Film review #1: A Complete Unknown

Beat twists spied in Dylan bio flick

A Complete Unknown, dir. by James Mangold (2024)

By Steven Taylor

Peter Chowka: Knowing him [Dylan] as well as you do, do you think he has been influenced by Zen or Buddhism?

Allen Ginsberg: I don’t know him, because I don’t think there is any him. I don’t think he’s got a self.^[1]

THE ESTATE OF journalist Al Aronowitz (who introduced Dylan and Ginsberg in 1963) is currently auctioning off a hand-written note from the singer, the text of which appears on the cover of Ginsberg’s Indian Journals. ‘Allen Ginsberg,’ he states, ‘is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius, a con man extraordinaire and probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman.’ Dylan might have said it of himself. If there is a single gesture characteristic of Dylan’s life and work, it is the invisible wink of the con man.

Various outlets have referred to James Mangold’s film as ‘the Dylan biopic’, a curiously appropriate misnomer, like calling the tale Dylan told Columbia Records’ PR guy in 1961 about being born in Illinois and arriving in New York by freight train ‘a bio’. In the film, when Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) asks Bob (Timothée Chalamet) where he learned to play guitar and he says from cowboy singers at the carnival he traveled with, she tells him he’s full of shit.

He tells her that the songs she’s written are like paintings hung in a dentist’s office. She says, “You know you’re kind of an asshole.” Interestingly, Dylan himself, upon reading through the script and voicing his character’s lines with director James Mangold, did not object to this scene, or to much of anything else. He only wanted Suze Rotolo’s name left out of it, as she never wanted a public persona. She appears as ‘Sylvie Russo’ (Elle Fanning). Her portrayal struck me as true to the woman who comes across in Suze’s terrific 2008 memoir A Freewheelin’ Time.

The coronavirus pandemic had several salubrious effects on this project: it gave Chalamet time to learn the tunes, and Barbaro time for guitar and voice lessons (eliminating the need for the worst element of the musical pic – lip-sync); the pandemic also cancelled Dylan’s tour, leaving him with a serious case of thumb-twiddle. He turned his attention to the picture and spent 18 hours going over the script with director Mangold.

The Rotten Tomatoes site says 96% of viewers liked the movie, but opinion among critics and hardcore Dylan fans seems to be somewhat split. Mangold told Variety’s Chris Willman:

‘If it creates so much anxiety for people that you’re telling a story about this person, you must be onto something, because there’s some kind of incendiary quality to the character that is value-added already. . . .It’s about how people get so locked in to . . . in this case, what folk music is or isn’t that it becomes an act of disloyalty to play with a band. It’s also about limitations that feel arbitrary, or that kind of theology, if you will, that is imposed on an artist that might cause an artist that has contrarian impulses or broader ambitions to act out against it.’

Arbitrary theology haunts the picture and its reception. Someone posted on Instagram that the quintessential New York experience is watching the film and afterward being lectured by strangers about how they knew Pete Seeger and that Mangold got Pete all wrong. The New Yorker’s critic complains not so much about factual fudging but that Mangold chose the wrong facts to fudge.

But there is no correct version of a myth. If the Ojibwe trickster is a raven and the Lakota trickster is a spider, that doesn’t mean one of them is wrong. The trickster who shows up in January of 1961 is a 19-year-old from the North Country looking to swap the shopkeeper’s life for Kerouac’s Duluoz legend.

The character Dylan created is of the type codified by Kerouac. In his own Chronicles, Dylan says that On the Road ‘had been like a bible for me’.^[2] He confessed to Ginsberg that, in 1959, Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues ‘blew his mind and turned him on to poetry’, ^[3] and, in 1984, Dylan told U2’s Bono that Howl, On the Road, and The Dharma Bums were books ‘that changed me’. ^[4]

Mangold says he drew inspiration from Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984), which doesn’t try to portray Mozart, but rather to present other people’s reactions to him. This framing is in evidence in A Complete Unknown. Bob sings and everyone lights up, and many want to own him. The only one who doesn’t have a fixed idea of who he ought to be is the man himself. Bob is something new, an emergent anti-identity. Chalamet’s got the shy, wry trickster thing down.

The tone is set by the opening audio – Woody Guthrie singing ‘So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You’. The whole film has the flavor of Groucho Marx’s ‘Hello, I must be going.’ Dylan arrives bumming a ride in a station wagon and departs on a Triumph motorbike. In between, he seems to be without a home. He crashes briefly at Pete’s, then with Sylvie, and then with Joan. Both women turf him out.

The movie is packed real tight, and it clips right along. We’re on the old elevated highway over the Jersey marshes approaching the Holland Tunnel; then at the Cafe Wha? in the Village where Dave Van Ronk tells Bob that Woody’s in Greystone State Hospital in New Jersey (‘Jersey? I’ve just come from there’); then crashing at Pete’s place; then playing Folk City; then at Columbia studios. At this point, it feels like we’re maybe twenty minutes in.

Bob takes a cab to Greystone, a place I knew from my first years in America as it was close to our home. I once took Ginsberg there to weep, recalling 1930s picnics on the lawn with his mad mother Naomi. My experience of Jersey predisposed me to see it as the Land of the Dead, where Woody appears as Tiresias, the blind prophet who advises Odysseus on his perilous journey, here situated as an aphasic asylum inmate who conveys his prophecy by banging his fist on the bedside table.

There’s a lot of condensing in the film. Incidents get mashed up. The speechless, bed-ridden Guthrie of Bob’s initial visit wasn’t really that badly off at first. He played guitar with Dylan on his first visit. In the film, Bob finds Seeger at the bedside. He sings them his ‘Song for Woody’. It’s a great moment, but I don’t think Pete was there when it happened.

