Not a Complete Flop

After seeing A Complete Unknown last Thursday night I was surprised I didn’t hate the film. Granted, my expectations were bottom-rung (and unless Searchlight Pictures and director James Mangold are figuring Bob Dylan (83) will croak soon and looking for a ghoulish cash grab, there was no reason to make the flawed biopic, especially since Martin Scorsese, with Dylan’s close overseeing, covered the same ground with 2005’s superb No Direction Home) but the film went fast and I never considered doing a runner. Also, Timothee Chalamet—not a favorite actor of mine—deserves credit for immersing himself in a challenging role. I didn’t think his singing was great, far too tentative (when he’s composing an embryonic “It’s Alright, Ma,” he sounds out the words like a six-year-old learning to read), and nothing like Dylan’s I’m-the-boss confident originals; on the other hand, Monica Barbaro nails the voice of Joan Baez, if that matters. Edward Norton’s portrayal of Pete Seeger was decent—unlike Chalamet, I think Norton’s one of his generation’s finest actors—but I don’t remember Seeger being so goofy.

Maybe it’s the holiday season, maybe 1960s nostalgia is peaking for the 51^st time, but I’m dumbfounded by the near-unanimous adulation for the film from critics, Boomers and Millennials on social media (there was a not-so-under-the-radar plumping of the film on Twitter, and I assume some walking around money was doled out) for a serviceable, nothing more, nothing less, biopic. One might believe Dylan was more deserving of a thoughtful, illuminating picture, but that’s not the way the ailing film industry works today.

The Wall Street Journal’s film critic Kyle Smith wrote the most embarrassing mash note to A Complete Unknown. He begins: “The world may be divided between those who do and do not still feel a little thrill from the hearing the drum lick that launches Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ It was the starting gun on what we know think of as the ‘60s. After that June 16, 1965, recording, the culture flipped from black-and-white to color.”

I do remember the “drum lick” on the explosive song when it came out, but Smith, born in 1966, doesn’t. As always, pop sociologists give different times for when this or that decade began and ended, but I’ve never read that the 1960s started with Dylan’s most famous song. My own memory, as a pre-teen with four older brothers, was that the 1960s broadly kicked off with the Beatles performing on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9th, 1964. That’s when the culture, in Smith’s hackneyed words, “flipped from black-and-white to color.”

In a 140-minute film, it’d be impossible to cover Dylan’s 1961-65 ambitious and wholly deserved zoom to stardom (at least critically, since his own records weren’t immense sellers) and I let the distorting mish-mash of creative license of mixing up events of that period wash over me. A few mistakes and misrepresentations really bugged me, though. During one scene in 1965, the popular group Peter, Paul & Mary are denigrated by those present as essentially bubblegum trio, when it was their cover of Dylan’s early “Blowin’ in the Wind,” that was a monstrous seller and AM radio hit and introduced the young songwriter to millions of Americans.

Also, the viewer’s given the impression when Baez sings “There But For Fortune” that it’s a Dylan tune, when in fact it was by Phil Ochs, a now-forgotten singer of notable repute, and a fairly popular Dylan competitor. Ochs died in 1976, a broken (and broke) bloated alcoholic, but he was significant in the early-mid-60s. That his name isn’t even mentioned in Mangold’s film is a small disgrace, reminding me of Hyman Roth’s complaint in The Godfather Part II that Moe Greene (the real Bugsy Siegel) wasn’t even given a plaque in Las Vegas. One more: Dylan wasn’t called “Judas” at Newport ’65, but rather in Manchester on May 17^th, 1966, not long before the amphetamine-fueled star had the motorcycle “accident” that began an entirely different part of his career.

Chalamet’s okay in capturing Dylan’s inscrutable and nasty interactions with those close to him (although never the really funny Dylan, evidenced by his live Halloween concert in 1964 at NYC’s Town Hall) but the recreations of that period’s Greenwich Village were off, and look AI-created. In one scene, adjacent to a folk club there’s a storefront with a sign that just says “TRAVEL AGENCY.” The dollar-store generic era was way in the future, and in the mid-20^th century businesses had names, maybe Ruth’s Travel Agency or Travel to Paris Quicker With Marv and Eileen. I wasn’t old enough to see any of the folk pass-the-hat shows in the early1960s, but did walk around Greenwich Village for the first time in 1967, and for a 12-year-old it was a wonderland, when there were rows of book and record stores and nothing was yet called a “junkque shop.”

I’m glad I saw A Complete Unknown, if only for the company of my sons—both Dylan diehards—and the chance to bruit about the film afterwards. I’ll never watch it again, unlike the Scorsese documentary and Todd Hayne’s brilliant 2007 I’m Not There, and if, as many say, the movie will generate interest in Dylan’s most creative period (aside from Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding, released after the ’65 Newport Folk Festival), fine by me. I don’t care one way or the other. My guess is those youths who are serious about pop/rock music history have already embraced or tossed away Dylan’s body of work. I’ve read—true or not, who knows—that Dylan has enthusiastically endorsed the film, maybe ripe for nostalgia himself, but more likely thinking it’ll add to the money he can pass of to those heirs designated in his will.

—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023