Bob Dylan has long been elusive when it comes to engaging with his own legacy. He hasn’t visited the Bob Dylan Center, which opened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2022, and famously skipped the 2016 Nobel Prize ceremony honoring his lyrical achievements. So when he posted on X in early December, praising Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of him in the new biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” it was a big surprise to fans.
“Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me,” Dylan wrote.
This rare public acknowledgment from Dylan added a layer of intrigue to the film’s considerable buzz. The two-hour-and-21-minute film is a loose adaptation of Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, “Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.” It offers a compelling retelling of the events leading up to Dylan’s controversial electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Set to be released on Christmas Day, the film joins the dozen or so others that explore Dylan’s life and legacy, but offers the first traditional biopic. Mercifully, unlike many other biopics, the film doesn’t attempt to capture Dylan’s entire lifetime, instead focusing only on the four-year period between 1961 and 1964.
I’m somewhat of a Dylan superfan. My dad listened to Dylan growing up, and I was raised on his music. As an adult, his lyrics about love, loss and anger resonate with me like no other artist’s. At 29, I’m not necessarily part of his typical demographic, but Dylan has been my top artist on Spotify for four of the past five years.
Many people deeply resonate with Dylan: his lyrics, his voice, his personality. But there’s something about Dylan’s presence and aloof charisma that is difficult to replicate. Chalamet worked intensely to master this aura. He sings live and plays guitar throughout the film, and was said to have been practicing during filming for “Dune: Part 2.” His performance is already predicted to earn him a nomination for Best Actor at next year’s Academy Awards. If he wins, he’d be the youngest to win that category in history — he turns 29 days after the film’s release.
At times, I felt that Chalamet’s personality overshadowed Dylan’s. Sometimes, it was akin to watching an impersonation or impression of Dylan, rather than seeing Chalamet as Dylan. This wasn’t necessarily bad acting on Chalamet’s part; rather, I was distracted by Chalamet’s charisma and fame. It felt, at times, that he struggled to dim his own power while channeling Dylan’s aloofness.
Throughout the film, Dylan, as is wont to be, comes off as an ambiguous, brooding shell of a person. He speaks little, occasionally revealing his personality through snide humor and sharp remarks. In this way, the film stays true to Dylan: it leaves room for viewers to draw their own conclusions. Making Dylan more accessible than he truly was would arguably be a disservice to his mystique. On the other hand, embracing the fact that Mangold is “unknowable” left me sometimes feeling as if the filmmakers actually didn’t know much about Dylan.
What Dylan doesn’t say is instead revealed through his music, which proliferates the film with strong performances from Chalamet, especially of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Dylan’s personality is also revealed through the actions and reactions of those around him. With excellent performances by Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (in real life, Suze Rotolo), Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, the film brings Dylan’s story to life by showing how his friends and lovers attempt — yet fail — to decode him.
His first love, Russo (whose name was changed at the request of Dylan, to protect her privacy), and his former lover, the “Queen of Folk” Joan Baez, attempt to get to the bottom of Dylan. They do not succeed. At one point Baez says “you’re kind of an asshole, Bob.”
Director James Mangold, who made the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line” nearly 20 years ago, apparently couldn’t resist weaving Cash into the story, too. Cash and Dylan’s mutual admiration plays a significant role in the film. We see their correspondence through letters, and Cash encourages Dylan to ignore the detractors. He appears even in moments where he wasn’t actually present, such as the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
The film takes quite a few creative liberties with historical events like this. A Rolling Stone article pointed out at least 27 exaggerations or changes from the historical record. From an imagined appearance of Dylan on Pete Seeger’s TV show to changes in who managed Dylan or produced his albums, many of these adjustments make sense. Dylan’s life, like anyone’s, doesn’t progress in a neat, orderly fashion. Biopics must condense timelines to provide a coherent narrative. They must simplify events to highlight the most emotionally poignant parts of the protagonist’s life.
Dylan himself might like this kind of fictionalization. After all, as he says in the 2000 song, “Things Have Changed”: “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.” He has consistently made up stories about his background since the beginning of his career. He told reporters early on that he grew up impoverished and joined the carnival, when in reality, he had a somewhat typical middle class background. In 2019, Martin Scorsese and Dylan made the film “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese,” which is a pseudo-documentary about Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue concert tour that mixes fact and fiction. In interviews throughout the film, Dylan refers to fictional characters as if they are real.
That said, I’m not like Dylan in this regard. I’m too much of an enthusiast to overlook one particular historical inaccuracy: The closing scene of the movie blends two iconic Dylan moments — the Newport Folk Festival “going electric” controversy and the infamous yell of “Judas!” from an audience member, reprimanding Dylan for playing an electric set. In reality, the “Judas!” yell occurred in the UK, at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1966. However, the film reimagines these incidents as one climactic moment at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
The real footage of this moment ends the documentary “No Direction Home.” Dylan replies to the heckler, stating “I don’t believe you,” then pausing to say, “You’re a liar.” He turns to his band and tells them to “Play it fucking loud!” before they launch into an awesomely vitriolic rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone.”
In “A Complete Unknown,” the F-word is absent. It seems small, but removing this one word completely diluted the power and outrage that comes from Dylan at this moment. Considering the film is already rated R for language, I don’t understand why the filmmakers left this out. While Chalamet’s performance in this closing scene is inarguably strong, I found myself wishing that I could just watch Dylan himself play.
For those who are already fans, “A Complete Unknown” won’t share much new information. However, for viewers who know little about Dylan, “A Complete Unknown” offers a compelling introduction to the singer and the folk scene of the early 1960s. Even those who claim that Dylan’s voice is “bad” and they “don’t get him” will be charmed by Dylan’s aloofness, his lyrics, his tangled love affairs, his constant cigarette smoking and the way he rolls out of sleep directly to his guitar. Audiences will walk away seeing both Dylan and Chalamet as singular, once-in-a-generation talents.
While the film doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to understanding Dylan himself, it provides a fresh interpretation of his life. Maybe that’s the point: It’s another chance to reimagine Dylan and shape our understanding of him.