In much the same vein as Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes’ cinematic portrayals of the enigmatic singer-songwriter, James Mangold’s Dylan biopic wisely leans into his elusiveness, writes Sophie Monks Kaufman.
Bob Dylan is a white whale of a subject. The 83-year-old, born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, is a mercurial figure who means so much to so many. Any filmmaker who tries to provide a definitive portrait all but guarantees an orchestra of harumphing from the millions who thrill to the lightning of his lyrics.
The best of his stark, conversational verses build up a story until you are pinned to the back of your chair. In ‘Masters of War’, included on his first original album, 1963’s Freewheelin’, he sings in that distinctive nasal twang: ‘You’ve thrown the worst fear/That can ever be hurled/Fear to bring children/Into the world/For threatening my baby/Unborn and unnamed/You ain’t worth the blood/That runs in your veins.’
How to make sense of a 22-year-old who wrote among the most withering anti-war songs ever written? The answer is: don’t bother. Genius has a way of highlighting our own lack of it. In 2016, Dylan became the second songwriter after the Indian polymath poet Rabindranath Tagore – and the first singer-songwriter – to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His award was ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’.
For his new Timothée Chalamet-as-Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (adapted from Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric), director James Mangold – like Todd Haynes and Martin Scorsese before him – knows better than to try to dig deeper than the poetic expressions themselves. Rather than playing psychological detective and speculating about the link between Dylan’s experiences and output, he has kept his leading man opaque, focusing instead on the songs he wrote in the early to mid Sixties; the two women around him at the time; and on recreating live performances in full at locations as varied as Woody Guthrie’s hospital bed, the Gaslight Cafe, and the folk festivals Monterey and Newport, where Dylan’s star hit the stratosphere.
A Complete Unknown (2024)
By combining a respectful psychological distance with a reverence for all aspects of musical performance, he is aligned with his star. Timothée Chalamet told NPR’s Ailsa Chang in December: ‘My way in was the music. I love this man’s music. These are the songs of life.’ Cinema is a medium powered by the intimate access it affords audiences to characters and the actors playing them. To actively resist that, as Mangold and Chalamet do, is both a conscientious choice and an artistic one, but what is offered instead of this backstage pass?
A Complete Unknown exists somewhere between a jukebox musical and fan fiction with high production values. The final, more mystical ingredient has to do with a very famous actor playing a very famous musician. It threatens a trend by coming out in UK cinemas hot on the heels of Angelina Jolie’s Maria Callas. Maria intrigues more for what it allows Jolie to communicate about her own complicated stardom than for its blazing insights into the opera singer. There is a subtler alchemy here if we consider the trajectory of Chalamet’s stardom. His breakout role in Call Me by Your Name (2017) was as a young man so emotionally available that he spends the final five minutes of the film crying to Sufjan Stevens but now – eight years on – he holds us at a remove. Chalamet spent five years learning how to play the guitar and the harmonica, learning how to sing, walk and talk like Dylan. Why should he allow us to see behind his shades as well?
I'm Not There (2007)
Todd Haynes approached the problem of personifying Dylan in the opposite way in 2007’s I’m Not There. Rather than staking his film on one withholding performance, he has six expansive ones resulting in a wildly original, free-range tone poem. Six actors – Marcus Carl Franklin, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Cate Blanchett and Richard Gere – each play variations on a myth. They go under different names. They exist in bodies that run the gamut from an African-American child to Cate Blanchett to an outlaw in the Wild West.
And they talk, oh how they talk, mostly with a cocky glimmer of irony, using a gift for oratory to run interference on any attempt to nail down the irrelevant matter of who they are and where they came from. There is a chasm between the directness of Dylan’s lyrics and the crypticness of his public performances of himself.
Rolling Thunder Revue (2019)
Martin Scorsese has made not one, but two Dylan documentaries. The second and most recent one, Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), is a pseudo-documentary in which fictional creations share the screen with real people, and separating fact from fabulation is a fool’s game. Primarily composed of 1970s footage taken from both the Rolling Thunder Revue tour and outtakes from a 1978 film directed by Dylan himself, Scorsese’s movie runs with his subject’s lifelong penchant for trolling. Yet, as most of the footage is from the 1970s, there is a contact high from seeing young Dylan, catnip to women, and so cherubically appealing that the Chalamet casting choice seems entirely logical.
‘Life isn’t about finding yourself,’ says Dylan in the Seventies footage, shortly after a contemporary bit when he claims that he can’t remember the Revue at all, and that it happened before he was alive. ‘It isn’t about finding anything. Life is about creating yourself and creating things.’ A Complete Unknown loyally conveys a man who embodies this attitude, and if there is a hollowness at its own creative centre – a straightness in place of a swagger – it’s up to individual viewers to decide whether they can accept, as Bob Dylan himself tweeted about the film, ‘some other me’.
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