“You’re pushing candles, he’s selling lightbulbs”

David Sheppard reviews James Mangold's widely anticipated Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.

Largely thanks to the protracted length of its production, anticipation for James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown has been building seemingly forever (work on the project, initially titled Going Electric, began in early 2020, only to be halted by the Covid pandemic and the subsequent Hollywood writers’ strike). Online stories about lead actor, Dune and Wonka star Timothée Chalamet’s protracted immersion in all things Dylan have been legion, not least his learning to play finger-style acoustic guitar and harmonica from scratch then exchanging notes with the 83-year-old bard himself, who seems to have given the film his tacit, if typically ambiguous, approval. 

Mangold is very much a mainstream Hollywood director, and while he has explored the musical biopic genre before with 2005’s Johnny Cash portrait Walk the Line, he is typically at home with more generic cineplex fare, delivering the final instalment of the Indiana Jones series, Dial of Destiny, for example, before embarking on principal photography for A Complete Unknown. No surprise, then, that his latest exploration of mythic mid-20th century American popular culture is an essentially orthodox charting of Dylan’s arrival in the early ’60s folk revival nexus of Greenwich Village (meticulously recreated throughout the film, down to the last buckskin jacket, subterranean club sign and record store rack) as a pink-cheeked, apple seed Woody Guthrie manqué, and his ensuing, four-year ascension from obscurity to international celebrity, helping, in the process, to drag rock’n’roll from the lowly domain of teen entertainment towards the high citadel of ‘serious’ art. 

To give the director his due, this is not a simply told chronological tale – there’s a certain collage-like, non-linear quality to the editing, for example – but an arthouse, I’m Not There-style take on Dylan’s mythos it is not. Indeed, the narrative turns, in a stereotypically tinseltown reimagining of the truth, as much on Dylan’s spurning of two women – Greenwich Village muse-cum-girlfriend Sylvie Russo (a character squarely based on the late Suze Rotolo, subtly played by Elle Fanning – the name changed apparently at Dylan’s behest) and folk singing imperatrix Joan Baez (a luminous portrayal by Monica Barbaro, who also learned to sing and play guitar à la Joan especially for the part) – as much as it does his spurning of the folk idiom. 

It goes without saying that compressing four stratospheric years in the young Bob Dylan’s life into two hours of screen time inevitably means some of the nuances of personal evolution are glossed over, but, in general terms, Chalamet’s brooding, aloof take on the young Bob feels largely plausible, even if his hair seems a little too long when he first arrives in New York City in late January1961, his blue jeans just a tad too flared for the Newport Folk Festival of 1965, and he never quite nails the singer’s Minnesotan burr, nor his Chaplin-esque gait (the actor being considerably taller than the surprisingly diminutive Bob). The sometimes rather arbitrary-seeming editing doesn’t help stave off the impression that Dylan/Chalamet flips too rapidly from taciturn ingenu to contrarian, perma-shaded rock’n’roll magus, with not too much in between. For all that, Chalamet’s ability to mimic the singer, whether as solo folky or with full electric band (abetted by the production team’s faithful recreation of period sounds, referencing Columbia’s original production notes from Dylan album sessions, and using faithful vintage microphones and long discontinued Gibson acoustic guitar models, especially re-manufactured by luthiers for the shoot) is an undoubtedly impressive achievement: there’s every chance it will land him an Oscar. 

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

“…there is also something strangely contemporary in the film’s depiction of Dylan’s self-curated, self-mythologised identity (a very social media concept), a topic which the film plays with without fully exploring.”

