FILM OF THE WEEK: A Complete Unknown By Anne Margaret Daniel

A Complete Unknown, opening in the US on Christmas Day and in Ireland on January 17 – and starring Timotheé Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan – begins and ends with Woody Guthrie’s song 'So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You'. This is a movie of goodbyes already inherent in its hellos, ave atque vale, hail and fare thee well.

Dylan fans, and those who know even minimal biographical details of the now 83-year-old artist’s early life, are aware of the skeleton of the story: he left his home state of Minnesota and arrived in New York City in January of 1961, when he was nineteen years old. Dylan immediately set out to become a major new voice, and then composer of original songs, inspired and aided by the ailing legend Woody Guthrie (who he visited in hospital in New Jersey, and at the Guthrie home), as well as Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, and the young sensation Joan Baez. Favorable press reports and a brash new manager fueled his meteoric rise; he was the darling of the Newport Folk Festival until he played an electric set of his new songs in July 1965. After that, Bob Dylan was a rock star.

A Complete Unknown does not deviate from this trajectory — how could it? As you watch, though, bear this ever in mind: you are watching a biopic, not a documentary. I’ll say this once, loudly, and won’t repeat it every time A Complete Unknown doesn’t line up with some Dylan biography: this is a biopic, not a documentary.

Want a documentary? Go see D.A. Pennebaker’s Don't Look Back, filmed primarily in April and May of 1965. Go see No Direction Home, which covers a far longer sweep of Dylan’s life. But go see A Complete Unknown with your sense of humour intact and enjoy it, instead of being primed to gripe. You’ll be both surprised and happy.

A Complete Unknown is above all three things: a movie about New York City and its vitality and possibilities; a movie that elides such facts as are known about Dylan from 1961 to 1965, and the people in or near his life, turning them into composites and in some cases caricatures and eliminating some altogether; and, chiefly, an emotional portrait of the overwhelmingly powerful effect a very young man who had named himself Bob Dylan had on everyone around him.

It is, it turns out, all good.

Did Dylan and Pete Seeger really meet for the first time at Greystone Hospital, and did Seeger take this talented little stray home to Beacon, New York, later that night? No, and no. But, both psychically and musically, this is poetically accurate. Here’s the bio part of this biopic, which most certainly plays fast and loose with actual facts, real people and places — something that suits Bob Dylan down to the ground, since he’s done it himself all his long public life. Dylan’s memoir Chronicles Vol. 1 (2004) isn’t an autobiography. The screenplay of A Complete Unknown, by the remarkable James Mangold and Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese’s longtime collaborator, is — appropriately — in the spirit of Chronicles. The movie’s fictitious and fictional scenes have already been compared widely to the facets of “Bob Dylan” composing the characters of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007), to parts of The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019); and called out in Rolling Stone and other publications, mostly in the form of online clickbait lists. Many of these lists contain errors themselves, which must make the scriptwriters giggle.

Most of the fictions won’t corrupt you or the “actual” story of the times, whatever that means — not even things like the absence of Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Mavis Staples, and other folk stars integral to Dylan’s development (a fleeting Van Ronk, played by Joe Tippett, has only a couple of lines, none sung); and the absence of Sara Lownds, who was Dylan’s partner from some time in 1964 and who was, by the time he went electric at Newport in July of 1965, pregnant with their first child Jesse.

BETTER DEAD THAN RED
In the movie, a teenaged boy whose name on his driver’s license is Robert Allen Zimmerman arrives in New York City in the bitter cold of January 1961, riding with friends of Minnesota friends. We first see him writing a song, stretched out amidst luggage on the back seat of what ought to be a 1957 Chevy Impala (the year and model of car, to my eye, that Dylan used in 2018 to illustrate the abandoned car of 'Tangled Up in Blue' for his Mondo Scripto series).

The car radio is tuned to a football game — could it the 1961 Pro Bowl? I grinned as I heard the name of Y.A. Tittle—the great quarterback Yelberton Abraham Tittle, Jr., who, like Dylan, came east to the city in early 1961 to finish his celebrated career with the New York Giants. Easter eggs like this abound in the movie. Enjoy them.

