“A Complete Unknown” Shears Off Vital Details in the Life of a Colossal, Complicated Artist

One doesn’t have to be a Dylanologist to know, or even to sense, that “A Complete Unknown,” which opens on December 25th, simplifies Bob Dylan’s early professional life and dilutes its furies. To a certain extent, it hardly matters: Dylan is such a distinctive artist and a fascinating personality that, even smoothed out, he’s still unusually sharp-edged, at least by Hollywood standards. The intrinsic pleasures of “A Complete Unknown”—a story of Dylan’s arrival in New York, in 1961, his rise to fame as a folk singer-songwriter, and his risking it all, in 1965, to become a plugged-in, noisemaking rock star—point to the purpose and the stumbling blocks of all bio-pics. If Bob Dylan didn’t exist, he’d be a persuasive protagonist of an absorbing but conventional drama about a musician who does what Dylan did. There’s just one catch: such mighty and manifold characters have never been invented by screenwriters. They are only adapted, in bio-pics—even in veiled ones, such as “Citizen Kane.”

The evasions and elisions that are inherent to the format—as here, with the cramming of four eventful years into just over two hours—are on view from the start of “A Complete Unknown.” Timothée Chalamet stars as the movie’s young hero, whom I’ll awkwardly call Bob, to distinguish him from the real-life Dylan. Bob hitches a ride to New York in the rear of a station wagon, the driver unknown, the small talk between them nonexistent, and is dropped off at the open maw of a tunnel. He soon finds his way to Greenwich Village, stumbles upon a bar where folk musicians gather, and gets instructions from one of them on how to find the hospital in New Jersey where the chronically ill Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is confined. But who does Bob know in the city? Where will he stay? How does he begin his musical career?

The movie offers answers that range from empty to artificial, leaving out the practicalities and manipulating dates and names in order to center the drama on a small number of personalities. The principal maneuver, in these early scenes, is to emphasize the role of the veteran folksinger Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) in Bob’s first breakthroughs so that, when, in 1965, Bob ultimately adopts what Seeger had dismissively called “electrified instruments,” the loss of his friendship registers all the more keenly as a price to be paid.

The details that get sheared off matter, not least because they embody the spirit of the age: how a young musician without a day job finds a place to live in the Village is even more of an emblem of the times than the overwrought precision of the movie’s costumes, hair styles, and simulacra of street life. Without the anchor of material reality, the life of the artist is reduced to a just-so story of soaring above banalities and complications—one that parses easily into its few dramatic through lines as if the stars were aligned from the start. What’s lost is the way a colossal spirit such as Dylan confronts everyday challenges with a heightened sense of style and daring.

Thanks to a folk-club performance hosted by Pete, Bob becomes an overnight success, marked by a rave review in the Times and a recording contract arranged by his aggressive manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). In the process, Bob faces his first professional conflict: the record label, Columbia, rejects his original songs and only lets him do covers of folk classics. As for his own music, he plays it at open-mike nights and hootenannies, and, at one of these loose gigs, he encounters a young artist named Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who hews closely to the real-life Suze Rotolo. She recognizes his greatness, encourages him to stand up for himself, and introduces him to the city’s cultural life. They become a couple, but, as Bob’s career advances, and just after Sylvie heads to Europe for a few months of study, he’s thrust into the company of a competitor and admirer, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the foremost star of the folk scene, who also begins a relationship with him.

The best scenes of Bob and Joan involve the conflict between two strong-minded artists in the same field, capturing Bob’s unyielding arrogance and Joan’s rapturous yet covetous appreciation. When Bob, the newcomer, first hears Joan in a club before his own début there, he declares to the audience that he finds her music “pretty” and adds, “Maybe a little too pretty.” When they get together, about a year later, he likens her songs to “an oil painting in a dentist’s office.” (She understatedly responds that he’s “kind of an asshole.”) Yet, upon hearing him sing, privately, a new song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” she asks him to give it to her to record first. She recruits him to perform in a duo with her, and, even as their relations sour, leading to onstage disputes, she maintains their musical partnership, which appears, above all, artistic and professional.

Bob’s relationship with Sylvie, by contrast, lays bare differences that are more revealing of his character and his philosophy of life. Sylvie admires the man as well as the artist, only to discover that she hardly knows the man at all—she’s surprised to learn that “Dylan” is his pseudonym and upset that he doesn’t tell her about his family, his home town, his past. He responds with an observation that comes off as a credo: “People make things up, talk about what they want.” (For instance, he’d told her in great detail about working in a carnival, which he hadn’t done.) When she points out that she talks about what really happened to her and the people she really knows, Bob retorts, “You think that stuff defines you?” He lives in a realm of self-creation, of the artist’s mythology as a part of the art itself. Yet she caps the argument with an insight so discerning that it’s an overriding failure of the movie not to pursue it further: “You’re ambitious. I think that scares you.”

