Dylan Biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’ Falls Flat

For Bruce Springsteen, it was the opening snare shot of “Like a Rolling Stone” that opened the door to his mind. He is not wrong. And he is not alone.

The iconic Bob Dylan song has and will stand the test of time. Sixty years later, it still crackles with energy and urgency – even if a sizable portion of Dylan’s audience back in 1965 wanted nothing to do with it.

A year after Dylan “plugged” at the Newport Folk Festival in July, he went on a whirlwind tour of England, playing the first half of the concert acoustically and the second half electrically. The crowd bought tickets just to boo him. They hurled insults and taunted. At a concert in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, a fan screamed “Judas!” from the audience.

“I don’t believe you,” Dylan scoffed from the stage. “You are a liar.” And then he turned to the band and said, “Play damn loud.”

The scene transported from England to Newport, rolled back from ’66 to ’65, and missing four letters, is recreated in A complete unknown. It is not an improvement.

Written by Jay Cocks and James Mangoldwho also instructs, A complete unknown adapts Elias Waldbook from 2015, Dylan goes electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the night that split the sixties and revives a thin slice of Dylan’s early days. It opens with Dylan arriving in New York City looking for his hero Woody Guthrie (Scott McNairy), hooking up with other people in Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and then meeting all the right people: Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison) and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning).

Only Russo is made up. Based on Suze Rotolo, who was Dylan’s girlfriend at the time immortalized on the 1963 album cover The Freewheelin’ Bob DylanRusso plays an aspiring artist who falls in love with the cute boy with the tousled hair and funny voice. Meanwhile, Dylan (Timothée Chalametwho sings himself) ricochets off the gravity of Seeger, Baez and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). They all love Dylan, but only Grossman and Russo realize he’s different.

A complete unknown plays like a Wikipedia article. Dylan lands a record deal with Columbia and releases a disc full of standards. It’s not going anywhere. He comes back with a disk full of originals and explodes. He drifts from Russo to Baez and back to Russo. Chalamet plays these scenes timidly, vacillating between a Dylan caricature and a typical genius frustrated that everyone wants a piece of what he’s got. Skinny as a twig and with a big pile of hair, Chalamet cuts a Dylan-like profile. But he spends too much of the film playing Dylan as an actual person and not the character that Dylan himself created.

Born long before the hyper-information age, Dylan was always a smooth guy. Where he came from, where he learned to play, what his real name was and what really happened in the hospital room with Guthrie is Dylan’s story. But six decades of archival footage, books and documentaries have pulled back the curtain on the enigmatic troubadour.

Yet he still seems inscrutable. Just watch 2019’s meta-documentary Rolling Thunder Revuewhere Dylan and the director Martin Scorsese dizzyingly play with the truth. Sharon Stone makes up a story about meeting Dylan as a young girl, while Scorsese inserts a completely fictional character from another film.

Then I’m sorry A complete unknown taking a few artistic liberties or because it doesn’t require enough? Frankly, as frustrating as it is to have the facts of the 1966 Free Trade Hall “Stone” performance smeared over the significance of the 1965 Newport concert, the blame for Unknown lies in the latter.

There is nothing remotely interior about Dylan or his music A complete unknown it comes close to Springsteen’s commentary. Nothing is as explosive as the English concert, which remains one of the most combative performances of the song ever. And nothing that opens the doors to anything.