Chalamet-as-Dylan has almost to perfection the hunched stance, the rolling walk that Dylan’s actual girlfriend in his Greenwich Village days, Susan “Suze” Rotolo, called “a lurch in slow motion,” and above all the way Bob holds a cigarette, down to the positioning of the fingers (see Barry Feinstein’s and Daniel Kramer’s portraits of Dylan for proof. Did Chalamet sleep with them on the ceiling of his bedroom?!). The prosthetic nose may have been a bridge (sorry) too far. Chalamet has an adorable nose not unlike that of his uncle, on whom I had a crush in college. Did Timmy-Zimmy really need augmentation? I don’t think so, but the profile shots of Chalamet on stage do look more like Dylan than they would without it.

Freshly arrived in the Village in search of Woody Guthrie, Dylan walks past a chestnut vendor in a fedora who looks for all the world like Leonard Cohen. There’s a large man with distinctive dark hair and beard, who can only be Dave Van Ronk, the Mayor of Macdougal Street and already a folk legend at 25, holding court and holding forth in the bar. Young Dylan is looking for Woody, but there’ll be an intermediary, and it is not Van Ronk: the psychic father Seeger is his route to the psychic grandpa Guthrie.

Edward Norton isn’t portraying Pete Seeger, he is Pete Seeger. Give this man all the awards there are, please, for capturing completely Seeger’s voice, demeanour, stance, grace, charisma, kindness, and ability to make people love a banjo. Even his haircut is perfect. At the New York City premiere, scattered bursts of 'This Land Is Your Land' came from the audience, as Seeger sang Guthrie’s song on the courthouse steps, while semi-literate conservative protestors holding a “Better Dead Then Red” sign stand watching. The times they have not a-changed much, have they? Seeger is right: “A good song can only do good.” Lift up your voices and keep making them heard, friends.

SHINING GOOD HUMOUR
Greystone Hospital was a rehab facility and psychiatric asylum located outside Morristown, New Jersey. The massive 19th-century monolith of a main building was torn down in 2015. I visited it twenty years earlier, and was amazed at its imposing and yet practical layout. Former employees said there had been a soup kitchen; that the hospital had its own vegetable gardens; and that the patients worked in them, and also tended livestock on the farm surrounding the buildings.

Allen Ginsberg’s mother Naomi was institutionalised there in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Woody Guthrie, stricken by Huntington’s chorea, was brought to Greystone for care in 1956 and left in 1961. One of his t-shirts from the hospital is now in the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is as small as a child’s, worn and much washed, the hospital’s name in capital letters faded across the front.

Scoot McNairy, compelled to do all his acting with his almost-still body, his twisting face, and his fever-bright eyes, is beautiful as Guthrie — handing the 19-year-old troubadour, who’s just performed 'Song For Woody' for him, his printed business card bearing on the back the words “I ain’t dead yet.” It’s one of the hundreds of perfect touches, grace notes, that comprise A Complete Unknown. Woody signed letters that way: the phrase is on merch from the Woody Guthrie Center shop. Dylan used the line emphatically in his 2012 song 'Early Roman Kings', one he has continued to perform live in recent concerts:
"I ain’t dead yet/
My bell still rings/
I keep my fingers crossed/
Like them early Roman kings."

Chalamet’s first performance in the movie is 'Song To Woody', sung to Guthrie in the hospital, and his intonation on “torn” and “born” won both my heart and ears right off the bat. Throughout the movie Chalamet’s Dylan-singing impression is excellent; his Dylan-talking less so. Like most singers, Dylan has a performance voice. He extends this to public speaking of various kinds, too, chiefly interviews and his rare public appearances. He had a gravelly Wolfman-Jackish radio voice for his Theme Time Radio Hour shows. How does he speak in private? In whatever his normal voice is. As I’ve maintained before, no one expects Reneé Fleming or Bryn Terfel to talk like they sing. Chalamet’s Dylan has a young man’s petulant bent, which isn’t wrong – but he uses it a tad bit too much.

The conversation in the car between Seeger and Dylan from Greystone to the Seegers’ home in Beacon, NY about music on the radio sets up the folk / rock dichotomy that provides really the only tension in the movie. We know Dylan is going to become a folk darling in 1961-62, and that he’s going to strap on that Fender at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. The getting there has to be the main plot of the movie — that, and the love triangle Hollywood adores. We know how that’s going to work out, too, or if we don’t Google can tell us: neither woman in A Complete Unknown marries Bob and lives happily ever after with him.