Sylvie, a regular person, ascribes regular inhibitions and self-doubts to Bob, though he betrays none. He understands what it takes for him to succeed, and in fact describes it to her the day they meet: “If anyone is gonna hold your attention on a stage, you have to kind of be a freak. . . . You can be beautiful or you can be ugly, but you can’t be plain.” The ordinary is the enemy and the danger. What seems to scare the Bob of the movie isn’t his ambitions but the possibility of not fulfilling them. He molds his entire being to achieve what he has in mind, subjecting his very identity to the heat of the same crucible from which his songs arise. Bob’s forging of a self that unites with his music in order to put it, and him, over with the public is the energy on which “A Complete Unknown” runs.

But the bio-pic doesn’t rise to the demands of this powerful subject—not in substance and not in tone. “A Complete Unknown” imposes on Bob a laughable naïveté about money (as with his apparent surprise upon receiving a royalty check for ten thousand dollars) and nothing but discomfort with his sudden fame. As he writes to his new friend Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), “It snuck up on me and pulverized me. To quote Mr. Freud, I get quite paranoid.” (Later, asked if he’s got kids, he answers, “Thousands of ’em.”) Another moment in the film astonished me with its undeveloped abruptness: Sylvie sits home, watching a TV broadcast of the March on Washington, where who should appear to sing in support of the civil-rights movement but Bob Dylan. How? Who arranged it? What happened while he was there? Bob’s experience of such a historic event is blanked out; the film only depicts its public side.

“A Complete Unknown” also leaves out the Beatles, whose overwhelming popularity set an example that struck Dylan like a lightning bolt. The movie’s dénouement, a grand set piece, is his plugging-in at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, to the outrage of many in the audience and behind the scenes. In the process, Bob plugs into the pop paradigm and launches himself onto the world stage. The script offers no inkling of any such ambition; rather, it links Bob’s stylistic shift to the enthusiasm that he expresses for Little Richard and Buddy Holly, and to his pleasure in hearing a new friend, Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison), play electric guitar. It entirely ignores what rock could satisfy and what the niche world of folk couldn’t: the will to power.

In the end, the movie delivers an official narrative, sufficiently heroic—with sanitized flaws calibrated to modern tastes for ambiguity and irony, such as self-importance, cantankerousness, even romantic deceit. Bob voices no motive more base than the desire not to grow old singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” All are acceptable because they come off as subordinate to his pure, unflagging devotion to the sound of his music.

In real life, Dylan’s drive to create and cultivate a persona was captured on film. D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Dont Look Back,” which was shot within the time frame covered in “A Complete Unknown,” conveys the fervor and the turbulence of Dylan’s British tour in the spring of 1965. Dylan played his songs but, along with them, he played his celebrity, flaunting his mischievous humor for the camera and turning himself into a movie star to match the Beatles. Pennebaker’s film also shows the tensions between Dylan and Baez that are dramatized in “A Complete Unknown”; what the documentary understandably leaves out but the bio-pic incomprehensibly omits is that, at the time, Bob was already involved with another woman, Sara Lownds, whom he’d marry later that same year. Perhaps duplicity is a go, but triplicity is an intrigue too far for the anodyne portraiture of “A Complete Unknown.”

Nonetheless, the prime beneficiary of the movie’s approach is Chalamet, who delivers a startling impersonation of Dylan’s singing and speaking voice. Impersonation is the very premise of “A Complete Unknown”: Norton, Barbaro, and Holbrook also imitate their characters’ singing voices along with their speech patterns and personalities. Though dubious in concept, the effect is peculiarly, if superficially, enticing. The songs are great when performed by the four real-life greats; they’re also great when covered by Jimi Hendrix or the Byrds, and even when covered by actors in a bio-pic. This sort of performance is essentially stunt work—it’s the musical version of wrestling the bear, when actors’ conspicuous exertion proclaims how hard they work for the audience—and so is the nonmusical mimicry that comes with it. Yet, because the movie emphasizes the characters’ public faces even in private, it doesn’t demand (and would hardly allow) true emotional depth and expressive range. Virtuosity takes the place of dramatic power. Strangely, “A Complete Unknown” ’s mythologizing of Dylan’s younger self may be the most Dylanesque thing about it. ♦