Beyond your command

A Complete Unknown is a father-son story with a lot of fun padding

Searchlight Pictures

The new Dylan movie has been a feast for fans* and a green light for Dylanologists to hawk their wares. Most of these are nostalgic, boomer-soothing remember-when and youngblood-baiting didja-know; some are instructive, as with this Facebook essay by Elijah Wald that gently but firmly contradicts the movie’s portrayal of Alan Lomax as a hard-assed enemy of rock and roll. And of course there is ancillary merchandising aplenty, currently driving Dylan’s back catalog up the charts.

All of these are appropriate, as A Complete Unknown is a commercial biopic of the most traditional kind. As I have previously observed, biopics are almost always a lesser art form, relying on the audience’s admiration their subjects for most of their appeal and power. (Maybe we should call them “hagiopics.”) There have been transcendent exceptions, and I understand some people think I’m Not There is one — though, much as I love Todd Haynes and Dylan, I couldn’t get past the first half-hour of that; the fractal approach struck me as hagiography by other means, treating Dylan as if he were, like Allah, an entity that could not be directly depicted.

A Complete Unknown, on the other hand, lays it all out for the fans, of whom there are enough that the filmmakers can get rich on their custom alone, in a pretty direct manner, and with admirable good taste — by which I mean, there isn’t a lot of obvious biopic cheese like supporting characters saying “Do you realize what X has done? Why, he’s…” (There is some quoting-out-loud what newspapers and magazines are saying, which must be very confusing for younger viewers.) Apart from one significant, artfully detailed relationship, though, it’s just another smooth product.

The first act zooms along wonderfully, with Bob and his guitar getting dropped off on the Manhattan side of the Lincoln Tunnel, stumbling on the Kettle of Fish, getting directions to Woody Guthrie’s hospital from Dave Van Ronk, going there and meeting Pete Seeger — very condensed, but the way memory does it, with minimal rib-elbowing. Guthrie and Seeger hear Dylan play “Song to Woody” and are impressed, enough that Seeger puts him up at his house and gets him to an open mic at Folk City where Joan Baez is doing a few numbers and Albert Grossman, Robert Shelton of the New York Times, and John Hammond are in the audience…

So far so good, but we have to have a conflict. As you probably already know, Dylan’s electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which (kind of) represented his transition from folk to rock star, is the movie’s big climax — at least it seems big because it’s famous and famously contentious, with the trad folkies flipping out at their crown prince’s electric betrayal. So the drama, such as it is, is in how Bob gets there.

At first the only assertive thing about Dylan is his talent. With Seeger he’s cryptic and elliptic (you know, Dylanesque!) but respectful, the way a newcomer will be when he doesn’t want to get caught out by his elders; when Seeger stiffens at Dylan’s enthusiasm over Little Richard, Bob barely pushes back. With women he’s pretty much your basic bohemian asshole; he outright negs Baez and Sylvie Russo (the movie’s version of Suze Rotolo, “renamed at Dylan’s request” per Wikipedia) and retreats to grunts or sophomoricisms when called on it.**

But as Bob gets big, he also gets moody — or, rather, what had looked like shyness or schoolboy smart-aleckiness starts to look like truculence. He’s a little sharper with everyone. He doesn’t like being pushed into playing a song at a fundraising event, and though he consents to do so when Pete is part of the push, we can see in his face what he thinks about it. He starts hanging with and taking cues from different, hipper people like Johnny Cash and Bobby Neuwirth. When Lomax gives him shit for the “noise” he’s got on the radio, Dylan glowers and says “that’s the Kinks” like a pissy teenager.

Why Bob isn’t satisfied with being the new folk god, or even the Voice of a Generation, is an interesting question, but the film is so full of incident, historical and dramatic, that you might not notice that the answer is not one that fits biopic scale: basically, Dylan is sick of folk and into rock, not because history or selling out or even his creativity demand it, but because he’s 24 in 1965.

I really don’t think there’s much more to it than that. There’s dramatic tension because other characters are pushing back against it, but within Dylan himself there doesn’t seem to be much struggle. He’s already shown he’s capable of blowing off and pissing off just about anyone; why would he care what the moldy figs think? All his “they don’t want to hear what I want to play” stuff seems like a slightly larger than usual set of stage nerves rather than an artistic or existential crisis.

There is one real Rubicon, though, to which in a way the rest of the movie is incidental, though for obvious audience-pleasing reasons director James Mangold doesn’t lean on it: Bob’s relationship with Pete.

Edward Norton plays Seeger as upstanding in every sense, head held high to face the world; whenever attention turns to him, he lights up, like any performer, but in his clipped, earnest voice he endeavors to redirect that attention to the cause of a better tomorrow. That’s what he thinks is the purpose of his musical gift, and of Dylan’s.

But unlike Lomax, Seeger is not any kind of bully and, when Dylan starts to veer off into more personal, and electrified, statements, he tries to get the young man to course-correct with a parable about the “teaspoon brigade” that’s been painstakingly uprooting injustice for years and the game-changing “shovel” that, Seeger says, Dylan has brought to the cause. It’s an exquisitely painful scene because however much we may admire Seeger’s goals we can’t help but find him and his pitch corny, paternalistic and awkward — not cool. And, we can just make out, under Dylan’s weary, ultra-cool aspect, he sees him the same way.

There’s already been some writing about the father-and-son aspect of this relationship, but what I find interesting and even refreshing about it is how simple and non-historic the breach is. I see from Mangold’s and Jay Cocks’ draft script that there was originally way more dialogue between the two, and I would have liked to hear them speak it. But the actors get the idea across. Mangold lets us see Dylan, on his way out of Newport by motorcycle, catching sight of Seeger picking up and stacking folding chairs with the rest of the crew — we know it’s him, even from the back and in medium long shot, by his posture (I love Edward Norton in this) — and, after an appraising moment, riding away. This is about as dramatically un-dramatic as such leave-takings usually are, and I admire that Mangold did it this way. (The later, corny bit with Woody Guthrie and the harmonica, not so much.)

Which brings me to Timothée Chalamet. None of this works if you don’t buy him as Dylan. He and Mangold very wisely play him recessive; like the real one, Chalamet is sufficiently charismatic and camera-friendly that he doesn’t have to push. His Dylan is quietly cagey, as if his talent and the strangeness of it is a secret he enjoys surprising and tantalizing people with. We get the impression that’s also why he’s so confident about his unusual singing style. (Hearing Chalamet’s versions of the songs outside the movie is unimpressive, but when you see him perform them in the movie you don’t question them at all.) Other than that he’s not a people-pleaser. He knows what he gives them is enough; everything else is for him. Imagine how unlikable he’d be if he were not a genius, and you get what’s really great about the performance.

* I like to think myself impervious to this stuff but I’m not, and some of the big scenes, like Dylan debuting “The Times They Are a-Changin’” at Newport ‘64, gave me chills. But by far my fave was the rendering of the famous Al Kooper/“Rolling Stone” story, especially since Charlie Tahan as Kooper looks kind of like Dee Dee Ramone. But help me out, Dylanologists: Neuwirth had to go to England to get Bob a Strat?

** Yet the gals put up with him, Baez because he’s a genius (this is made explicit by the way she looks at him when he plays songs for her, as distinct from way she looks at him the rest of the time) and Russo because, poor thing, she’s in love with him. (No slur on Elle Fanning, but by the second Newport Folk Festival she spends staring tearfully at Bob and Baez, I got to thinking Sylvie was none too bright.) Speaking of folkie female disempowerment, you must read Merrill Markoe on how little Seeger’s wife Toshi, a formidable figure in real life, gets to say in the movie.