“I don’t think of myself as a folk singer,” complains Bob to Pete. He turns the radio to Little Richard, his high-school favourite. In the Hibbing High School yearbook, The Hematite, Robert Allen Zimmerman’s senior photograph smiles above words telling us that he was a member of the Latin and Social Studies Clubs, and that he’d be remembered for wanting to “join ‘Little Richard.’” No one, least of all Seeger, should be surprised when he goes electric.

The Seeger house is warm and wonderful, with its composting toilet — it’s lovely of Mangold and Cocks to acknowledge Seeger’s work as an environmentalist, and his indefatigable efforts to clean up the Hudson River he so loved; friendly, smart children; and Toshi knitting in bed while Bob smokes outside in the snow. Eriko Hatsune is serene and warm and fine as Toshi, a larger role in some ways than Joan Baez or “Sylvie Russo” (the character based upon Suze Rotolo) are given.

At a question and answer session at the Museum of Modern Art after a screening of the movie on December 14, Mangold said that the character’s name was changed at Dylan’s specific request. Rotolo was not a musician or part of the music scene herself, and was “a civilian,” as Mangold put it. Elle Fanning is lovely and accomplished as Russo, and along with the Seegers provides the warmest heart and hearth supplied to Dylan, but the script calls on her to be dull-eyed and unsmiling much of the time. It’s a pity that she is so sad: the point that it’s hard to love and be loved by a genius need not be made so gloomily. The character of Sylvie could have used some of Fanning’s own shining good humour and ready smile, which are quite akin to Suze Rotolo’s own.

UNSEEN BEDROOM
In the movie, Dylan and Sylvie Russo meet after he sings in a hoot at Riverside Church. In her 2008 memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, Rotolo remembered that it was a very hot day. “Whenever I looked around, Bobby was nearby. I thought he was oddly old-time looking, charming in a scraggly way. His jeans were as rumpled as his shirt, and even in the hot weather he had on the black corduroy cap he always wore. He made me think of Harpo Marx, impish and approachable, but there was something about him that broadcast an intensity that was not to be taken lightly.” This is exactly Chalamet in the scene; I am glad the moviemakers used Rotolo’s book, even as she appears under another name.

Sylvie gets folk music better than Bob does: it doesn’t have to be all about the Dust Bowl and Johnny Appleseed, and can be written right here, right now, in New York City. She’s politically savvy and involved; she has to tell him that CORE is the Congress of Racial Equality, and she gives him a book by leftist cultural critic and celebrated Partisan Review editor Dwight MacDonald to read. “He’s a contrarian like you,” Russo tells Dylan. She has his number after just one day.

She also pays for their Now, Voyager movie tickets, and for their meal later that night. You don’t get the feeling that he’s head over heels, but I certainly was, as she heads down into the subway after kissing him on the cheek. Instantly, they’re sharing an apartment in the Village, as his career begins to soar. Far too soon, Fanning is gone from the screen, as Sylvie leaves on what’s called a “school trip” to Rome for twelve weeks — she even returns on a school bus, emphasising her youth. 'Don’t Think Twice' ensues right after her departure, not accidentally. You miss her, and feel that he does too.

Fanning, as Russo, is increasingly assertive about herself, and her own life and artistic pursuits, just plain nice, and deeply in love with this bright, wry, unfaithful, dishonest, slippery, generous young man who clearly loves her. When she leaves her easel to come to Newport in 1965, riding on the back of his motorcycle, Russo and Dylan smile more than either of them do at any other point in the movie. If it had actually happened, what might have come to pass?

Al Kooper and Bob Neuwirth are more than mere cameos in the movie. There are moving versions of old friends living and dead, including Noel Paul Stookey, played by Stephen Carter Carlsen in a performance as uncannily like the real man as is Norton’s Seeger. Mary Travers has no lines and we don’t hear her glorious voice, but her blonde pageboy cut lets us know she’s here. Maria Muldaur, dark and beautiful in her headkerchief, hugs Seeger and praises the festival. Mike Bloomfield must never be forgotten: the good news is that this movie won’t let that happen. Paul Butterfield too — Dylan recently posted a birthday remembrance for Butterfield, who was a year younger than he and who died in 1987, on the website formerly called Twitter.

As Dylan begins to succeed in the folk scene, falls in love, gets a place of his own, you feel that this could only have happened in New York. This movie is a valentine to the city and what it meant to a firebrand boy, to his lovers and friends of long ago and forever. Chalamet is a chameleon of an actor with a gift for physical and vocal impersonation, and he’s also a New Yorker vocal about his affection for his city, and prone to wearing Yankees gear. He really is the perfect choice for The Early Bob.

