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15 January 2025

The Bob Dylan mystery machine

In A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold and actor Timothée Chalamet present Dylan as an enigma – a mythology favoured by fans, biopics and the singer himself.

By Kate Mossman

Rock biopics. Familiar stories lumpenly told. Alien faces trying to pass for our greatest personal heroes. Sulky girlfriends looking on from the wings. And the worst of all: songs composed on the spot, in record time: “Hey guys, what do you think of this?” Yet somehow, in recent years, there has been a shift, and watching them suddenly feels like listening to fairy tales. What was once heavy-handed seems comforting and incantatory, as the 50-year Renaissance that was rock ’n’ roll becomes a part of history. Why do we make rock biopics – and why do we watch them – unless it’s to see the deeply familiar parts of our collective culture playing out over and over, with varying degrees of success.

One of the most unappealing things about Bob Dylan, for me, put about by him and his fans, is the endlessly self-cancelling riddle that, because he’s a master of trickery and self-fictionalisation, there is no truly knowing him – hell, there is no truth at all! Emotionally, I find that this goes nowhere as an idea – but at least the shape-shifting and tall tales created the songs. The obscure origin story, his training with the “carnival”, was original in 1961 – though in James Mangold’s new film, it does get a lot of eye-rolling from his girlfriends. The Eternal Dylan Mystery is a line of defence taken by the film-makers in calling the movie A Complete Unknown, instantly detaching them from any obligation to get inside his mind or explore who he was on a psychological level. Such an approach would appeal to Dylan, of course, who helped with the script – and apparently acted out the whole part for Mangold.

Yet funnily enough, it is exactly this slippery, silverfish quality that makes Timothée Chalamet more than bearable playing him. In the hoboish early years, and the be-sunglassed mid-1960s, Dylan was such a mumbly, obfuscating, stylised creature that any decent character actor could have a crack at it – Cate Blanchett was good in 2007’s I’m Not There, another film that covered itself with a gaseous title. Likewise, his voice is one of the easiest in popular music to imitate – perhaps even the most imitated – so Chalamet can do that too. Given that Dylan’s songs felt like they were handed by God to a street urchin, it is fine for someone else to perform them in equally wobbly, though slightly different, tones. He hid so much in his vulture frame and cotton-wool drawl, it’s like he was made for an actor to play him.

Mangold directed Walk the Line, the story of Johnny Cash, generally considered one of the most successful rock biopics, probably because Joaquin Phoenix was so intense. In his new film, Mangold includes the surprising penpalship between Dylan and Cash, who told Bob to “track some mud across the carpet” and treasured his copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The film covers Dylan’s rapid rise to superstardom (“to quote Mr Freud, I get quite paranoid,” he wrote in one of his letters to Cash) and culminates with his electric turn at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, in front of an audience of sour-faced beatniks who object to his new direction. Always at work, in the rock biopic, is a strange combination of deep conservatism (rattling off the hits, name-checking the main characters) and wild fiction, and there are fictions here. The cry of “Judas” didn’t come from Newport but a gig in Manchester a year later; Cash wasn’t at Newport in 1965, as Mangold suggests (though he was at the 1964 one, when he and Bob had so much fun that they jumped up and down on their hotel room beds with June Carter and Joan Baez).

In discussions for the movie, Dylan apparently insisted on “at least one utterly fabricated event”, and part of the game is guessing which one it is. If you come to the film to learn more about the scene Dylan emerged from, you’ll discover that he sat in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey and played tunes to Woody Guthrie, who was dying of Huntington’s disease, while Pete Seeger accompanied on banjo. There is no evidence they sat there together. But Edward Norton is astonishing as Seeger, who gave Dylan a lot of early breaks and is painted as something of a father figure. He is the only actor whose soul you feel, in those kind but slightly wincey, paternal-but-rather-conflicted eyes. What a blessing that Benedict Cumberbatch was indisposed, in the end, and couldn’t play the role: the film has been delayed, then picked up again, many times.

[See also: “Pistol” reveals the major problem with rock biopics]

The objection to Dylan “going electric” at Newport, which seems so strange and arcane today, is explored with depth: folk is the instrument of protest – of civil rights and nuclear disarmament – and for Dylan to drop it and move on to rock makes the left terrified they are losing the key component of their power. (Though Dylan’s road manager, Bob Neuwirth says, “It’s over anyway, Kennedy is dead, they just shot Martin Luther King.”) In a comically literal moment in the film, Seeger eyes a row of five or six axes leaning against a table (at a festival?) and nearly takes one to chop Dylan’s power cables in half! But at least Mangold replicates Pete’s wonderful “teaspoon” speech, about the power of protest, in full: “The world is like a seesaw out of balance: on one side is a box of big rocks, tilting it its way. On the other side is a box, and a bunch of us with teaspoons, adding a little sand at a time. One day, all of our teaspoons will add up, and the whole thing will tip, and people will say, ‘How did it happen so fast?’”

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One of the great achievements of the film is the subtle way in which, in the space of two hours, Seeger and his banjo pass into another age as Dylan rockets on. Baez (Monica Barbaro), who shared his songs, and with whom he had an affair, also has this air about her – her warbly soprano soon feels out of date, her songs overwritten “like oil paintings in a dentist office”. Dylan contributed some real lines to the script – of course, he won’t say what they were – and I assumed this was one of them, it being so rude that surely Mangold wouldn’t have dared.

“You who are so good at words/and at keeping things vague”, Baez said of Dylan in her song “Diamonds and Rust”. Chalamet’s Dylan has nothing to give his women but he still likes to turn up at their houses at 4am, long after the relationship is over. The decision to fictionalise his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, and call her “Sylvie Russo”, is strange, especially when it is quite clearly Suze. But, again, it came at the request of Dylan himself. Played by Elle Fanning, she got him into civil rights and nuclear protest, Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Rimbaud, yet her time in the film is spent mostly standing in the wings, looking upset: the fate of so many women in rock biopics trying to be with Great Men.

All of them, like fairy tales, tell much the same story: a story of individuation, or becoming who you are meant to be. How nice it is to see Dylan chat onstage; express disappointment about his records not selling; thank people for showing up to his gigs; want things and not get them, like ordinary people do. The film illuminates forgotten concepts: like the controversy in trying to write your own songs in an era when performing the standards was a sign of authenticity (Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon were some of the folkies who changed that).

There are two musical high points: one, when he first plays “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, a moment in which he, much like Mitchell and her song “Woodstock”, was uniquely placed to record revolution in real time. The second is in the studio when Al Kooper hits the warbly Hammond organ at the start of “Like a Rolling Stone”. It feels like freedom, to be electric – one of several moments in the film when the emotional affect of what is on screen dovetails with a deeper message that will be almost impossible to explain to our grandchildren: that for a short period in time, if you plugged in your guitar, a small group of people really believed it was the end of the world.

“A Complete Unknown” is in cinemas now

[See also: The end of Generation Rock]

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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors