How A Complete Unknown accounts for Bob Dylan
Film Review: ‘A Complete Unknown’
Review: The biopic explores a musical prophet’s rise to stardom, exhibiting an exceptional performance by Timothée Chalamet.
Most of my friends know me to be a movie person. Before winter break, when one of them asked which of the slew of holiday releases I’d be seeing, one of my answers was “the Bob Dylan movie.” She said hadn’t heard of him. I’d barely heard of him myself – I told her about his Nobel Prize and “legacy,” but at that point, I couldn’t name a single song of his. Still, I was shocked: I never met someone who hadn’t at least heard of Bob Dylan.
Think about other music biopics from recent years. Elvis is about, well, Elvis dang Presley. Bohemian Rhapsody is the highest grossing music biopic ever by a margin of three times, maybe because the song it is named after is one of the most iconic rock songs of all time. Both of these films cover the lives of their subjects from childhood to untimely death, with a clear rise-and-fall-and-rise-again structure. Rocketman has the same thing, but only tracks the tumultuous early years of Elton John’s career before he sorted himself out.
Bob Dylan is a rarity. How do you make a movie about someone older and more prolific than Sir Elton John, someone with a singing voice that’s perhaps the opposite of Freddie Mercury’s, someone arguably more influential than the King of Rock himself? Not to mention, someone who has spent the last 60 years in the public eye as a total chameleon, curmudgeon and extraterrestrial. That’s the challenge A Complete Unknown faces.
The film isn’t “the true story you never saw behind the world’s biggest musician,” or “the wild behind-the-scenes action kept out of the public eye.” The redemption arc you might find elsewhere is flipped on its head; the quiet, unrevealing Bobby Dylan learns over the course of the film that maybe it is okay to be arrogant and brash.
The innermost conflict of A Complete Unknown is Dylan’s search for personal meaning and pure creative expression, in spite of his entanglement with the folk scene that put too many of their chips on him. By the end, there’s no doubting that he is a true artistic chameleon, as long as he manages to hatch from the hard-shelled egg that is the possessive folk community.
Before Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) hitchhiked to New York City, he was in the carnival, or way out west, or on the moon, depending on who was talking to him. To say he was Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota would be too boring, and besides, folk singers come from the Dust Bowl or the bayou, not some state school in the Midwest.
To Dylan, someone’s past does not define them. His stardom is found elsewhere: “I put myself in another place,” he says, “but I’m a stranger there.” As previously mentioned, Dylan is an extraterrestrial, his lyrics beamed to him across time and space. Nobody knows where they come from, not him or anybody else in the last 65 years. But what other explanation can you come up with when you watch this twenty-something kid pen breakthrough after breakthrough?
As Dylan’s celebrity builds and his perhaps deserved ego inflates, he butts heads with the leaders of the folk scene, including Pete, that built him up. It’s not a hard conflict to grasp: here is this kid prophet who has apparently mastered folk music as his conquest, and now he’s ready to pick up something heavier than a harmonica or an acoustic guitar. Meanwhile, the American folk music revival has been building for around 25 years now, and Dylan came along just at the right time to make everything stick… if only he was willing.
So those are the stakes when Dylan sets his fateful closing set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Will he tip the seesaw and maybe make folk a thing once and for all, or keep up the rebellious streak with an all-electric set?
He does the latter, of course, and it feels like a defeat. This whole community will now invalidate everything he’s done simply because he couldn’t be held down any longer, and he has no allies left except for his co-conspirators in the band. But then again, it’s lonely at the top, isn’t it?
That’s Dylan’s conundrum now. He’ll always push everyone away, because they don’t get him, or they don’t accept that he can be so unconcerned with the greatness of his talents, or they want those great talents for themselves. He’ll always feel like an outsider, but one that will never be able to hide from the limelights: the one casted on him, and the ones casted right back into the curious minds of anyone that stumbles upon his larger-than-life words and art. Ultimately, though, Dylan seems to use some of the prophecy associated with him to look forward into time and realize how right he is to be full of himself.
These turmoils are played out magnificently in the always-brilliant Chalamet. More than the signature grumble and floofy hair, Chalamet captures the all-encompassing discord of an artist stuck at the crossroads of his rapidly flourishing genius and the role that genius plays in the world around him. His years of preparation comes across in the very first song he performs, as you watch his timid-schoolboy wonder blossom into rapturous musical expression, seemingly possessed by generations of folk musicians before him. He might not have won every award in the book, but there’s no doubt Timmy won’t be going away anytime soon as he continues his “pursuit of greatness.”
So, how does it feel? How does it feel? One might have the thought to be offended by Dylan’s callous self-importance, if they weren’t as caught up in his artistic tidal wave as his diegetic audiences were. He might be a jerk, but I think by now we can say that he’s earned it.