(courtesy IMP Awards)
Plunging into a biopic of someone you know about but who isn’t someone you know well, can be an interesting, and sometimes illuminating, exercise.
By sheer dint of their celebrity and ubiquity, you will have some surface knowledge about them floating around your knowledge-burgeoning mind, but beyond that, any additional insight is gravy, with a good biopic being an entry point, with some creative license exercised of course, to a revelation of sorts about who this person actually is (or at least whom Hollywood wants you to think he is).
A Complete Unknown, based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, well and truly fills any void you might have in your awareness of Bob Dylan, generally regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time and a giant of twentieth and early twenty-first century music.
Upfront it should be declared that this reviewer has not, and is unlike to ever be, a massive Bob Dylan fan, but the fascinating thing about A Complete Unknown is that you don’t have to be obsessed with the man or the artist in any sizeable way to find this masterfully realised biopic utterly compelling.
It begins in a small but important way when Robert Allen Zimmerman, legally known as Robert Dylan but Bob to his fans, arrives in New York City from Minnesota in 1961, an aspiring folk musician who has fallen in love with the music of Woody Guthrie (Scott McNairy), and hearing that he’s fallen gravely ill, decides to visit him in hospital.
There he also meets Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), a close friend of Guthrie’s and a major member of the New York folk scene and co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival, who introduces a clearly super talented Dylan, who sings like a dream and whose songs are luscious, emotive poetry set to music, to a who’s who of the industry in the city.
It doesn’t matter who hears this man, who can channel musings on societal injustice, personal heartbreak and a slew of other accessibly addressed subjects into arresting beautiful but meaning songs, from Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) to Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) and Dylan’s eventual manager (until 1970), Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler); to a person they are enraptured by his inability to create near flawless works of thoughtful art in short, and sometimes not so short, songs.
He is an undeniable talent, but he is also someone whose capacity for pushing creative boundaries and not staying artistically still, means that he will inevitably butt heads with some of the very people who champion and adore him.
And so he does, with A Complete Unknown taking us from his small but pivotal beginnings in 1961 through to his controversial appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where he dispensed with the traditional acoustic folk sound and did a set of electric-influenced songs from his groundbreaking album, Highway 61 Revisited, generally regarded as one of the greatest song collections of all time.
This moment in time which ends the film is when Dylan goes from universally hailed folk darling to someone, depending on your perspective, who is the beating heart of future folk or who will damn this musical artform to trashed-up irrelevance.
Part of the reason that the gatekeepers of folk, like Dylan’s close friend, Pete Seeger his fellow Newport Folk Festival, find Dylan’s new direction alarming, is that folk music has become and will continue to be the sound of a host of movements such as the fight for civil rights and is too important to be sullied.
But it’s also of course the age-old clash between the established order and the avant garde, a pattern that has been repeated over and over and which is once played out in a decade where constant change, and often of the most disruptive kind, was a fact of life.
Complicating things in A Complete Unknown is that Dylan is, in the words of Joan Baez, “a bit of an arsehole”, a creative narcissist who is undeniably musically brilliant but who treats those close to him like onetime girlfriend Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning), based, it is conjectured, on real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, close creative partner and occasional lover Baez and even Seeger, who is the reason that Dylan gets his big break, at disposable items to be used at his convenience and dropped when they are no longer of immediate use.
The willingness of A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold to a flawlessly paced and realised screenplay by Mangold and Jay Cocks, to be honest about Dylan’s flawed humanity is a revelation, given that many biopics are more apt to place their subject on a pedestal than explore them warts and all.
The result is an vibrantly illuminating film that doesn’t bite off more, biography-wise, than it can chew and which in keeping the four years at the start of Dylan’s 60 year-plus career, perfectly encapsulates who Dylan is as a man and an artist.
Creative license no doubt has been taken, something that a casual glance at the artist’s Wikipedia page will make manifestly clear, but by and large, A Complete Unknown feels authentic and honest to a degree you rarely find in biopics.
Losing yourself in the film is easy, so completely and fully does A Complete Unknown recreate the ’60s, Dylan’s career and life and there is that delicious sense throughout that you are witnessing something quite extraordinary and epochal.
A Complete Unknown is one of the best biopics to come down the pike in quite some time, a measured film which knows just how much of its subject life to cover, and within that period what the salient issues are and what will ultimately matter to audiences who may know of the man and his work, but not always know them intimately, and which brings them to life with vivacity, thoughtfulness and an emotional honesty that you rarely get in films of this kind.