Russo and Dylan could have gone on forever, in that little apartment on West 4th Street — but then a girl actually based in Cambridge, Massachusetts threw a spanner into the works. “She acts depressed, looks at her shoes, makes men crazy,” says Grossman, mockingly, of the only female folk star with any real screen time in A Complete Unknown, and Russo’s rival for Dylan’s affections: Joan Baez. Monica Barbaro’s performance as Baez is superb, but the character she’s made to be is rather flintier than Joan was at the time, even when she had to be tough as the beautiful, gifted young woman in the very male-dominated world of folk music. And Barbaro can’t sing soprano, a real problem when you’re playing Baez. She gamely tries for the vibrato on the high notes, but wisely doesn’t go too hard.

In a sweetly funny moment, after starting out a performance sky-high and shrill, her voice crashes down to a nice mezzo as the duet portion with Dylan begins. They both laugh as they sing. I laughed too. According to Fanning, Baez kindly gave her original arrangements of songs to the film crew to help with authenticity in Barbaro’s preparation. Certainly this helped.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 plays a large role in A Complete Unknown, and sparks Dylan’s affair with Baez (no, not historically accurate). Dylan is jarred from writing while sprawled on the floor by the television and President Kennedy’s speech, rising up to look out the collection of rear windows before leaving his apartment to look for community and security. Baez tries to call someone on the phone, then panics and runs into the street with her guitar, seeing people grabbing cabs to get themselves out of the city before the bombs start falling. She’s still looking for a taxi when the sound of Dylan singing 'Masters of War' in a basement down the stairs stops her in her tracks.

After his performance, she waylays him in the hall and scoops him up and into bed, sliding into the little apartment he shares with Russo as if it’s absolutely her entitlement to be there making the coffee while he sings 'Blowin’ In the Wind' in his underwear. This scene is lovely, from the corona of too-long string-ends sprouting from the neck of his guitar to the blended harmony of their voices when she joins him.

After they finish, she asks immediately if he’s recorded it, and when Dylan replies “not yet,” she says he should let her do so. Dylan agrees, because her popularity is far greater than his. It’s the way she asks that is so nakedly selfish, like pulling him toward the unseen bedroom in her smooth, modern, houseplant-filled California house later in the movie (no, there are no sex scenes, which is quite un-Sixties, really, but I am glad of it).

DYLAN ROARS AWAY
Fast forward, now, to the ending. After slipping into a bit of a trough of Dylan going to music festivals and, in Samuel Beckett’s great phrase, getting known, the movie perks up again with the arrival of Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). Fame has, as Dylan says in the movie, snuck up on him and pulverized him. Screaming girls pound on car windows; worshiping kids chase him in the streets of the Village; he’s the Voice of A Generation. Dylan has gotten the success he came to New York to find, but the price is high. Cash offers him advice and an example not to follow, entirely.

Johnny Cash is a rock star at a folk festival in 1964. When he holds that big old dreadnought-style guitar (the debate rages on: a Martin? Gibson? Prairie State Jumbo?) and rips into 'Big River', the crowd goes wild. Dylan has a new mentor: a cool, hard-living big brother, to go along with dad Pete, and grandpa Woody. Cash introduces Dylan as his pen pal, which they were indeed; you may read some of his letters to Dylan at the Bob Dylan Center Archives. Dylan plays 'The Times They Are A-Changin’' to great applause, and delighted smiles from Pete and Toshi.

The Seegers have no idea just how much the times are about to change: bang. The screen tells us it’s 1965. This was the year in which Dylan released two remarkable albums, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, and was working on the songs for a third, Blonde On Blonde. We see him buying the whistle that will kick off 'Highway 61 Revisited' and playing with it in the bath. The whistle was evidently Al Kooper’s, but the bathtub scene really reminds you that this superstar is only 23 (he’d turn 24 in May). He goes to a bleak formal record-executives party with a brand-new girlfriend, an elegant Black girl named Becka with an English accent (according to Google AI, this is Mavis Staples. No, this is NOT MAVIS STAPLES), where he and Pete are expected to play like trained seals (rather like the Columbia records retreat he attended in Puerto Rico with Suze Rotolo). He doesn’t lift his Wayfarers.

