'A Complete Unknown': A Bob Dylan origin story

A poignant moment for me, as one intrigued by the shift from the Beat '50s to the Folk '60s in grimy Greenwich Village, was the last scene of the movie Inside Llewyn Davis. Davis, played beautifully by Oscar Isaac, is a talented folk singer whose embrace of high principles leaves him struggling professionally, and the story ends in 1961 with success still eluding him. Then there's the last shot of the film, bathed in denim-blue light, of a bushy-haired guy seen in silhouette on the stage at the Gaslight Cafe on MacDougal Street, singing the traditional folk song "Farewell." In a flash it becomes clear and your heart stops: it's 19-year-old Bob Dylan, just off the road from Iron Range Minnesota ("where the winds hit heavy on the borderline") to check out the NYC folk scene. 

The point of this brilliant Coen Brothers shot is that the audience is the omniscient observer who knows, unlike everybody else at the time, that this nobody scruffy kid is about to change everything in the NYC folkie world, then in pop music generally, and then in Western cultural history of the 20th century. 

Don't we all fantasize about being a fly on the wall back when a germ of history was in the making? Who wouldn't want to have been in the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962 to see John, Paul, George, and Ringo putting the act together, knowing then what we know now? I desperately wanted more than a couple of seconds at the end of Llewyn Davis to visualize Bob Dylan beginning to make his mark. How did he go from new-kid with a sort of OK song dedicated to Woodie to Blowin' in the Wind, It's Alright Ma, and Chimes of Freedom? And what of his walking arm-in-arm with proto-hippie girlfriend Suze Rotolo (forever memorialized on the cover of Dylan's first successful album Freewheeling), rambling down in the streets in the short interval between obscurity and celebrity? And the complicated personal and professional relationship with Joan Baez in those early days, enough to inspire a decade later Baez's classic Diamonds and Rust ("You burst on the scene already a legend, the unwashed phenomenon, and straight into my heart")?  

And on it goes: Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax struggled in Newport to keep their beloved folk festival folkie in 1965 even though Dylan, the headliner and show-closer, had discovered the electric guitar. Maggie's Farm ain't no Blowin' in the Wind. The crowd booed and called him "Judas." Half a century later, Dylan would become the only songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He clearly was on to something even if it was not widely recognized at the time.

Bio-pics generally suck and necessarily so. How can one credibly tell a life story in two hours without absurd caricature? A smarter strategy is to tell a shorter story. Churchill's early 1940s extremities (Darkest Hour); Oppenheimer's 15 years between the Manhattan Project and his losing his security clearance (Oppenheimer). Another useful strategy is to forswear any allegiance to the historical record and just tell a rollicking good story, a la Oliver Stone (JFK, Nixon).

Director James Mangold employs both in the Christmas-day-released Dylan bio-pic A Complete Unknown with the result, in my opinion, of his creating a great story and a great movie. Dylan Goes Electric, a story retold in hundreds of biographies and now the stuff of myth, is one of unrestrained artistic genius confronting staid (and commercial) expectations. Picasso couldn't help himself--and as he reinvented himself, he reinvented 20th-century art. So, too, Dylan, and if his beloved mentor Pete Seeger was furious and heartbroken, well, that's the price of genius. 

Mangold presents the struggle as coming down to a single moment when Dylan's roadie holds out two guitars, one acoustic and the other electric, and asks: "Which one?" What Dylan has going for him, according to Mangold, is his I-don't-give-a-flying- [expletive] attitude, pretty much about everything and everybody. Joan Baez tells Dylan upon his unsolicited criticism that she tries too hard, "You're kind of an asshole, Bob." Nothing in the movies countervails that impression. Picasso, I hear, was also fairly so described. 

If you are going to get upset about historical fiction, don't watch this movie. I mean, Pete Seeger just happened to be visiting Woodie Guthrie at Greystone Hospital when Dylan showed up unannounced? I don't think that happened. Joan and Bob hooking up the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis? I wasn't there but it seems like a whopper to me. The fact-checking list will be long and detailed in the days to come. 

But I don't care. This isn't a documentary. It's a fly-on-the-wall fantasy and it worked for me in no small part on account of the acting. Timothy Chalamet is courageous, taking on a living legend with profound vocal and personality quirks. It would have been so easy to blow it and become a laughingstock but instead, he nails it. And his guitar playing in the style of Dylan is jaw-dropping. He holds his own with a genuine Delta bluesman--in open D tuning, no less.

Elle Fanning plays "Sylvie Russo," an obvious pseudonym for Suze Rotolo (a name change apparently made at Dylan's request), who is portrayed as the woman wronged and a source of early feminist strength. Dylan's true love was for Joan, the movie asserts, which becomes apparent only when the two perform together in public venues. In consequence, Sylvie summons the will to leave "the carnival," leaving an imploring Bob at the bus depot. I loved her performance, and I can see why Bob fell for her in the first instance. Ed Norton as Seeger is outstanding. 

Is there caricature? To be sure. Albert Grossman, Dylan's (and Gordon Lightfoot's, Janis Joplin's, and Peter, Paul, and Mary's) famed agent, is absurdly portrayed as the crafty go-between the label and the artists (with his apparent allegiance to the money.) And the fast-talking Columbia Record guys represent the Orthodoxy against which a virtuous artist must struggle. Mangold requires Dylan to walk out of the room as they gadfly him to be more commercial--and the walk-outs occur more than once lest anybody not get the point. Way too much on the nose.   

The movie also reliably covers the key points of the legend. Al Kooper's sneaking into the session to sit at a Hammond organ (which he doesn't know how to turn on, the movie claims) to come in an eighth note late on the intro to Like a Rolling Stone and thereby creating a sound for the ages. Dylan smiles in that instant, knowing something fantastic had just happened. There's Pete Seeger's contemplating taking an axe to the sound equipment at Newport in 1965 when Bob refuses to turn down the electronic cacophony. And Dylan, driving just a little too fast on his Triumph motorcycle despite Seeger's earlier warning to "be careful on that thing," presaging an accident that leads to the groundbreaking Basement Tapes recorded with The Band during his convalescence. 

Then there is the triple entendre title. Of course, it's a line straight from what Rolling Stone for some decades called the best rock and roll song of all time (it's currently number 4; Aretha's Respect is now number one). It's also a theme of the storyline: a complete unknown becomes completely known in a starburst of brilliance. But the point of the movie, I think, is that Dylan, the household name and the legend, remains a mystery. Is it his shtick or is it his psychology? The movie doesn't answer the question except to note at the end that Dylan did not attend the ceremony when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. You have to admit, that's unusual.   

I saw the movie Christmas Day in San Luis Obispo. Every seat was taken in the large theatre. When the movie ends and the credits roll, the soundtrack is, of course, Like A Rolling Stone and the audience is singing along, everybody aware of every word. Not so unknown.