Meet Me At the Corner…With Dylan’s Movie Doppelgänger
Why “A Complete Unknown” Hits All The Right Notes, and Nerves
Five minutes in, the tears started.
As Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan sings “Song To Woody” to the Hollywood version of the folk legend himself (played by Scoot McNairy), who lies in a New Jersey hospital bed badly stroke-damaged, mute, yet somehow still commanding in presence, and with Dylan’s other musical hero Pete Seeger (a simply spot-on and fearless Ed Norton) looking on, I began a moment-by-moment, joyous battle with my emotions that ended some two and a quarter hours later.
Forget that the scene never happened in “real life.” Nor did several other moments in “A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s latest biopic of a popular music leviathan. The movie grabs true fans like me the instant 20-year-old Bob emerges from the Holland Tunnel a fully formed genius with designs on … whatever his inscrutable life has played out as since then, on a million stages, through dozens of personas (paging David Bowie), and in our fevered minds and smitten hearts.
I embraced the giddy, beautifully acted and shrewdly staged deception throughout the film, and judging by the smiles and somewhat loopy looks on the faces of my fellow audience members as we walked out into the December night–including longtime friends of my wife’s and mine, who we just happened to run into in the top row, and one of whom is a musician himself–I wasn’t alone. This is a flick that actually lives up to the hype. It hits one perfect emotional note after another even as it fiddles with facts and timelines, as I’m quite sure Dylan himself would, and still does, at age 83. Instead of resorting to standard “troubled soul” tropes as in his 2005 Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line,” Mangold keeps Dylan’s Minnesota roots well hidden beyond a passing reference or two, zeroing in on the skinny, mop-headed wunderkind’s whirlwind ascendance to the folk god heights and that same not-so-clean-cut kid’s destruction of the sacred temple of acoustic purity during his epochal electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the movie’s crescendo.
Though its fairly linear storyline hews closely to Dylan’s early New York days as they actually spooled out, Mangold’s goal wasn’t to cast the young Mr. Zimmerman in a harsh light of factual events and corroborated journalistic accounts. That’s impossible by any measure, even within the confines of documentaries like Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” or D.A. Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back”: America’s greatest living songsmith glows brightest behind a shape-shifting screen of his own creation, letting us catch glimpses of his true soul through its wrinkles and folds only by listening–really listening, again and again–to more than 600 songs and 55 albums, while doing our best to digest the true meaning of his oblique lyrics. It’s lifelong work, and I, for one, never tire of doing it. Ultimately it’s the man’s songs, not the flesh-and-guitar-strings chameleon himself, that holds us in such thrall, which is why I call this movie a musical, pure and simple. And every character, including the “real” ones like Norton’s Seeger, Monica Barbaro’s John Baez and Dan Fogler’s Albert Grossman and “composites” like Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo (standing in for Dylan’s actual early ’60s girlfriend Suze Rotolo), takes seriously his or her responsibility to elevate the music as the film’s true lead character rather than illuminate the mysterious soul behind the notes and words. Like Chalamet himself, every actor playing a musician actually learned their instruments and mastered each note, no dubs or lip-syncs needed. The utter reverence they give every bar and chord change, both in Dylan’s songs and in snippets of their own work, is truly breathtaking. My jaw audibly dropped when Seeger/Norton leads a crowd through a sing-along of “Wimoweh/Mbube,” nailing the refrain’s soaring, familiar high notes with glee and gusto.
Chalamet’s inhabitation of Dylan the performer is truly astonishing, as well. It’s onstage where actor and subject meld most completely; Mangold’s script draws the offstage Bob–the sometimes distant and selfish lover, impetuous artiste, and pop-culture juggernaut–in less defined lines, and Chalamet tows that line well, too. Again, by design.
Go ahead, call me a geek at this point, but also know that I cannot claim cradle-to-grave appreciation of Dylan’s work. I didn’t bother to do a deeper dive below his most “mainstream” hits–“Like A Rolling Stone,” “Lay Lady Lay,” “Blowin’ In the Wind,” “Rain Day Woman No. 12 & 35”– until I was in college, in the late 1970s. By the mid-80s I was well on my way to full-blown Dylan Devotee, and when I saw him in concert in Reno in 1986–with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers backing him–I was, to quote another occasionally cantankerous singer named Van Morrison, “real real gone.” Dylan burned through the apocalyptic “A Hard Rain’s-A-Gonna-Fall” with a brutal immediacy that night, and that song, which Mangold perfectly employs as an expository device in “A Complete Unknown,” has haunted me in the best possible way ever since. Along with “Like A Rolling Stone” and the 1975 masterpiece “Tangled Up In Blue,” it remains a personal favorite, still shrouded in beautiful, clear-eyed menace six decades after it emerged through whatever unnamed spirit powered Dylan’s muse, then and yet.
By the time the movie nears its dramatic zenith in Newport, Dylan’s fame and creative confidence conspire to carry him to the level of myth–and, in his original fan base’s hidebound estimation, too close to the rock ‘n’ roll sun. As he and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band launch into a scathing, electric “Maggie’s Farm” moments after another Dylan penpal and fellow table-turner Johnny Cash urges him to “track mud on the carpet,” the crowd turns on him, hurling garbage and insults at the stage. There’s a moment where even Seeger considers cutting the cord, literally, to silence his one-time acolyte’s electric war cry (a dramatic touch that Seeger later pushed back against, saying he was just dismayed at the sound system’s distortion). But moments later, through the words of “Like A Rolling Stone,” Dylan reels them back in, only to vanish into the motorcycle void.
“It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way,” Bob sings decades later on his 2012 album “Tempest,” but back in the heady days where “A Complete Unknown” dwells with such abundant and generous love for man and music, the young Dylan’s path to immortality was as broad as his imagination, and America’s hunger for musical deliverance in troubled times, would bear.
And here I am, and here are we all, in fraught times of our own, bearing it still. Welcoming it. Counting on it. Long live Bob. May he stay forever young, meeting us on whatever corner we find ourselves needing his music most.
Dylan has always understood what we seem to forget about lyrics: They don’t have to make sense, or mean anything. They need to flow on and around the melody, to fit the meter. That’s it. Any further evocation, real or imagined, is gravy. Which is why the next expectational step — the idea, advanced by cultural critics, that these lyrics [might] make anyone the voice of anything, much less an entire generation — is absurd... Great stuff here, Vic, btw. Going to see the movie Wednesday. My parents (born in 1936 & '39) were huge Dylan folk. They went to see Baez on their honeymoon, August 1963. She pulled Dylan out of the audience to sing with her. That was their introduction to him. They were never fans of the electric Dylan, but neither did they have an expectation that he was obligated to please them forever, in the same musical form. The idea that folk, rock or pop stars would continue to operate as such, forever, is a late 20th century construct. And a largely unfortunate one. But now that we have it, all those angry folkies in Newport come of as, well, even more absurd!
Wow, now I know I have to see it!!