It’s Everyone Around Bob Dylan That Makes A Complete Unknown Worth Watching

How do you make a movie about an artist as unknowable as Bob Dylan? If you’re Todd Haynes, you don’t try to find the man’s center at all. You splinter him into pieces of his persona, with different actors each playing some fragment rather than attempting to represent Dylan in his entirety. If you’re the Coen brothers, you sidle up alongside Dylan with a narrative set in his world but also in his shadow, ending with your also-ran of a musician-main character going outside to meet his beatdown destiny while the future star performs on the stage he just vacated. But if you’re James Mangold, whose 2005 Johnny Cash biopic was one of the main texts spoofed in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and you have Timothée Chalamet lined up to play young Dylan — a role that was guaranteed to get the actor an Oscar nomination as soon as it was announced — well, you’re not going to make something that breaks wildly with convention.

The wonder of A Complete Unknown isn’t just that it manages to be good anyway but that it finds an angle on Dylan as unexpectedly electric as that amplified Newport set. The film works its way through plenty of expected biopic beats, but Mangold’s epiphany is that he doesn’t need to come up with a set of hackneyed explanations for why Dylan is the way he is — the reliable bane of this subgenre — to show what it was like in the Greenwich Village folk scene when Dylan landed like an asteroid out of space. Instead of treating him like a protagonist, A Complete Unknown approaches the musician like a force. Its best sequences aren’t about Dylan so much as they are about what it was like to be in his orbit when it felt like he could remake the universe. I’m not talking about the escalating audiences he plays in front of, most notably the riled-up crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which ends the film. (The script, which Mangold wrote with frequent Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks, is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!) It’s the faces of those more intimate with Dylan that carry the film — the collaborators, colleagues, and lovers around him as he makes the ascent from gifted upstart to rock star.

And no face more eloquent than that of Edward Norton, who as Pete Seeger has that expanse broadened by a hairline swooping up toward his crown. A Complete Unknown benefits from an array of worthy supporting performances, among them a bell-voiced and increasingly exasperated Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, a vulnerable Elle Fanning as girlfriend Suze Rotolo (named Sylvie Russo in the film), and Boyd Holbrook doing a swerv-y rendition of Johnny Cash. But as the torch carrier for the folk-revival movement, Norton embodies the scene that births Dylan’s career, and that he eventually outgrows. The movie begins with Dylan washing up in Manhattan early in 1961, on a pilgrimage to see Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who’s been hospitalized in New Jersey. Seeger’s visiting his friend when this guitar-toting fanboy comes in declaring that he hoped to “catch a spark” off his idol (“before he’s dead” is left implied). Guthrie, left nonverbal by Huntington’s disease, and Seeger feel indulgent enough to ask him to play a tune.

As Chalamet croons “Song to Woody,” the amusement drops off Norton’s face, replaced by an assessing look, as wary as it is excited. The next morning, when Seeger wakes to find the kid who slept on his couch noodling away on what will become “Girl From the North Country,” Norton’s expression flickers through an astonishing mix of admiration, envy, and calculation in less than a minute. Something similarly complicated is reflected on Barbaro’s face after Dylan takes the stage after Baez. He stops her from walking away by describing her voice to the audience as “a little too pretty,” then gives a performance of “I Was Young When I Left Home” that she takes in with as much caution as appreciation. These are the faces of people who understand that the artist they’re watching is about to exert a gravitational pull over their world. As the object of this scrutiny, Chalamet is suitably magnetic, doing his own nasal singing and emanating an untested certainty in the spotlight that gradually solidifies into swagger. But his part is all about providing hard surfaces for the other characters to bounce off of. He goes from deflection to aggression as Dylan grows restless and begins to feel penned in by the expectations of the folk crowd and the pressures of fame. It isn’t a mere impression, but it’s a performance made viable only by everyone around him providing humanity and softness. 

Is A Complete Unknown a good Bob Dylan biopic? I don’t know if, for the people most invested in that matter, such a thing could even be possible. But it’s a good movie about talent, and about how it feels to be around someone who has the kind of genius that feels like they’ve been touched by the divine. The comparison it brings to mind isn’t Walk the Line at all — it’s Amadeus, only instead of a single jealous Salieri it has a crew of earnest folkies, many of whom are hugely gifted in their own right, hoping to hitch their movement to Dylan’s rising star until he shakes them all off in frustration. A Complete Unknown gives a cluttered, tactile texture to a Greenwich Village that’s become the stuff of myth, but its Dylan hovers above all of it. Late in the film, he swings by Suze’s apartment on his bike, and despite the fact that they’re no longer together, she hops on and heads with him to Newport, because who wouldn’t? It’s the stuff of an album cover. And yet, once she’s there, you can see the fizz in her go flat, as she realizes she’s become an accessory in the latest outfit he’s trying on. A Complete Unknown doesn’t attempt to offer up a solution to the enigma that is Bob Dylan. It does something more achievable — shows us what it’s like to bob around the wake of greatness.