A Complete Unknown

Movie poster for A Complete Unknown

I was not planning on going to see A Complete Unknown, James Mangold's biopic of Bob Dylan, but Sophie wanted to treat me so I relented and saw it Sunday night.

Now, anyone who has known me for a long time has known that I spent a lot of years collecting rare and/or unreleased Dylan recordings, and before I share my thoughts on the film, I thought I'd also share some of that backstory because I think it's important to know the basis for my thoughts.

My infatuation with Dylan's music began after borrowing Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits from a friend in 1969 or so, so about two years after it had been released. I probably wasn't yet 15. By then, of course, Dylan had already become huge—"Like A Rolling Stone", "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", "Positively 4th Street", "Subterranean Homesick Blues", and even "Lay, Lady, Lay" had all been radio hits for him—and I recall well hearing those songs on AM radio—most likely WOHO in Toledo, or CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. A grade school classmate, George Liebherr, had been pretty fluent in Dylan and Arlo Guthrie as I recall, often half-singing/half-speaking their lyrics for no other reason, I guess, than that he could. But I'd not yet caught on.

In addition to those radio hits that Dylan performed, his songs performed by other artists—"Blowin' In The Wind" by Peter, Paul & Mary; "Mr. Tambourine Man", "All I Really Want to Do", and "My Back Pages" by The Byrds; and "It Ain't Me, Babe" by The Turtles—had also gotten considerable airplay, so while Dylan's music was certainly a part of my musical landscape, he was—until I borrowed that LP—just one of many artists that came into my ears on a regular basis by way of the AM airwaves, and therefore didn't take up much of my consiousness. He was not—like The Beatles—a media sensation, at least not in Toledo, Ohio.

Backing up slightly, at this time in my life, my older brother Mike was the record collector in the house, and he had Columbia Record Club membership. The records I recall that he'd bought were The Beatles' Meet The Beatles, Rubber Soul, and Revolver, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, a Dave Clark Five LP, and maybe a Righteous Brothers record or two. I was still in my Monkees phase.¹

But because The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" had reached #1 on the Billboard Charts in July and August of 1965, I heard it a LOT. At that time in my life, though, I didn't memorize many lyrics (I'm often surprised at how few songs from my younger days that I know the lyrics to), but when I heard Dylan's version of the song on Greatest Hits, I had an epiphany of sorts. I was surprised that the song had two more verses than The Byrds' version, and my impression at the time (it still is, actually) was that The Byrds left off the most important verse:  

And take me disappearing
Through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees
Out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, 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
Make me forget about today until tomorrow

Even at 14 or 15 or however old I was at the time, I was able to recognize the poetry of those words—the impressionism, the alliteration, the internal rhymes. The power of this original studio version far surpassed that of the jingly-jangly Top 40 hit by The Byrds. I still consider it one of Dylan's most personal songs.

Not long after this eye-and-ear-opening moment, I bought my first Dylan record, which regrettably—at the time, anyway—was Self-Portrait, then his most recent release. It's a double-LP collection of mostly throw-away² covers, recorded during various sessions as a matter of warming up his voice, along with a few live tracks from his recent (and rare) appearance at the Isle of Wight festival in England. It's an album I've come to appreciate more over the years, but this particular Dylan was not the creative genius I'd heard up until that point.

Fast-forwarding to after having made a few more Dylan purchases, the Concert for Bangla Desh was held in New York's Madison Square Garden in August of 1971. We happened to be in Manhattan that night visiting my mom's father and I distinctly recall the rumors reported  (and confirmed) on the local news that Dylan would be a surprise performer. Naturally, I purchased the eventual three-LP record of the event which came out barely four months later, and went to see the film of the event three months after that. The audience's response to Dylan's appearance was thunderous.³ His performance of "Mr. Tambourine Man", while lacking its third verse, had me spellbound.

