“A Complete Unknown”: Bob Dylan Finds (and roars away from) Fame

Watching the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, was like returning (yikes!) to my college years. Though never a hardcore Dylan fan, I attended a Hollywood Bowl concert that took place soon after Dylan shocked his fans at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by playing a plugged-in electric set with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. As at Newport, there was booing at the Bowl, with audience members showing their fury that a man they saw as an earnest young folkie (a poet and an one-man band, in Paul Simon’s terms) was turning toward rock-and-roll.

 Back then, as an atypical Sixties kid more interested in literature than protest, I didn’t quite see what the fuss was about. But in watching A Complete Unknown I was surprised how much I responded to those oh-so-familiar tunes: the wistful “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the ominous “A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall,” the jaunty "Subterranean Homesick Blues." And I realized, via the film, how much Dylan—a man who liked to be inscrutable—revealed about himself in his songs.

 It was smart of the filmmakers to focus on the very young Dylan, arriving in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961 but then—feeling the burden of fame—lighting out for the territory in 1965. In Timothée Chalamet’s sensitive portrayal we see how much he owes to the friends he made along the way, but also how badly he wanted to cut ties that were all too binding.

  According to the film, perhaps the most important relationship he built was that with Pete Seeger, played by an excellent Edward Norton. They meet in the dismal hospital room where Pete is watching over the dying Woody Guthrie, a longtime Dylan hero. From the first, the two veteran folksingers are impressed by Dylan’s original ballads, and see him as the potential messiah who can bring young people into the folk music scene, with its emphasis on social awareness and the beauty of the acoustic guitar. Having survived two Dune films, Chalamet is clearly used to playing messiahs-in-the-making, but the point of A Complete Unknown is that he doesn’t want to be one.

 Nor does he want to be part of a permanent romantic couple. This lesson is ultimately learned by the women in his life. Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo (a re-naming at Dylan’s own request of the real-life Suze Rotolo) introduces him to social action, but is unable to penetrate his self-imposed inscrutability. Joan Baez, beautifully portrayed by Monica Barbaro, partners him on the stage and sometimes in bed, but can’t get him to play nice while on tour and refuses to be merely his occasional sexual conquest.

 Which brings me to the Dylan songs that explain it all. “It Ain’t Me, Babe” (a duet by Dylan and Baez in the film, while a stricken Sylvie looks on from the wings) makes clear he rejects any long-term romantic connection: “It ain’t me you’re looking for.”  The lyrics of “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” seem to justify an itch to cut ties and hit the road. Most apt of all is the tune whose lyric gives the film its title. “Like a Rolling Stone” is the song of a loner “with no direction home,” one who is ultimately heading out on his motorcycle to points unknown. But perhaps the lyric that stays with me most is Guthrie’s own ditty as sung by Pete Seeger, depicted here as the gentle Mister Rogers of the folk music scene: “So long, it’s been good to know yuh . . . I’ve got to be driftin’ along.”