A Complete Unknown

 The first twenty minutes of James Mangold's A Complete Unknown (2024), a bio-pic about Bob 
Dylan's early years in NYC, is about as good a piece of prestige Hollywood movie-making as you are likely to see.  Similarly, the film's last twenty minutes depicting Dylan's decision to shock the folk music fans at the Newport Folk Festival with aggressive, electric rock and roll is thrilling, beautifully staged, and oddly moving.  The problem with A Complete Unknown is the ninety minutes between these two highlights.  The movie's middle act, too long for its slender subject matter, involves Dylan ricocheting between two women, Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo  (with a couple short-term affairs thrown in for a good measure).  Although Dylan has written some exemplary and powerful love songs, his real metier is derision and contempt, think of songs like "Just Like a Woman" and "Positively 4th Street."  Simply put, Dylan is not a convincing romantic hero -- he's too opaque, sarcastic, and arrogant, in a word, a bad boyfriend.  A Complete Unknown is true to Dylan's famous reticence and snarky rebarbative manners; you don't get the sense that the taciturn hero is concealing some sort of great sorrow or struggle; there's no "immortal beloved" anywhere in sight.  Since Dylan doesn't seem to care much about romantic love (except in the abstract), it's impossible for the audience to care either.  You don't what he's thinking; his motives are not so much secret or concealed as arbitrary -- the women are casualties of Dylan's hipster nonchalance.  We care about the music, and the movie has a tremendous playlist but the hero's private life is pretty much off-limits; if Dylan wants to express something about his feelings, he writes a song.  

At the very start of A Complete Unknown, Dylan has apparently hitchhiked to New York City.  It's 1961 and NYC is dark and grimy, streets crowded with zombies of the sort that would late take over the city in movies like Scorsese's Taxi Driver.  In the corner of fifth or sixth shot in the picture, there's a guy in black suit with a horrible posture -- he has a crook in his neck, a crew-cut, and wears horn-rimmed glasses.  The man is on-screen for only three seconds, but that figure encapsulates everything you want to know about lower Manhattan in the early sixties.  Indeed, the next fifteen minutes or so is dense with period detail that is absolutely convincing.  We see Pete Seegar (played by Ed Norton) in Court where he is accused of some sort of breach of the law relating to his Civil Rights advocacy.  Dylan goes to visit Woody Guthrie who is dying very, very slowly in a the shadowy grime of a New Jersey hospital.  Seegar is visiting the semi-paralyzed Guthrie and meets Dylan in the the dying man's room.  Dylan sings a song and Guthrie, who can no longer speak, punches at a nearby chest-of-drawers to show his approbation.  On the ride back to Seegar's house, where Dylan spends with night, the young man fiddles with the car radio -- this triggers the first discussion with Seegar about rock and roll (of which the folk singer disapproves) and echt folk music.  (Later, there's an important scene in which Joan Baez is singing to a big crowd; at the end of the song, she puts her hand over the microphone so that the audience can hear her voice pure and without amplification.)  Dylan begins performing in small venues in Greenwich Village and, of course, his genius is immediately recognized.  After about a half-hour of the movie, he's become famous, a fame that he seems to abhor.  There are a number of show-business rogues around him and the music scene in the early sixties is very convincingly portrayed.  Indeed, as long as the movie focuses on the music business, it's interesting, gritty, and entertaining.  But, then, Dylan's relationships with women become central to the movie and the picture, although always well-acted and reasonably interesting, becomes inert -- it's just biding time between the bravura opening and the climax at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.  Dylan alternates between Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo.  Russo with whom he lives for awhile goes off to Rome, freeing Dylan for an affair with Joan Baez -- I was going to write "freeing Dylan to pursue" Joan Baez, but the verb "pursue" is too strong for Dylan's rather limp and lackluster style as a lover; he's the one pursued.  Russo returns and Dylan revives his relationship with her.  Ultimately, she breaks things off (although only temporarily) because she perceives that the singer/songwriter is "a complete unknown"; the stories he's told her about running away to join a carnival are all obvious lies and she observes that she doesn't even really know his name -- he gets packages mailed to him as "Robert Zimmerman."  When the affair with Russo ends, Dylan goes out with some other girls and, then, visits Joan Baez at the Chelsea Hotel -- it's not clear why she's at the hotel since she is prosperous, famous, and seems to have a very nice house in Connecticut or upstate New York.  Baez is too smart to believe Dylan's stories about being taught guitar by an old cowboy; she remarks that she had piano and guitar lessons and the same must have been true for him.  Her beef with Dylan is that he spends too much time lounging around the house writing songs and not enough time in the sack with her -- this is a vulgar way of putting it, but this is the gist of the situation.  Johnny Cash has been exchanging letters with Dylan and the two of them have a sort of "bro-mance."  Cash encourages Dylan to go electric and this sets up the big climax at the Newport Folk Festival.  Sylvie Russo is back with Dylan having come with him from NYC on his motorcycle -- Timothee Chalamet (who plays Dylan) spends a big part of the movie zooming around with dangerous abandon on his motorcycle. At Newport, Sylvie sees Dylan singing a duet with Joan Baez ("It ain't you, Babe") and senses the magnetism still persisting between them, despite their rather icy demeanor.  She storms away, although there's a final short encounter between them, a cyclone fence separating the two figures, as she departs from Dylan's life at the Newport ferry.  Dylan returns to the stage and to the horror of Pete Seegar plays an electrically amplified set of hard-driving rock and roll.  This is like Stravinsky's famous premiere of The Rite of Spring -- all hell breaks loose, there are fist fights in the audience and the promoter tries to cut the power to the stage without success. Seegar has pleaded with Dylan to not play electric guitar at the festival.  Ed Norton, who acts the part of Seegar, is very affecting and gives a persuasive speech about how folk music represents the collective labor of thousands of people and many generations all in the service of equality and justice.  He asks Dylan to not besmirch this legacy.  But, of course, we all know how this turned-out.  After Dylan has outraged the huge crowd with his tempest of electrically amplified rock and roll, he is persuaded to return to the stage and play an encore, an acoustic piece.  Then, he leaves the festival and pays one last visit to the poor mute Woody Guthrie.  In the film's last shot, Dylan is shown roaring off into the darkness on his motorcycle.  

There are many wonderful details in the film.  In Sylvie Russo's apartment, there is an expressionist picture by Georges Rouault, "The Old King" -- my father had a book of pictures by Rouault and, in fact, copied one of his lithographs, "The Prophet" in pen-and-ink. (it was on the wall in my childhood and still graces a corner of my mother's house).  An image like this immediately summons for me, at least, the era of the early sixties.    After the cataclysmic Newport show, Dylan rides up to the stage at dawn.  Pete Seegar all alone is putting away chairs, one by one -- and there are hundreds of chairs lined up in front of the stage.  It's a brilliant evocation of Seegar's commitment to folk music and the festival.  We see the Cuban missile crisis as experienced in lower Manhattan -- people are running in panic through the streets and, apparently, it's impossible to hail a car; the taxis just roar by like yellow boulders.  Another excellent scene involves Dylan, an old Black blues singer, and Pete Seegar playing together on a public TV show -- the singer is chugging gin and doesn't know (or care) who Bob Dylan is, an attitude that invigorates Dylan.  The movie is crammed with fantastic versions of Dylan songs.  I think its worth seeing just for the music.  And the film's beginning and ending are both brilliant.