A Complete Unknown - Film Review

by Stuart Penney

It’s often said you simply can’t have too many films about The Beatles.  This is equally true of Bob Dylan, perhaps more so.  A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s movie of Dylan’s life between 1961 and 1965, is considerably better than most biopics, however.  For one thing it was made with Bob’s co-operation and so had unfettered access to his music.  This fact should not be underestimated.  Recent biopics about Brian Epstein (Midas Man), Jimi Hendrix (All Is by My Side) and others were rendered virtually unwatchable by the absence of original music from their subjects.

For Dylan fans of a certain age, the story covers an era we know as well as we know our own family history.  That means every frame will be scrutinised in forensic detail, for familiarity as much as for accuracy.  Yes, this is a serious business and, given the constraints of fitting it all into a 140-minute movie Mangold has done a fine job, albeit with generous helpings of artistic license, conflating events which happened months (or years) apart. Occasionally the events happened quite differently to how they appear in the film and sometimes they didn’t even happen at all.

Whether this is a true account of Dylan’s life between his arrival in New York in 1961 aged 20, and the musical revolution he ignited at the Newport folk festival four years later is neither here nor there.  The film looks great, and Timothée Chalamet gives a sterling performance as the handsome and enigmatic Dylan.  His hair is perfect, although purists will say the halo of curls is much closer to Bob’s 1966 look than 1965 (much could happen in a year during the mid-60s).  Other details are spot on though.  The overlong and dirty, nicotine-stained fingernails on his right hand (for guitar playing) was a nice touch, as was the green polka dot shirt, neurotic mumbling, Chaplinesque twitches and acerbic put-downs.

The supporting cast is also strong, especially Edward Norton as the uptight but unfailingly decent Pete Seeger.  Norton nails Seeger’s voice and manner and he even shaved the front of his hair to create Pete’s widow’s peak.  Elle Fanning is superb as “Sylvie Russo” a thinly disguised Suze Rotolo, Bob’s first New York girlfriend, as seen on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album.  Dylan insisted she be given an alias in the film, perhaps because he treated her so shabbily.

Monica Barbaro turns in a great performance as Joan Baez even though, like Fanning, she looks nothing like the real thing.  We are told that Monica learned to play guitar from scratch and improved her singing skills just for the role.  Her onstage duets with Dylan are fantastic and a testament to that hard work.  There’s a lovely scene where the up-and-coming Bob visits an already successful Joan in California.  She had two or three albums in the charts by that point and impressed Bob with her big, fancy house, complete with E-Type Jaguar in the driveway (that’s a Jaguar XKE to the Americans).

I wasn’t nearly as convinced by the portrayal of Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman.  In reality he was an imposing bear of a man, not the short, roly poly Jack Black lookalike who appears in the film. 

There’s a scene in a New York club (supposedly around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis) where Dylan is performing the newly written “Masters of War.”  The line “And I hope that you die, and your death will come soon” is mysteriously cut from the song.  It presumably wasn’t edited out for reasons of space because the rest of the verse follows intact.  Modern sensibilities prevailed, perhaps?

But even the scenes which are laughably, patently untrue, such as Dylan bonding with longtime sidekick Bobby Neuwirth in an Irish bar and receiving a punch in the face for his trouble look convincing enough.  The song Neuwirth’s band was playing at the time incidentally was “The Irish Rover” which, although thought of as a traditional tune, dates back only as far as WWII. 

I like to think it was included in the film due to Bob’s love of the Pogues, who recorded it in 1987 with the Dubliners.  It would be churlish to point out that the song didn’t become popular until 1966 (a year after the scene in the film) when it was recorded by the eponymous folk group The Irish Rovers on their debut album.

Thanks to a deal with Gibson, the guitars are as accurate as any film of its kind I’ve ever seen.  Dylan’s early Gibson J50, Gibson Nick Lucas Special, Joan Baez’s Martin 0-45 and Johnny Cash’s Gibson J200 are all are present and looking absolutely correct.  From Fender we got Dylan’s Newport era Stratocaster and Mike Bloomfield’s Telecaster too. They even made sure Bob's Strat arrived in a period correct black Fender guitar case. I recently saw a “making of” documentary which showed Bob playing a Fender Jazzmaster during the recording of Highway 61 Revisited (real photos of him with this guitar do exist) but the scene clearly never made it to the finished film.

Still with guitars, at one point the Bobby Neuwirth character mentions that Bob’s famous Newport Fender Stratocaster was bought in London during the May 1965 UK tour.  I’ve never heard this claim before and very much doubt it's true.  This was the guitar which sold for almost one million dollars at auction in 2013, a world record price at that time.

Rumoured to be a late addition to the film script, Johnny Cash looms large, turning up at Newport in 1964 and 1965.  It’s a fact that Cash was a big supporter of Dylan, covering his songs and encouraging him to go electric.  Boyd Holbrook plays him to a tee as the mad, bad and dangerous to know outlaw country music star.  No matter that Johnny wasn’t even at Newport in 1965, the scene where the hungover Cash fails to recognise Bob, before drunkenly crashing his car was wildly entertaining, if scarcely believable.

The final scenes where Dylan shocks the Newport crowd by going onstage with the Butterfield Blues Band to play a high-octane electric set is handled well.  After the anomalies which preceded it, we can perhaps forgive the inevitable denouement where a crowd member yells “Judas” prompting Bob’s "Play it loud!" instruction to the band leading to an ear-splitting “Like A Rolling Stone.”  In fact, the “Judas” incident happened a year later at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester but, artistic license or not, it’s a fitting and powerful end to the film.

We see the stuffy Newport festival board members frantically trying get Bob to turn down the volume, resulting in the unedifying spectacle of Alan Lomax and Albert Grossman, stout middle-aged men both, trading punches and rolling around in the dirt.  At this point Pete Seeger eyes the row of axes used by an earlier act for a woodchopping song as if he were contemplating cutting the electric cables, before his wife Toshi blocks his path, stopping him in his tracks.  And so the myth remains intact.  Only serious Dylan scholars will get the reference. 

Ultimately, despite the contradictions, anomalies and glaring errors, this is an enjoyable and important film.  Take it at face value and you'll love it too.

Oh, and there was only one mention of the Beatles in the movie, yet Donovan is name-checked twice!  Make of that what you will. 

Stuart Penney first saw Bob Dylan live at the Gaumont Cinema in Sheffield on May 16, 1966. The legendary “Judas” incident happened the following day in Manchester.