan throws him out. As every Dylanologist knows, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ was recorded after Newport and ‘It’s Alright Ma’ was recorded six months before.

Chalamet’s performance is brilliant – with the reservation that when you flatten someone as complex and protean as Bob Dylan into a conventional mould, something is lost. Alan Lomax and Albert Grossman seem like caricatures but this film isn’t about them. It’s about the music. Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties, the book the film is based on, makes the case that something tragic happened at Newport 1965 as well as it being the moment of triumph of a new style of music and lyric writing. A triumph of electricity over acoustic music. A triumph of modernism over traditional forms. A triumph of individual stardom over the collective voice.

There’s a moving moment when Ed Norton as Pete Seeger tries to preach a parable to Bob to remind him of the cultural values he’s abandoning. A nice scene when Bob meets an older Black musician in a TV studio – and the two enthusiastically improvise a song which echoes ‘It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’ – conveys Dylan’s immersion in the blues and his alienation from the politics of the folk music revival. The film also captured something I’ve often felt about Bob. When he arrived in New York at the age of 19, he had the voice of an old man. His first album sounds like different attempts at a weather-beaten voice. The moment in the film when he sings ‘Song To Woody’ for the ailing Woody Guthrie in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital is arresting. Those odd irregularities in his pitch and phrasing and timing are skilfully conveyed.