A Complete Unknown is a strong but imperfect biopic that dismantles Bob Dylan
CBC
Early on in A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan sidles into the hospital room of a dying Woody Guthrie, the young musician's hero. It's the early '60s and Dylan's guitar is still slung over his shoulder, his hair still flying up and around his head.
Sitting next to Guthrie is folk musician Pete Seeger, expertly played by Edward Norton. He smiles and motions Dylan in, who walks over, uncharacteristically unsure of himself.
"You shy?" Seeger asks him.
"Not usually," Dylan responds.
The rest of the film goes to great pains to prove that point about the Nobel Prize-winning musician.
There's his early encounter with a girlfriend — when she asks whether he thinks he's God, Dylan quips, "How many times do I have to say this? Yes."
After Dylan begins to establish himself in the New York music scene, there's a tryst with an early-career Joan Baez. As opposed to his own seemingly effortless and unquestioningly deserved success, he believes Baez is working too hard to prove herself. "'Sunsets and seagulls,' 'smell of buttercups,'" he says. "Your songs are like oil paintings at the dentist's office."
And there's the early meeting with collaborator and manager Bob Neuwirth after a particularly oppressive party. Dylan — recently inducted into the sticky world of fame, pen pals with Johnny Cash and touring the world — is coerced into performing for a fawning high-society group who hold little interest in him as a person.
Heading down the elevator in a huff, Dylan whines to his date: "They should just f—k off and let me be."
"F—k off and let you be what?" asks Neuwirth, posturing nonchalantly in the corner.
"Whatever it is they don't want me to be," Dylan answers.
Based on Elijah Wald's biography Dylan Goes Electric, the story spans from that acoustic-oriented early Dylan in Guthrie's hospital room to the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan swapped his acoustic guitar for a Stratocaster. There, the movie builds to arguing that Dylan expanded the narrow definitions of folk into something transgressive, innovative and of the moment.
It's perhaps an alien conceit to present a genre modern audiences associate with Noah Kahan, Bon Iver and Taylor Swift as some flashpoint of controversy. But this was an era of folk steeped in contemporary issues, everyman activism and civil disobedience. Instead of Starbucks-approved playlists, Seeger was deliberately trying folk music to use to feed activist causes.
That era of folk eventually led to modern artists like Jeffery Lewis singing about the L train, suicide and the pointlessness of online fame, Kimya Dawson on meth labs and small-town abuse and Devendra Banhart writing a song with the most disgusting beliefs he could think of in order to keep his album off coffee shop playlists.
