A Complete Unknown says little about Jewish star – The Forward

The Bob Dylan world is buzzing with anticipation, bated breath, and perhaps some excitement upon the release earlier this week of the first official “teaser trailer” for the upcoming Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold (Walk the Line, Ford v. Ferrari) and starring Timothée Chalamet (Dune, Call Me By Your Name) as the young Dylan. Filming only just ended earlier this month; the movie is expected to get a theatrical release toward the end of this year or early in 2025.

The biopic is not a complete life story, but rather hones in on Dylan’s early years, from his arrival in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1961 through his famous — or infamous, depending upon your point of view — appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. There, he performed with a plugged-in rock band for the very first time, shocking the audience, his fans, and the world at large, which until that moment had considered Dylan an acoustic-folk artist. 

While the release of the short, two-minute trailer does not reveal much about the tone of the film, it certainly succeeds in “teasing” viewers with suggestions about how it intends to tell Dylan’s story. It apparently recounts Dylan’s journey from a complete unknown Midwesterner, newly arrived in the Village, to worldwide fame as “the voice of a generation” who married a sophisticated poetic approach to songwriting with a social and political consciousness in songs that made their way to the top of the pop charts, including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Short clips in the trailer include several scenes featuring actor Edward Norton playing Pete Seeger. Then it cuts to a scene featuring Chalamet/Dylan onstage, shot from the rear for maximum dramatic effect, with a spotlight casting a glow upon the actor, seen mostly in silhouette. Chalamet, who does his own singing in the movie, is performing “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” in a pretty convincing imitation of Dylan. 

Short, out-of-sequence shots of Dylan find him walking the streets of Greenwich Village carrying his guitar, followed by scenes capturing the budding romance between Dylan and Suze Rotolo, here given the name Sylvie Russo and played by Ellie Fanning, with no attempt made to make the ginger-haired Fanning look like the real-life, brunette Rotolo. Cut to scenes of Dylan watching a young Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro), who was already famous as “the Queen of Folk,” and the two of them stealing kisses backstage. Soon, Dylan joins Baez onstage as a special guest, the two playing out their own incipient romance for all the world to see, a teary-eyed Fanning, now just another member of the audience.

The trailer raises more questions than it answers. How much of the narrative is going to focus on Dylan’s relationship with the Suze Rotolo character and Joan Baez at the expense of portraying Dylan’s creative development? These kinds of biographical movies often forefront the romantic dramas at the expense of exploring the inner workings of the main character. (See Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro.) The trailer also provides no clue as to the relative wit of the movie dialogue. 

Perhaps most importantly, how will the movie (and Chalamet) portray Dylan himself? Will it cast its hero as a divinely inspired prophet, or will it emphasize his blind ambition and his human foibles? Given how little we really know about Dylan the man — in spite of his being the subject of several hundred books and dozens of  movies — how would one even go about making such decisions?

One newly revealed clue is that Bob Dylan is listed as an executive producer of the film, and in a recent interview in Rolling Stone, director Mangold says he was in frequent touch with the Nobel Prize-winner. If that is the case, how much pressure will Dylan exert on the way he is portrayed in the final cut? And does it really matter?

In the world of ardent Dylan fans and so-called Dylanologists, there has always been great skepticism about this film, dating back four years to the earliest reports of its production. This skepticism ranged from grumbling about the suitability of Chalamet for the role to grumbling about Mangold’s track record as a maker of biopics. While his Johnny Cash film, Walk the Line, was much lauded, the film’s emphasis was not on Cash the musician, but instead on Cash’s personal struggles. 

There is also the question of why. Why even make this movie? There is no dearth of Dylan on film, especially in documentaries covering the same era, including D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back and Murray Lerner’s Festival, which includes footage of Dylan’s notorious performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan turned the camera on himself several times throughout his career, in films including Eat the Document, Renaldo and Clara, and Masked and Anonymous. 

The question remains, how can one capture the essence of Bob Dylan in a conventional Hollywood drama? Dylan has always been so elusive and enigmatic that such an effort seems bound to fail. The only successful attempt at portraying Dylan in all his multitudes was Todd Haynes’s 2007 film, I’m Not There, in which six different actors portrayed Dylan — most memorably Cate Blanchett, who portrayed the 1965/1966-era Dylan. The movie’s non-linear narrative and its shifting points of view echoed some of Dylan’s own narrative strategies in song. Also, the film was co-written by Haynes and filmmaker Oren Moverman, and between the two they seem to have watched every frame of every Dylan appearance and read every interview Dylan ever gave; that authenticity is baked into the film. 

Based on a two-minute trailer of a film that hasn’t even yet been completed, it is too soon to render judgment on the effort. The trailer certainly has sparked curiosity among many and helped prime the general public for what will likely be a very popular movie when it is released. Chalamet and Fanning are pretty good bets for Oscar nominations; that’s just the way Hollywood works. 

As for shining a light on Bob Dylan, we can expect a slew of stories about his early years to accompany the release of the film. And we can only hope that we don’t leave movie theaters muttering underneath our breath, like Dylan in his song “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” that “nothing is revealed.”