In one of the many incandescent, finely layered scenes that make up “A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s entrancingly offbeat drama about the early years of Bob Dylan, we watch Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who’ve been involved musically and romantically, perform a duet at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. They’re singing Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and the way their voices blend (their smiles too) creates a sound so pure it feels sunlit. Mangold lets the song roll on in its entirety, as he does with many of the songs in “A Complete Unknown,” so that they literally become the story the movie is telling.
This number is like a shimmering dream, but part of it is the drama that’s unfolding beneath. Baez, at this point, has had it with Dylan. He’s a moody, self-absorbed folk celebrity hipster poet, always placing himself at the center of things (yet somehow always looking like he’s too cool to be there). And since Joan herself, with that quavering soprano, is a fierce customer, famous in her own right, she’s done with being treated like Dylan’s accessory. The song they’re singing expresses how they feel about each other (“It ain’t me, babe,/It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe”). Yet they invest it with so much passion that it sounds like a romance. (Bob’s other girlfriend, played by Elle Fanning, gets so caught up in the singers’ connection that she turns away from the stage in tears.) Folk music is rooted in a devotion to the world, but at that moment what Dylan and Baez are singing about is devotion to the self: the new world that’s coming. That’s why the scene makes your heart burst and your head spin at the same time.
“A Complete Unknown” is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. Yet the feel — the effect — is that of a musical. You’d assume that might be true of any classic rock biopic, but in this case the film, with its beautifully haphazard song-cycle structure, truly is about Dylan and his music, and how the music changed everything. Each new song is a dramatic episode, whether it’s Dylan performing “Masters of War” in the Gaslight Cafe just after the Cuban Missile Crisis or trying out “Blowin’ in the Wind” with Baez in his living room or singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’” at Newport, where the audience, by the end, sings along as if it was a song they always knew.
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Dylan, played by Chalamet with a frog in his throat and an ornery sly quietude that’s so authentic it disarms and then floors you, wanders from cramped bohemian apartments to recording studios to concert stages to chic parties, always returning to the colorful squalor of Greenwich Village (played by a not-very-convincing Jersey City), connecting with whoever’s convenient to him. He slides into liaisons and then, just as quickly, slides out of them. But that’s because the music is his only real lover. The songs Dylan composes, scrawling the lyrics on notepads, often in the wee hours, consume and define him. And “A Complete Unknown” digs into the elemental power of what Dylan created during this period, tossing off songs for the ages as if he’d pulled them out of the ages. That the Dylan we see is kind of a cad becomes part of the film’s power. It’s ruthlessly honest about what an obsessive artist is really like.
We meet him in 1961, when he’s a 19-year-old kid hitchhiking from Minnesota. He gets dropped off in New York City on a cold winter day, wearing his cap and coat and scarf and backpack, carrying the guitar case that feels like it’s part of him, and he immediately heads for the hospital in New Jersey where Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is lying in bed, unable to speak due to the ravages of Huntington’s disease. Guthrie’s buddy Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) in visiting him, and Bob walks into the room looking quizzical. But he’s in awe. It’s Guthrie’s lilting everyman-drawl music that forged the template for what he does.
As Dylan takes out his guitar and plays “Song to Woody,” something happens that I won’t hesitate to call magical. Chalamet, singing in a nasal and slightly clenched voice, his tone as rock-steady as his gaze, sings out the lyrics as if they were an incantation…and at that moment, he becomes Bob Dylan. The voice, the hardscrabble directness, the spiritual harshness that melts into something lyrical — it’s all there.
Chalamet’s Bob doesn’t say much; he tends to speak in gnomic five-word sentences. But that’s because, in his mind, he has already cut through the malarkey that is human communication. He doesn’t have much use for it. He’s plugged into something more timeless. And Chalamet rises to the challenge of capturing the prickly charisma of Dylan’s inchoate, anti-matter, read-between-the-lines personality. It’s a transfixing performance that’s true to Dylan and, just as important, true to the logic of movies. We stare at this young mystery man, who lights up a room when he sings, and like everyone around him we want to know what makes him tick.
The script, by Mangold and Jay Cocks, is delicately engineered so that all the points a conventional biopic would cover are there: the way Dylan, at Folk City, captivated early-’60s Village audiences as well as the New York Times; his push-pull bond with Baez and the gentler connection he forms with Fanning’s political-minded Sylvie (the film’s the-same-in-everything-but-name version of Suze Rotolo); the deal he strikes with the cunning manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler); and the camaraderie he forges with Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), a country upstart who fuels Dylan’s bad-boy impulses, and with the banjo-wielding Seeger, played with spot-on whimsicality by Norton as a twinkly-eyed, truly folksy activist utopian saint.
Dylan himself is steeped in folk music, but he’s no folkie purist. He sees what’s coming that Seeger can’t: the swooning self-infatuation of the new pop audience. (Seeger doesn’t realize that that narcissism will kill his proletarian dream.) The story “A Complete Unknown” tells is how Dylan moves away from the “purity” of folk music because his music begins to open up to a richer, bolder, more majestic purity: the need to reflect back the world he sees around him.
That’s why he goes electric. It’s going to upset the true believers, like the Newport Folk Festival organizer-guru Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), but it’s Dylan’s fate as an artist to move into uncharted terrain, and to do it by writing some of the most thrillingly propulsive rock ‘n’ roll ever recorded (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) and some of the most sublime (“Like a Rolling Stone”).
This transformation was covered brilliantly in Martin Scorsese’s great 2005 documentary “No Direction Home.” But “A Complete Unknown,” tethered to Chalamet’s haunting performance — now hooded, now open, now despairing, now powered by rebel vibes — captures something the documentary didn’t: the anguish in Dylan’s heart, and the toll it took on him personally. To make this change in his music, and in the world, he needed to do more than confront an audience of screaming betrayed fans at Newport. He had to stare down the cosmic forces that were telling him no and replace doubt with faith. That’s what Dylan’s music always was: the sound of belief lighting up the darkness. Watching “A Complete Unknown,” his journey into the light becomes ours.