The supporting cast generally turn in creditable performances, too, although Dan Fogler’s cartoonish take on Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman lacks the latter’s gravity and inscrutability (see Grossman’s somewhat chilling scenes when knocking back British TV producers by phone in D.A, Pennebaker’s 1967 Dylan documentary, Dont Look Back). Boyd Holbrook’s black-clad, speed-freaked Johnny Cash, all wild limbs and wilder stares, is also something of a caricature but somehow convinces, while Edward Norton as the US folk scene’s endlessly benevolent, jumpery grand vizier Pete Seeger is the film’s still centre and perhaps its standout performance (it’s difficult to imagine the originally cast Benedict Cumberbatch pulling off such convincing down-home gentility). Seeger’s outward smiling forbearance is increasingly tested as Dylan, initially canonised as a kind of youthful mascot for ‘the movement’, seemingly charged with picking up the baton from hors de combat Woody Guthrie (who he visits in hospital in an early scene, delivering the beleaguered folk hero, played by Scoot McNairy, a musical tribute, the unambiguously titled ‘Song For Woody’, in one of the movie’s numerous contractions of true events), transitions inexorably from ‘virtuous’ protest singer towards a singular, mercurial, unmapped future.

By the film’s climax, with Dylan and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band ripping up the Newport Folk Festival’s rootsy, ‘socialist-authentic’ rulebook by blasting out amplified rock’n’roll (“You’re pushing candles, he’s selling lightbulbs” one character chides Seeger as he tries to dissuade Dylan from plugging in his Stratocaster), Seeger/Norton’s apoplectic response finally threatens to break through his benign demeanour, but, rebuked with a look by his wife Toshi (another notable portrayal, exuding stoical, maternal calm, by Eriko Hatsune), he resists the temptation to take an axe to the backstage cabling, although the anger in his eyes burns on. In fact, this incident may never have happened, even if it is one of the ‘legends’ of Dylan’s notorious closing set at Newport ’65, but, as with much here, the director is not going to let the truth get in the way of a good (and transparently symbolic) story.  At times, this tendency goes too far. It is not entirely clear, for example, what is achieved by transporting the fabled, anti-electric Dylan “Judas!” audience put-down from the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966 – surely by now an incident of widely acknowledged record – to Dylan’s electric Newport set a year earlier, other than to deny the northern British provenance of one of the most infamously cauterising heckles in musical history. Cinematic licence some have argued; alternative facts say others... 

All of which brings us strangely up to date. Indeed, while Timothée Chalamet’s undoubted Gen Z pulling power has acted as a gateway drug, helping A Complete Unknown (not to mention interest in the still ceaselessly touring Bob Dylan) achieve unforeseen traction among the young, even before its release, there is also something strangely contemporary in the film’s depiction of Dylan’s self-curated, self-mythologised identity (a very social media concept), a topic which the film plays with without fully exploring. That said, the liberal, Kennedy-era USA against which the action plays out, with its apparent air of optimism, the on-going dismantling of racial inequalities and the rejection of the turgid old order, with youth very much in the vanguard of change, feels barely credible from a 21st century standpoint, with the country, and the world, on tenterhooks as a second, gerontocratic Trump administration is sworn in. The times they are a-changin’ back...

Of course, even that early ’60s sanguinity proved short-lived, courtesy of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis (portrayed courtesy of an effective montage sequence in the film) and Kennedy’s assassination the following year – a souring of mood that while it initially inspired some of Dylan’s finest protest anthems like ‘Masters of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ (indeed, if nothing else, A Complete Unknown serves as a reminder of how gloriously, savagely skewering the lyrical pen of the 22 and 23 year-old Dylan could be), seems also to have helped usher him away from political critique in favour of the deeper, more existential, neo-Blakeian matters that characterised much of his mid-‘60s songwriting.

At several points in the film, Holbrook’s Johnny Cash advises Chalamet’s Dylan to “Go track some mud on the carpet”. Aimed at the metaphorical rugs of folk traditionalists, it could also reflect a broader disparagement of societal norms, tapping into Dylan’s instinctive role as a contrarian disruptor – and this is a key tenet of Chalamet’s performance. Indeed, his portrayal is that of a complex individual, one whose true motivations are sometimes shrouded, and while he remains a character with whom audiences can undoubtedly empathise, ultimately his prickliness, wilfulness and self-absorption make him just a tad difficult to, well, like. So, while the film, like so many biopics, is essentially a juxtaposition or trade-off between the faithfully observed and the fictional, chapeau to all involved for not demeaning Dylan’s story by overly sugarcoating it and instead steeping it in enough righteous piss and vinegar to make it largely credible.