Bob Dylan’s Not a Complete Unknown, But He’s Still Working on It
When Robert Zimmerman arrived in New York from Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1961, he began creating a public persona under the name Bob Dylan.
The new movie A Complete Unknown, which telescopes the rather eventful life of the young Zimmerman-turned-Dylan from 1961 to 1965, continues the process.
Dylan didn’t come to New York to become known as a persona. He wanted, badly, to become known for his music, a goal that worked out. This is not to say he hasn’t enjoyed creating the persona, only that once he got over the fun of spinning yarns about traveling with a carnival, the persona become a practical necessity.
For Dylan as for many successful artists before and after, the persona enables the actual person to recede far enough into the shadows to avoid some of the more debilitating consequences of success, like unrelenting scrutiny from strangers. (And writers.)
To the surprise of no one who knows anything about Dylan, he goes about this differently than your average famous person. Whereas most people who want to leave a mark shoot for a sharply focused image, Dylan wants everything except his music shrouded in London fog.
A Complete Unknown, for which Dylan worked on the script and is credited as an executive producer, gets that job done.
That doesn’t neutralize the film. On the contrary, a viewer who goes into it knowing nothing about Dylan will learn a lot.
First and most important, there’s Dylan’s musical genius. It permeates the film, both through Timothee Chalamet’s sturdy renditions of Dylan’s own songs and the interpretations by other actor/singers, most frequently the Joan Baez character. You can’t listen to his songs either about the big world (“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” “When the Ship Comes In”) or his own world (“Don’t Think Twice”), and not hear a singularly gifted writer.
Beyond that, someone unfamiliar with Dylan would see how and why he hated the baggage of fame, like being smothered by well-intended fans. The film nails how he has always been a world-class contrarian, doing and saying things almost reflexively because someone didn’t want him to. It acknowledges his problem with relationships, partly because his musical drive and success get in the way and partly because sometimes he just isn’t a nice guy. The film also makes a persuasive case for his refusal to be boxed in as only a “folksinger,” which was an incendiary debate around 1965.
All that is true and valuable.
All that has also been known, to anyone who followed Dylan even moderately, for close to 60 years. A Complete Unknown doesn’t add many brushstrokes to the canvas.
Take, f’rinstance, his relationships with Suze Rotolo (named Sylvie Russo in the movie) and Joan Baez (named Joan Baez in the movie). These relationships play a central role in A Complete Unknown, bordering at times on a soapish triangle, and yet in the end the viewer is left politely wondering what exactly really happened.
Scenes in the movie sometimes seem to reflect what happened in real life and sometimes to be invented — which isn’t necessarily a devious thing. In compacting a complicated story for cinematic purposes, sometimes a composite scene is the best way to make the point. It’s not accurate, but it’s true.
That may be happening here. Or not. When A Complete Unknown doesn’t try to tell us how Dylan felt about Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, his manager Albert Grossman or his sidemen, it may just be tacitly acknowledging those are essay questions and don’t lend themselves to simple summations. While Dylan has occasionally mused on such matters in places like his wonderful autobiographical book Chronicles, A Complete Unknown leaves it mostly to the viewer’s extrapolation. Okay, it does seem clear he really liked Bobby Neuwirth and Johnny Cash.
Musically, it’s understandable that A Complete Unknown doesn’t try to address the Eternal Dylan Question, which is how he wrote the songs he wrote in those years.
Random lyric, from “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1964): “To dance beneath the diamond sky / With one hand waving free / Silhouetted by the sea / Circled by the circus sands / With all memory and fate / Driven deep beneath the waves / Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”
How did he do that? How do you make words spin like glass beads in a kaleidoscope?
The closest A Complete Unknown comes to addressing his songwriting isn’t close at all. It’s a brief irritated aside when he impatiently tells Baez that he writes songs because if they’re going to tour, they need something to sing.
True answer. Not the whole answer.
Dylan himself, in a 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley some years back, said those songs were “magically written,” as if he were a vessel channeling something from somewhere else.
“Try to sit down and write those songs,” he added, which is the right challenge. You can’t. No one can. Let’s call “magic” as good an explanation as any. It just doesn’t disperse the fog.
It’s not hard to understand why Dylan would like to have time, and a life, away from being Dylan. In an interview years ago, he recounted how, when he went to his son Jakob’s Little League game, he had to watch from his car in the parking lot because if he sat in the stands, the evening would become about seeing Bob Dylan, not seeing a Little League baseball game. That could get old fast, even if your own drive for success was the reason it was happening.
A Complete Unknown doubtless includes both flashes of honesty and subtle diversions. If it doesn’t tell us as much as two best Dylan documentaries, D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, Chalamet never lets it get dull.
Plus there’s the music.
Just don’t expect it to burn away much of the fog.