As Bob Dylan would write much later, “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes/ There’re secrets in them I can’t disguise.” In the elevator, making his escape, he meets Bobby Neuwirth (Will Harrison) and the two immediately click, bonding over the question of what Dylan is, who he wants to be. Neuwirth invites him to a gig at a club, and ditching the girl it turns out he’s just met, Dylan goes. When he walks in , Neuwirth’s band are playing 'The Irish Rover' – surely a tribute to both Liam Clancy, who with his brothers and Tommy Makem had released the song in 1962, and Shane MacGowan, Dylan’s friend who died last December.

He’s having fun, listening with a smile in the back of the crowd. Then a girl screams, pointing at him. “It’s Bob fucking Dylan!” He tries to leave; but they want to see his eyes. A girl grabs his sunglasses and when he tries to grab them back, her boyfriend slugs him. Neuwirth is the caretaker, getting him out of the situation as he will other situations to come. Russo, too, steps in to tend to his wounds, even though it’s 3am and she’s not alone. The portrayals of Neuwirth and Al Kooper (a charming Charlie Tahan, who lays down the organ for 'Like A Rolling Stone' and chooses that green polka-dotted Newport shirt) are, like that of Russo, sensitively and affectionately done.

The screaming at him and violent trying to see into his eyes, the whole punch-up in the pub—and Dylan doesn’t hit back — makes you feel how much fame is moving at breakneck speed for him now, frighteningly and perhaps literally.

In this dizzying world, “Jesse Moffett” is my favorite made-up character. I kept hearing Chris Eigeman as Nick Smith in Metropolitan, explaining that a girl whose sad story he has told his friends is not a single person, but “a composite, like New York Magazine.”

I kept thinking of that line during much of A Complete Unknown – for, all the characters are fictitious, really, including Dylan. Jesse Moffett is a blues guitarman who plays and sings like a mix of Howlin’ Wolf, Lead Belly, Son House, and Brownie McGhee. It is beyond glorious that the actor portraying Moffett is William “Big Bill” Morganfield, the son of McKinley Morganfield of Clarksdale, Mississippi — better known to you by his stage name, Muddy Waters. It is perfect casting.

In the movie, the man playing a blues musician on Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest (a show on which Dylan did not appear) is a well-regarded musician whose legendary father learned the blues from listening to Robert Johnson. Music history matters immensely to Dylan himself; and watching this movie can be like listening to an episode of Theme Time Radio Hour. I mean this in the very best way.

Was Suze Rotolo really at Newport in 1965? No, though she was there with Dylan in 1963. Was Johnny Cash? No. He was there in 1964, but did not return again until 1969, when he was joined by June Carter (who first introduced him to Dylan’s music) and Kris Kristofferson. Alan Lomax was present — he’s angrily played by Norbert Leo Butz; Seeger was, and Baez was; but what matters is that Dylan and his own hand-picked fellow travellers, his bandmates and friends, were. Again, the respect shown to Kooper, Neuwirth, Paul Butterfield, and Mike Bloomfield by A Complete Unknown might just prove to be my favourite thing about the whole movie. I hope Al Kooper, the last man standing of the four, enjoys the grace and kindness of his portrayal here.

Dylan’s choice to play 'Maggie’s Farm' with a full electric band is a watershed moment in music history. It’s done wildly and well here, with Grossman and Lomax coming to blows, Neuwirth guarding the soundboard to make sure no one turns down the loudspeakers, Baez openmouthed and amazed, Cash delighted, and Toshi saying “no” to Pete as he looks for a moment at the sound cables and then an array of axes left offstage by the Texas Prison Working Group, the act that preceded Dylan.

“Judas!” calls out an audience member at the end. “I don’t believe you,” Dylan replies. The exchange is of course from the Manchester Free Trade Hall, May 17, 1966, when Dylan and The Hawks, in reply, played 'Like A Rolling Stone' fucking loud. Here, Dylan leaves out the “You’re a liar”, and the obscene directive, but indeed they do play that brand-new rock and roll song before, in a concluding act of forgiveness to the Newport audience that made him famous, Dylan gives them an acoustic 'It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue' as an encore.

Cut to New Jersey, where things come full circle as Dylan bids Guthrie a final adieu, in a scene beautifully played by Chalamet and McNairy. The myth is made. Things should start to get interesting right about now. Dylan roars away from Guthrie, Seeger, the folk world, and New York City on his fine motorbike, gathering speed, shooting like light out into the world. Catch him if you can — and you can’t. No one can.

All you can do is stand up and cheer.