REVIEWED: Bob Dylan Gets the Hollywood Treatment in A Complete Unknown

“I’m just thankful and grateful to be seeing the real you at last,” sings Dylan on 1985’s Empire Burlesque, and that’s cute because there’s not enough gratitude in the world. And you know what? I’m grateful to be born within the same lifespan of Bob Dylan. What are the chances? Sure, the baby boomers may get bragging rights about rubbing shoulders with the restless troubadour at the Roundhouse in ’65, but us Gen X and Y children got to listen to Dylan as babies and children – Tambourine Man was our lullaby, Subterranean Homesick Blues was our fever dream, our paranoid anthem, a frantic dispatch from a world teetering on the edge of chaos. Plus, Allen Ginsberg is in the music video. While much of Dylan’s palette was colored largely by the American folk revival there were enough splashes of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues and Ginsberg’s Howl to add a disordered streak of melancholy to the canvas.

Much of the criticism for A Complete Unknown from traditional media outlets comes from those who want to know “more about the man” and less about the myth. Personally, I couldn’t give a fiddler’s elbow about understanding the real man. I’ve been exploring the murky depths of Dylan’s soul since Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues and can frankly take no more. Truth be told, I didn’t want to see the real man. Why? Because I’d already seen him perform at Brixton Academy. Never get too close to your heroes. Trust me. I wanted a film that transformed the audience to a post-beat Greenwich Village café, a picture that brought to life the record sleeve of Bringing It All Back Home. I needed to see a writer in a messy room smoking cigarettes and scribbling in the middle of the night, because, ladies and gentlemen, that is the life of a songwriter. I wanted Johnny Cash to be a caricature of himself, I wanted Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman to be fat and kinda, like, gross, man. Filmmakers can be authentic to the legend without being authentic to the time and real characters – sell us the dream because the fantasy is what we’re buying. Directed by James Mangold, based on a book by Elijah Wald, the movie takes place over an eventful four years, culminating with him shocking the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by going electric.

And then come the cries of Judas. Now, as every schoolboy knows, the real cries of Judas occurred in England, a year later, but this fact takes nothing away from the film. Bob, the artist as a young man, played brilliantly by Timothée Chalamet, soon finds his Chelsea boots on the ground in New York’s bustling folk scene, after meeting Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton, at the hospital bedside of Bob’s hero Woody Guthrie. Success in the music business only happens fast in Hollywood adaptations. I was expecting that “failed first gig” moment that has become a trope of rock biopics over the years, but here it didn’t happen (although in real life, it most certainly did – the one time I saw Dylan perform). Romance is a bore, man. It’s a drag when you’re writing at the highest level of your life, and the kids are coming at you in droves. Worn underwear sent through the mail. Lipstick and limousines. Bob and I both know all this, but the filmmakers here had to shoehorn in a tragic love triangle between Dylan, Sylvie, and Joan to keep the romantics appeased. Personally, I’d love to know more about Dylan’s preference on tunings than his weakness for women, but that’s just because I’m a psychopath with a heart made out of a rolling stone.

The whole movie screeches to a halt at the aforementioned folk festival and electric rock and roll is born or reborn, or reinvented or whatever. Dylan goes electric, the world goes technicolor. The future is now – the future is Hollywood. Corporate, baby. But who really cares? Propaganda, all is phony.