Review by Rocco Simonelli
Geniuses are born, not made. Einstein was a genius the moment he issued squalling from his mother’s womb, and likely before. It’s a starting point, not an achieved end. If you are born a Salieri, no amount of work, study or resolve will make you a Mozart. It doesn’t work that way. Competence can be achieved, even a high level of craftsmanship, but genius? Like star quality in a movie actor, either you’ve got it, or you don’t. Brando was a star long before he ever stepped onto a stage or before a camera. Stella Adler taught him well, gave him technique, but the rocket fuel of talent that elevated him so far above his contemporaries he brought with him from inception.
The line on Bob Dylan has always been that he is a mystery, an enigma, masked and anonymous (as the 2003 film starring and co-written by Dylan himself was titled). Thus it’s no accident that the current biopic covering the first four years of his musical ascent is dubbed A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. But like so many of Dylan’s moves throughout his career, it’s a feint, a magician’s ruse. It’s not that he’s unknowable, it’s just that there’s nothing terribly interesting or relevant about him to know. The songs really do speak for themselves. And Dylan realized this from the beginning.
One comes to a film like this expecting certain ingrained story beats, the ones so expertly lampooned by the Jake Kasdan directed parody WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY -- the troubled, poverty scarred childhood; the distant, abusive parental figure; the traumatic death of a loved one that haunts the character into adulthood and informs his art; the rise to fame, the fall from grace, the resurrection and redemption delivered by love. A COMPLETE UNKNOWN indulges in none of these cliches, primarily because Dylan himself never indulged in them. His character in the film does not experience what screenwriting manuals call an “arc.” He does not go through a process of becoming Bob Dylan, he is Bob Dylan soon as he appears on screen, just as he was in life the moment he stuck out his thumb to hitch a ride from Minnesota to meet his hero Woody Guthrie, languishing mute and debilitated in a New Jersey mental institution.
In the film, Dylan (Timothy Chalamet) encounters singer and activist Pete Seeger (sympathetically portrayed by Ed Norton) for the first time at Guthrie’s bedside, and of course it didn’t really happen that way, but no matter, it doesn’t alter any important truth. Like every other character upon first coming in contact with Dylan, Seeger is at first awed by the boyish young man’s beyond-his-years artistic power, but then rapidly begins to calculate how he might use him for his own gain. In Seeger’s case, it’s not dollar signs we see in his eyes when he looks at Dylan, but the idea that this could be the messiah he’s been waiting for, the one to bring folk music more widely to the masses and win them over to his dream of a socialist utopia, with Dylan as Jesus to Seeger’s John the Baptist.
There is an extraordinary moment early on where a rapt Dylan stands off stage at Carnegie Hall watching Seeger engage the audience in a singalong to In The Jungle (Wimowah), and it is chill-inducing in its depiction of the communal power of song; it took me back to the concerts of my own youth, and feelings I really haven’t experienced since. What’s more important in regard to the story A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is telling, is that it gives you the sense of what a mighty presence the gentle Seeger was in the moment Dylan first knew him. But as the movie progresses Seeger’s stature in comparison to Dylan profoundly diminishes, as if he were a ground-rooted figure being seen from one of those cameras NASA attaches to the side of a rocket as it roars into the stratosphere.
The women who become attracted to Dylan fare no better. At first it is Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), the renamed stand-in for the real-life Suze Rotolo, who in the film hears him performing his own songs at a church concert and later ends up arm in arm with him on the cover of his second album. She is followed romantically into his orbit by Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), whose “pretty” songwriting Dylan holds in contempt while still seeing her as a useful means for him to reach a wider audience.
It brings to mind what the legendary Scribner’s book editor Max Perkins said of Ernest Hemingway, that “He has always been someone willing to offer a helping hand to a man on a higher ledge.” Baez calls Dylan “kind of an asshole,” and castigates him for climbing out of her bed post-lovemaking to work on a song -- how dare he not cuddle with the Madonna of folk! -- but what did she expect? She and Sylvie and literally everyone he meets, man or woman, is drawn to him because of his songwriting. Did they think Blowing in the Wind, Hard Rain, The Times They Are A-Changing, It’s Alright Ma and too many others to list just came to him effortlessly from out of the ether? As Jay Leno’s boorish manager told him when he expressed shock and dismay at learning of the aggressive tactics she’d been using to keep him number one in the talk show wars, “You love having me serve you the steaks, but you never want to know how I’m slaughtering the cow.” How can they not understand that Dylan’s first, truest and forever love is, and will always be, his muse? Lovers, wives, friends, fans, record companies, acolytes and enemies, all come and go, but for a true artist, a born genius, the muse is the only companion to whom eternal fealty can (and frankly, must) be pledged.
Ask F. Scott Fitzgerald about that. He wrote what is now considered by many the great American novel (The Great Gatsby), but then allowed himself to be distracted and derailed by a manic wife who demanded amusement, and by his own materialism and grotesque weakness for alcohol. In the 15 years between the publication of Gatsby and his death at the age of 44, Fitzgerald managed to complete only one more novel, Tender is the Night, tellingly about a brilliant doctor named Dick Diver who squanders his talent through marriage to a fabulously wealthy but mentally unbalanced socialite. The Dylan of A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is arrogant, single-minded and self-absorbed, too consumed with his own creative work to come back to bed and snuggle; what he is not is another Dick Diver, another Fitzgerald. No Zelda will come between him and his muse, and for that we should all be grateful.
However, there is one time in the film when he truly is an asshole, and it’s when he insists on “going electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. I know, it’s the dramatic climax of the story, one of the clear delineation points in American culture, like the JFK assassination, or Woodstock, and the primary reason the film was made.
But looking at it from the remove of decades, as much as the angry, booing audience is depicted as narrow minded and villainous in their rejection of the great artist’s new direction, let’s be honest: it was a FOLK MUSIC festival. Imagine if it were a vegetarian festival, and Dylan got up on stage and started butchering a pig. Would we condemn the audience for booing then? He could have approached his appearance in a more conciliatory fashion, acknowledged to the fans that he was moving in a new direction, away from the provincialism of folk, strapped on the old acoustic guitar to say farewell and no hard feelings, like a girl who breaks up with a guy but has the decency to throw him one last goodbye fuck, and gotten out of Dodge with no shots being fired. Instead he pokes the bear with a stick, and when the beast swipes at him with its claws and leaves him bloody, he sullenly crawls off into a corner at the afterparty to pout.
Ah, well. To borrow a line from SOME LIKE IT HOT, nobody’s perfect. But the musical performances are terrific, the production design is evocative, and the actors, especially Chalamet, never let their portrayals descend into broad imitation. And the confrontational performance at Newport that serves as the film’s exclamation point, despite Dylan’s assholery, is thrilling. See it in a theater with an audience to receive its full effect.
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