The James Mangold film “A Complete Unknown” entered theaters on Christmas Day as the first, or at least the most straightforward, biopic ever made about one of American pop culture’s most enduring yet perplexing figures: Bob Dylan, played by Timothée Chalamet.
The movie traces the dramatic early years of Dylan’s career, when he emerged in the 1960s as a star of the New York-centered folk revival scene and then (to quote the man himself) threw it all away by making electric rock ’n’ roll — most ostentatiously from the stage of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, a performance that provides the film’s climax.
The beats of this story are well known by some — and extremely well known by those so well versed in the intricacies of the Nobel Prize winner’s life and career that they are known as Dylanologists. Two such passionate Dylan fans discussed “A Complete Unknown” over video chat: Lucy Sante, the author of “Six Sermons for Bob Dylan,” whose own memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” was published last February; and Ian Grant, a host of “Jokermen,” a podcast founded to elevate Dylan’s musical output following the celebrated period covered by the film, and “Never Ending Stories,” a podcast about Dylan concerts.
“If I were going to make or fund the Bob Dylan movie, I would focus on literally any other period of Bob Dylan’s career,” Grant said.
“Dylan’s career goes on and multiplies exponentially. But this is a movie,” Sante replied. “I think any filmmaker would choose this period, because for cinematic purposes and also for the purposes of informing the public about this giant enigma in American culture, you need to establish the premises first.”
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Did you like the movie?
SANTE I was pleasantly surprised. I’m very suspicious of biopics in general, but it works brilliantly. It’s not Dylan, but these are really good cover versions. Monica Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez, is wonderful. I know that they had to do it for plot purposes, but I was disappointed by how they reduced Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend, to this doormat character [Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning]. Suze Rotolo is the only character in this movie whom I actually met. I had a full-blown crush on her, frankly. She was very, very smart, very funny.
I don’t think it’s a very deep movie. I would still send people to see “Dont Look Back” and “Eat the Document” over this. But for younger viewers in particular, to have them make sense of what things were like in the early ‘60s, it’s pretty good for that.
GRANT I think that Elle Fanning does the best she can with the material she’s given — she’s there to hector Bob Dylan and browbeat him at the beginning, and at the end she’s there to weep when he is seeming to fall in love with Joan Baez. I was not particularly impressed with the depth of that character, particularly when Suze Rotolo in real life was the one who introduced Dylan to the whole political valence of songwriting. Editors’ Picks Where to Find Great New York Slices in 2025? You Might Be Surprised. From $80 Days to $6,000 Days: How 3 Small Coffee Shops Got Started ‘I’ve Been to All the Popular Tourist Sites at Least Once’
The thing that sticks out is the omission of Sara Lownds — Sara Dylan. She ultimately becomes Bob’s wife, mother of several of his children, a more significant romantic partner than either Baez or Rotolo. She was such a fundamental part of the man’s life at this moment in time and certainly in the future.
The bone I have to pick with any piece of Dylan whatever that focuses on this era is just pretending like this is all there is to the story. There’s no hint or gesture toward the 60 years of this man’s life since then, which, to me — as great as this stuff is in the early ’60s and mid-60s — the real story is everything that comes after. And Sara is the clearest, strongest way that they could acknowledge that there is a whole life for this man beyond this flashbulb moment.
SANTE I kept expecting him to meet her, move into the Chelsea Hotel and start writing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” I understand what you’re saying, and it’s completely valid. But how do you do that? Except have some montage of the next 40 or 50 or 60 years? They had to decide an endpoint. And because she’s the dominant presence in the following 10 years of his life, it would just complicate matters.
Is it defensible, if there’s going to be a Dylan movie, for it to depict precisely his most famous period — he arrives in New York, he’s a rising star in the Village, he plugs in at Newport?
SANTE I think so, in part because it’s the least documented. I mean, it’s very well documented. But there is hardly any footage of any of that pre-1965 stuff, except for the March on Washington.
GRANT I see what you mean about this period of time literally being less documented — having not nearly as many primary sources to draw on. But at the same time, it’s so debated and mythologized and plumbed, generation after generation. And that makes sense, because the reason this is the moment that continues to fascinate people is because Bob Dylan himself, the art he’s making, the decisions he’s making, are so centrally tied to a particular thread of American culture at this moment in time. Dylan himself becomes a symbol for a generation, for political dynamics. So you tell a bigger story — the story of America in the mid-20th century — by telling Dylan’s story from the years 1961 to 1965.
But I’m more interested in Dylan as the artist, as opposed to Dylan as the symbol. All the music that he made, all the weird, terrible movies he made, all the thousands of concert performances — some amazing, some awful — that he’s given over the years and decades. Any of those eras are more interesting to me because they haven’t been debated, mythologized, cast in bronze as this larger-than-life moment of the Great American Artist.
SANTE I accept what you say. But most of the world is not composed of Dylanologists. And if you’re going to make a movie about [Dylan’s 1989 album] “Oh Mercy” or whatever, you still have to account for the origins.
How do you think the movie did at depicting how Dylan turned into an artist? Is it even possible to depict that in a movie?
SANTE You cannot depict the act of creation. It’s just not going to work. The thing I could say about this movie is that it avoids embarrassment. One of the benefits of the quick montage structure of the movie is it doesn’t give you time to think, “Wait, he just wrote x, and now he just wrote y.” It just happens. Unless you have a European art movie where it’s all about Dylan writing one song — that would be kind of interesting, actually, he’s smoking and thinking, and various people come in and out of this life, and he’s still trying to write “Obviously Five Believers.”
GRANT That’s an element to the story that’s just uncinematic. It’s an internal process that happens in dreams or when he’s sitting in a coffee shop and studying the way light is falling through the window. It’s very difficult to put that into any sort of audiovisual format that makes sense to the audience, and isn’t, like you just said, Lucy, embarrassing, cringe, too on-the-nose.
Was “A Complete Unknown” true to the pricklier side of Dylan’s personality?
GRANT The great thing about “Dont Look Back” is he is [an expletive] in that movie and there’s no effort to hide it. It’s endlessly delightful to me, even as I can acknowledge that I would have probably hated being around this guy if I were in that hotel room when he is screaming about who threw the glass.
SANTE In the new film it’s done subtly. It’s done negatively, you might say. It’s all about him hunching his shoulders and ignoring everybody to the left and to the right. That kind of works without hammering the point home.
GRANT I agree that he is shown as not a particularly likable character, certainly by the time you get to the second half of this movie. You get Dylan and his friend Bobby Neuwirth sulking around with their sunglasses, acting like they were too cool for school. That’s on the money. But it’s not counterbalanced with, “I want to look past these flaws because he’s still Bob Dylan.” Chalamet does go for it, but it veers into the hammy department on occasion.
SANTE And you don’t get Dylan’s wit. The kind of conversation he was capable of having. You wish there were a little more undirected stuff to fill out the personality, because the personality, you’re taking a lot of it on faith or prior knowledge. There’s nothing where you think, “There it is.” Chalamet is an interesting actor and he conveys something negatively. You get a vision of a hard-driving performer, songwriter, lover of many women; arrogant even though he comes from nowhere. But you don’t get much of the sense of that mind.
GRANT If you listen to some of those bootleg tapes from Bob, there’s one where he’s telling this joke about being in East Orange, N.J., and it’s the corniest — a borscht belt comedy type of thing. But it’s really funny. And it’s 21-year-old Bob Dylan delivering it. That element of his personality isn’t present here. And that’s the man I love. ---- other NYT articles: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/25/movies/a-complete-unknown-review.html