The Current Cinema - Rod Bishop's memories of Bob Dylan triggered - A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (James Mangold, USA, 2024)

I never expected to see this Beginner’s Guide to Dylan, let alone write about such a film or ever listen to these songs through a state-of-the-art cinema sound system. 

Dylan’s four years in A Complete Unknown, 1961 to 1965, were this writer’s formative teenage years: 13 to 17-years-old. The first Dylan songs I ever heard were in a suburban Melbourne pop-up folk club, sung by a visiting American folk singer who - like Pete Seeger - spoke of Dylan in breathless, near-religious terms. My friend and I sat in embarrassed awe, in a circle around the singer. Angst-ridden, hormone-driven by puberty, we stared into our cups of black coffee, hoping no-one would suspect our ages.

These tumultuous four years covered Kennedy’s assassination, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, civil rights in the USA, right-wing politics in Australia - particularly the DLP - and my suburban parents whose lives were governed by a pathological cultural conservatism and by child rearing practices consisting solely of treating their children as “units to be controlled”. 

The political events ticked off in A Complete Unknown, were the staple material of the “finger-pointing” folk singers we heard at the time. By contrast Bob Dylan’s songs - “finger-pointing” or otherwise - were delivered with such an intense, poetic ferocity, the effect was revelatory, particularly on young teenagers. He was seriously charismatic and prolific beyond anybody’s reasonable expectation. The songs were not only significantly divergent from each other, but also showed a rapidly developing maturation. They spoke to us on a whole other level. His songs and his trajectory through these four years, like the political events swirling around in our daily soup, became life-defining for us.

Watching A Complete Unknown was an alternating experience of revisiting my teenage years while trying to fact-check what appeared on screen. Timothée Chalamet covers most of it – voice, dress, looks, body language. He can’t quite nail Dylans’s intensity and facial expressions. For this, check out Dylan’s Newport performances in Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror. But when Chalamet soars, like he does with Dylan’s premiere performance of The Times They Are a-Changin’ at Newport or Masters of War in a Greenwich Village club, it feels almost like the real thing. Only disappointment was the closing Newport song It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, Dylan’s heartfelt goodbye to the folk scene forever. See The Other Side of the Mirror for this. Watching all his performances recorded by Murray Lerner from Newport 1963-1965 you wonder if you’ve ever heard Dylan sing any better live. 

Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Timothée Chalamet  as Bob Dylan

Ed Norton gives a decent account of Pete Seeger and is also in good voice. If his performance feels one-note, then maybe that was just the way Seeger wanted to present himself publicly. Monica Barbaro also comes very close to reproducing Baez’s voice as does Boyd Holbrook with Johnny Cash’s pipes.

If you took all the songs out of A Complete Unknown, I’m not sure what you’d be left with. The romantic triangle of Dylan, Baez and Russo would be even more sketchy and limited than it is, and the machinations between Grossman, Lomax and the Newport Folk committee would appear even more slapstick.

Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo

Mangold with co-writer Jay Cocks worked with Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!and along the way there’s considerable time fudging; some completely invented characters such as bluesman Jesse Moffette and a black Brit ‘companion’ of Dylan’s called Becka; Phil Ochs is missing entirely – a serious omission; Bob Neuwirth is given far more screentime than his appearances in Wald’s book; only one of Peter, Paul and Mary appears and then in an organizational role, despite this highly successful group’s work with many Dylan songs. The New Yorker once called them “two beards and a doll”. There’s no mention of The Byrds at all, a group who had a huge hit with an electric version of Mr Tambourine Man and electric versions of other Dylan songs. And, apart from the alcohol, there no drugs. Ridiculous.

I remember three things from the Melbourne concert in April 1966. A third of the audience walked out during the electric set. The acoustic set contained a memorable 11-minute version of Visions of Johanna, sung so slowly I thought Dylan might fall asleep from some sort of opioid consumption. And somewhere in that audience that fateful night was my future life partner. We hadn’t met and didn’t meet for another five years. We’ve been together now for 55 years.