It’s convenient because Pete has a car and Bob has no money and nowhere to go. Next morning at Pete’s place, we see Bob working on ‘Girl From the North Country’. Toshi Seeger and the kids are impressed. Pete is speechless. This sort of thing happens every time he whips out a song in progress.

Bob plays Folk City where he meets, intrigues and, from the microphone, insults Joan Baez (‘She’s pretty, sings pretty, maybe too pretty’); then he’s at Columbia making a record.

The plot is driven by three factions: the artists (Dylan, Baez, and JR Cash), the merchants (Albert Grossman, Harold Leventhal, and John Hammond), and the ideologues (Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, and the Newport Festival Board).

Joan is the successful artist who is wise to the system but apparently untroubled by it. She has the confidence and ease of the Ivy League professor’s daughter, and has a groovy, expensive pad. She and Sylvie clue Bob to big-city bohemia and political activism.

Sylvie’s a painter, i.e. an artist who doesn’t roam around. She wants him home. Joan wants him when she feels like it. Cash represents the working-class, bacchic roots of the music. He is the enabler here, allowing Bob to disregard the dithering folk religionists and play whatever the hell he wants. When Cash goes on at Newport with the Tennessee Three we get ten seconds of hardcore rockabilly and it’s astonishingly powerful. And there, in the music, is the extraordinary power of the film.

It is remarkable how efficiently the picture flashes each persona. Alan Lomax, the collector and folk purist, appears in a few scenes, hunched over a tape recorder at a hootenanny, refusing to include white blues musicians in the festival lineup (he drops the A-word – ‘authenticity’), demanding that Bob not play electric at Newport, and slugging it out with Grossman as Dylan does just that. Seeger is pleasant and mild-mannered but passionate about folk music. He’s on a mission to save the world through song.

Manager Albert Grossman is wise and sharp-witted and all about the money, of course. He packs heat (afraid of a Chicago mob hit, they say). Grossman says of Baez, ‘She acts depressed, looks at her shoes, and drives men crazy.’

Harold Leventhal was an important promoter of folk music who had started out as a song plugger for Irving Berlin. In his brief appearances in the film, he’s a smiling party host, part of the commerce trio. At one party, a Ginsberg look-alike appears for a brief moment.

John Hammond comes off as consistently serious, though I remember him as enthusiastic and cheerful. He was cool at the recording desk, but otherwise delighted in the presence of music. There’s a scene where Bob faces the big studio microphone for the first time and Hammond stops the take and tells him to stop turning away from the microphone (First time I ever sang into one of those big condenser mics, Mr. Hammond instructed me to do the same, and watch Allen to sync the vocals).

One thing that didn’t ring true for me was the bit where Grossman doesn’t want Dylan to record his own songs. As Bob relates, ‘No one wants to hear what some kid wrote last month.’ Everyone finds the music astonishing; ain’t nobody in New York complaining about ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. And it’s hard to imagine Hammond saying no to ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’

There is a striking episode that reminded me of that time. In ‘62 we had a neighbor who, whenever the subject of ‘the bomb’ came up, had to run to the church to calm down. The TV says the Russians are situating nuclear missiles 90 miles off the coast of Florida and old Cronkite invokes the threat of ‘it’s all over’.

People panic. Joan runs down to the street to get a taxi, but the cabs are all taken, careening off to nowhere. Joan hears Bob’s voice coming from a basement bar and when he steps off stage she grabs him and latches on for the requisite mad passion. How many babies were conceived that Saturday night, October 27th, 1962?

Cut to 1965. Fame has become a problem. Bob goes into a bar to watch his friend Bobby Neuwirth play and everything stops when a woman screams, ‘O my God, it’s Bob Dylan!’ Another woman grabs his sunglasses off his face and when he tries to pull them back, a guy decks him. He goes to Sylvie’s place for solace but she’s with a guy. ‘We broke up, remember?’

There is a thread in the plot that may be necessary to build up to the final conflict with the folk ideologues but it seems a bit forced. I don’t know the details of the case, but in the lead-up to Newport ‘65, there’s a lot of pleading with Bob to not go electric. It starts with Pete following Bob around wanting to know the set list. Bob says he hasn’t decided yet.

Pete dogs him in the street and at the pre-gig hotel about what he’s going to play, and makes a speech about how Bob has tipped the scales toward change, and he just needs to do it one more time and close the festival as the solo folk prophet.

When I first heard about the film, my initial skepticism was relieved somewhat when I learned that Dylan had been involved in the project (his right-hand man Jeff Rosen is listed, with Mangold, as co-producer). I dreaded having to endure lip-sync or an actor singing, but Chalamet does a great job. He’s not a great singer, but neither is your man. The overwhelming takeaway is how amazing those songs are. They still astonish.

The day after the festival, as Bob blasts westward toward a shadowy horizon, I thought of the end of On the Road…

‘I know by now the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks in the west, folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.’

Editor’s note: Steven Taylor is a musician, writer and regular contributor to Rock and the Beat Generation. Taylor was Allen Ginsberg’s guitar accompanist between 1976 and 1996. In 1982, he participated in recording sessions with Ginsberg and Bob Dylan.

See also: ‘Interview #29: Elijah Wald’, December 21st, 2024; ‘Book review #36: Dylan Goes Electric!’, December 11th, 2024

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References

^[1] Allen Ginsberg. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, ed. David Carter (Harper Collins) 2001. 389.

^[2] Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume One (Simon & Schuster, 2004), 34; 57; 47.

^[3] Ginsberg. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, ed. David Carter (Harper Collins, 2001), 504.

^[4] Quoted in Clinton Heylin, The Double Life of Bob Dylan (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), excerpted on Literary Hub, May 24th, 2021.