A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Who is Bob Dylan? Having spent a lifetime dodging the question, he’s apparently given the nod to this terrific early-years biopic which might be expected to answer it, but of course it doesn’t, nor would we want it to. The spell remains. 

        Dylan’s elusive nature is the predominant theme of A Complete Unknown, in which Timothée Chalamet offers up a striking, believable and thoughtful depiction of the young Dylan; visiting Woody Guthrie at his hospital bedside, rising up from the clubs of Greenwich Village and somehow juggling two girlfriends, Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo, the latter a fictional character clearly based on Suze Rotolo, with whom the real Dylan was photographed on the sleeve of his 1963 Freewheelin’ LP. Quite why the producers felt it necessary not to give Rotolo her real name – unlike every other real life character in the film – is a mystery*, but then again much of Bob Dylan’s appeal is his mysterious, impulsive nature, and in this respect A Complete Unknown delivers in spades. 

I wasn’t quite prepared for how well Chalamet would handle the music, to somehow replicate the sneering, nasal delivery that elevated Bob Dylan into a class of his own but it was the musical moments, the songs, hit after hit, and very loud too, that kept me gripped to my seat yesterday afternoon at the Guildford Odeon. It didn’t matter where it happened: in the Village clubs before sparse audiences, in concert halls of ever increasing size, in the Columbia Records recording studio or in his apartment as he worked on his songs and their lyrics. For me, the most moving sequence in the entire movie was when he was figuring out ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ while Baez was making coffee in their tiny kitchen. Having got the chords right, he begins to play and sing, hesitant at first, then with confidence. Beaz hears him, recognises that something of great cultural value is being created right before her eyes and joins him on the bed, leaning over his shoulder to read the words from his notebook. My heart pounded as she began to harmonise on the song that first made its writer’s name. 

If Dylan’s wary, intangible nature is the film’s overriding motif, then other themes intermingle over two hours and 20 minutes that seemed to flash by. Fame is a burden he’s unwilling to shoulder, taking him by surprise, unsettling him. He hides behind his shades and the scene in which fans mob him as he’s driven away in a limousine reminded me of the painting of Dylan wrapped in fur and cradling a cat in the back of a car in Guy Peellaert’s wonderful Rock Dreams book. “Messianic, he need only point his finger and the temples trembled before him,” was Nik Cohn’s caption.

And then there is identity. Dylan and Sylvie/Suze watch Now Voyager, the 1942 movie in which Bette Davis assumes a new self to escape the clutches of her domineering mother. “She just made herself into something different,” says Dylan, pondering on the possibility of doing precisely the same thing himself. Much later Baez challenges his story that he “worked on carnivals”. He just smiles: never apologise, never explain. 

        Similarly, Dylan refuses to be categorised. He moves at speed, often on a motor cycle. This leads to the film’s stirring climax, the now legendary appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he defies the organisers, among them father figure Pete Seeger, and performs with an electric band on the closing night. While traditionalists backstage recoil in horror, the crowd jeer as he storms into ‘Maggie’s Farm’, but after a verse or two the music overwhelms them and they begin to cheer, just as in an earlier sequence, at the 1964 Newport, when he performs ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ and they join in spontaneously on a chorus they’re hearing for the first time, recognising its significance as a harbinger for a decade unfolding at pace. 

        Other characters in the movie are present, well portrayed and correctly identified: scheming manager Albert Grossman, drunken Johnny Cash, aide-de-camp and sounding-board Bob Neuwirth, long suffering Seeger who, incidentally, pitches in to help tidy away chairs after Newport – a nice touch, infirm Woody Guthrie, unable to speak as Huntington’s disease devours him, ace picker Mike Bloomfield on a Telecaster and even Al Kooper adding his wild mercury Hammond lines to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as Columbia A&R chief John Hammond watches on from the studio control room. The street scenes evoke early Sixties Greenwich Village perfectly, the right cars, the right shop fronts, the right clubs, the right buskers. Who knew that Dylan bought the whistle he blows at the start of ‘Highway 61’ from a street vendor on his way to the session? 

        Who is Bob Dylan? We still don’t know. We never will. Even when Sylvie/Suze leaves the apartment she shares with him for a temporary stay in Europe she tells him she doesn’t know who he is. This film is great but as its title implies, the question remains. 

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*The mystery has been cleared up for me since I wrote that. Evidently Dylan read the script and felt that Suze Rotolo's privacy ought to be protected, so he requested her name be changed. Nevertheless, anyone who knows anything about Dylan will be able to identify her as the 'Sylvie' character.