Possibly, had that appearance not been so well-received, Dylan might not have decided to tour in 1974 for the first time in eight years (tickets for which I was unable to get). By this time, I had purchased all of his available records, but one night, while at a Disc Records at Toledo's Franklin Park Mall, I came across what I learned to be a "bootleg" LP of rare and unreleased recordings of his which, if memory serves, was called The Unkindest Cut. I had stumbled onto the underbelly, of sorts, of the record industry. Upon making this inadvertent discovery, and buying a few more available bootlegs via mail order, I placed an ad in Rolling Stone looking for more rare recordings, whether studio outtakes or concert recordings. I purchased a cache of tapes from a fellow in Connecticut, then made trades with people across the country and around the world. I was invested—in more ways than one—in the music and myth of Bob Dylan. And, of course, I read everything available in print about him. Despite that I've not kept up with all of the many books that have been published since the 1990s, when my trading activity waned and eventually ceased, I consider myself pretty well-acquainted with most aspects of his public life.

So, I wasn't actually looking forward to seeing A Complete Unknown because I've seen many a lame film depiction of musicians' lives; I expected departures from historical reality, but I honestly didn't expect the film would be one fictional event after another.

In a post to her Facebook page, Joan Osborne spoke to the film's many detours from historical fact, but also stated that what's ultimately important is that Dylan's music gets exposed to a new, younger generation, and I guess I support that attitude, but it didn't make watching the film any less cringe-worthy for me when so many scenes played out that I know never occurred. And yes, I get that the film isn't a documentary, and that fiction can be a tool in telling a greater truth, but many of the distortions in the film had to do with significant moments of Dylan's life and career, and there will be those who come away from the film believing that what they've seen is factual.

I could tick off so many, but the three that annoyed me the most, I suppose, were these: Timothée Chalomet's overly mumbly voice (Dylan spoke quite clearly in recordings I've heard of him from that time); the representation of Sylvie Russo (fictional name for Suze Rotolo) as a jealous girlfriend storming away from an event she didn't even attend; and the quasi-climactic scene at Newport when Dylan kicked off his new electric sound. People did not pelt the stage with cans and bottles and other trash. Also, booing was not as loud and boisterous as depicted, and it still remains unclear as to whether people booed Dylan (no doubt some did) or the poor sound delivered by an unprepared crew.

As for the positives, bravo to Chalomet for choosing to learn the guitar and to not lip synch to Dylan recordings. As Osborne said in her post, nobody does Dylan like Dylan, but Chalomet's performance was about as good as one could expect, and except for the mumbling I've already noted, he did well to recreate a lot of Dylan's mannerisms. So, I give Chalomet a 9 out of 10... maybe even a 9.5. (I think the mumbling was based more on myth than reality.)

I was also pleased with the production quality of the film, and Mangold's ability to recreate a 1960s feel. I also liked the songs that were selected for the film, and was especially pleased to hear the snippet of "I'll Keep It With Mine", one of my all-time favourites and one of those unreleased outtakes I'd first heard on a bootleg so long ago. I was happy that Phil Ochs was given a hat tip—albeit not with a name-check—with the inclusion of his song (performed by Barbaro/Baez) "There But For Fortune". It appeard to me that Chalomet/Dylan shot a glare at someone during the performance of the song, and I wondered if that was supposed to be Ochs. I wish that "House Of The Rising Sun" had not been performed by Barbaro/Baez (early in the film) because even though she probably sang the song in those days, Dylan had lifted his arrangement of the song from Dave Van Ronk (played by Joe Tippett), who I didn't even recognize in the film. I was quite pleased with Ed Norton's portrayal of Pete Seeger, although his role in Dylan's career was not as pivotal as the film made it out to be, at least not as directly as depicted, and there's no record of a practically crazed Pete Seeger at Newport in 1965. Ditto for Alan Lomax.

Elle Fanning's portrayal of Russo/Rotolo was as good as could be expected, too, considering that there's very little public knowledge about Rotolo's relationship with Dylan, beyond what little those within their circle have been willing to share over the years, or what Rotolo herself shared in her very fine memoire, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. I wish her depth and cultural influences on Dylan would have been explored more—that she brought him to a civil rights protest barely scratched the surface—instead of the rather uncritical and somewhat trite look at their crumbling relationship. I admit, though, that I was quite moved by the fictional scene in which she sees Dylan and Baez singing "The Times They Are A-Changin'" together. I'm not sure what to read into that scene, but it ties back to an earlier one in the film in which she finds a scrap of paper with a few lines of the song on it and reads it out loud to him before he snatches it from her hand:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast

Upon hearing the song, did her eyes tear up because she'd originally thought the song was written about her only to discover it was something else? Did she tear up because she was witnessing genius bubbling to the top? Was she recognizing the influences she'd had on his politics? I suppose that it's this vagueness and the possibility of interpreting it in several ways that made it powerful to me.

Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez was also quite good, particularly since she was never going to fully replicate the power of Baez's iconic soprano voice, and she did well to portray Baez's tone in her speaking scenes. I didn't like the phony argument with Dylan at the microphones about which song to sing next. I can't recall now what scene it was, but there was a moment between Baez and Dylan similar to the one with Sylvie mentioned above that moved me.

There is a scene in which Chalomet is filmed walking down the street (as I recall, in a bit of a huff) passing by many of the clubs that were the mainstay venues for the folksingers of that time: Café Wha?, The Gaslight, Gerde's Folk City, maybe a few others... I found it to be an extremely effective technique of trying to rope in the many places in Greenwich Village where Dylan and his fellow musicians would gather.

The Albert Grossman character was a bit too cartoonish for my likes, which is not so much a criticism of the actor, Dan Fogler, but the script. From all accounts, Grossman was a larger-than-life figure that didn't suffer fools, and I didn't really get that sense of him in the film at all. Also, while maybe there's documentary or anecdotal evidence of him sharing a bed with Dylan at Newport, I've never heard of it, and I don't think there's a chance in hell that he wouldn't have secured himself a private room if indeed he attended the festival. I just found that scene weird.

Now, I understand the task of trying to compress five years or so of history into a two-hour film, but I think that for all the inaccurate narratives that were created, more historically accurate narratives could have been written into the script in their stead. For example, the scene involving the angry janitor in Woody Guthrie's hospital room was totally unnecessary, playing no real significant role in the film. Was it merely to show Dylan's snipey wit? I've read that Dylan himself gave blessing to the script (in addition to requesting the Suze Rotolo name change) but that doesn't surprise me. I've long known that Dylan has had an eye on his legacy, and since the film shows him in a pretty good light, by and large, of course, he approved of it.

If you've read this far, thanks for bearing with me. I'm not—nor have I ever claimed to be—the foremost Dylan scholar. I've derived great satisfaction listening to his music and marveling at what he has done with music and words and wordplay over the course of his lifetime. His real, true story is a fascinating one. I finally got to see him a in person a couple of times on back-to-back nights in 1978 (Toledo and Dayton) and, I think two other times. I was thoroughly disappointed with the last show I saw, in November of 1990 in East Lansing, Michigan, and vowed to never see him again. I haven't. I don't think writing songs has been that important for him in a long time, and I didn't even think all that much of his Grammy-winning Time Out Of Mind. In fact, I've only listened to it once or twice. I've barely listened to any of his records since. Go figure.

So, while there are many, many aspects of the film I don't like, I'd give it a 6 or 7 out of 10, and as a film in and of itself—without the baggage of depicting a meteoric rise of someone who would become the icon he became—it was enjoyable... it had good acting, and undeniably great music. Just don't take it all that seriously as a historical document.

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¹An episode of the Monkees television show had a scene which took place on an old Cowboy Western-type set, and involved a character that resembled the television show Gunsmoke's Chester, played by Dennis Weaver. To understand the gag, however, you had to be familiar with Gunsmoke and its main character, Sheriff Matt Dillon. I can't recall the scenario exactly, but the Monkees came up to this Chester character for help and he said he'd go get Mr. Dylan (sounds like Dillon... get it?), and when they asked him if he meant the Sheriff, he said something like, "No, Bob Dylan... he can write a song about your problems."[back]

²By throwaway, I mean not intended to be released, not that it's a bad or unusable performance, although certainly that could apply in some cases.[back]

³I've long posited that George Harrison very slyly played "Here Comes The Sun" prior to introducing Dylan.[back]