A Complete Unknown (2025.4, Off-the Record, Great Music)

A Complete Unknown – Michael’s Moments

Joan Baez: You know, you’re kind of an asshole, Bob.

Bob Dylan: I guess.

That’s an exchange from the movie, but, of course, we don’t really know for sure if it actually went down just like  that.  A Complete Unknown is a biopic, not a documentary.  And that means that the filmmakers have a license to play loose with the facts.  Even though Dylan was somewhat involved in the production, the movie, like others in that genre, does not pretend to faithfully recreate the events of the film’s four-year period.  Dylan purists have panned the film severely because of all the liberties taken.  

Possibly in order to ‘protect the innocent’, it isn’t clear that the movie’s portrayal of relationships is entirely accurate.  Sylvie is  based on a real character but with a different name.  I can understand not using the real name.  But very curiously, an important woman in Dylan’s life during this time isn’t even mentioned.  Shortly after the Newport Folk Music Festival of 1965, the real Bob Dylan married Sara Lownds in November of 1965, and shortly after that, in January 1966, they had a son.  So she was around 3 months pregnant at the time the movie ends.   And it must have been a significant relationship because they stayed married for 12 years and had four children together.  So where is Dylan’s future wife and family even mentioned in this film?

Apparently, that is just one of many instances where Mangold plays a little loose with the facts, and the Dylan purists can probably make a pretty good case that much of the movie was fabricated.  So what exactly is this movie?  If it doesn’t portray events as they happened, what have we actually learned about Bob Dylan?  

The answer to that kind of question actually surfaced in an interview that Chalamet gave about his singing.  In response to an interviewer’s observation that Chalamet came close, but still did not sound exactly like Dylan, Chalamet quickly responded that of course he didn’t and he couldn’t.  What he offered was not a re-creation but an “interpretation” – not a picture of exact reality, but an artistic rendering filtered through Chalamet’s mind and body.

Perhaps that is the only way we can look at A Complete Unknown – it is not just Bob Dylan’s story, it is Dylan’s story absorbed and transformed by the experiences and characters of the filmmakers (Mangold and Chalamet, among many others).  We need to take all biopics as works of fiction.  They may occasionally strike chords in the real world, but they must stand on their own as studies in character and filtered interpretations, not mirrors, of real lives.  

A Complete Unknown – Story and Tone:

The story is an interesting variation on your typical musician story, which usually traces the artist’s rise to fame, engagement with potential or real disaster, and the coming out of the challenge even better, or a lot worse, than before.  Mangold makes no attempt to trace out Bob Dylan’s entire career but instead focuses on a brief and relatively undocumented period in Dylan’s life, starting from the time he arrives in New York City in 1961 to just four years later when he shocks the music world at the Newport Folk Music Festival of 1965.  By taking a slice-of-life perspective, Mangold and Cocks avoid some of the silliness of many music biopics as they try to cram a lifetime into a two-hour movie.  We don’t explore what happened before (except very tangentially) nor talk about Dylan’s prolific career forward.  

But those four years were critical in forming the man and the music of Bob Dylan.  The first key scene is when Dylan, barely 20, having just hitchhiked to New York City, visits his idol Woody Guthrie, who is in a New Jersey hospital.  Coincidentally, he also encounters folk music great Pete Seeger.  (I won’t divulge anything more about this encounter because the scene actually defines how the movie’s structure and use of Dylan’s lyrics is going to play out in the rest of the movie.)  From there, we follow him as he plays gigs in New York and begins to record covers of songs by other folk musicians.  Along the way, he encounters a cute, vivacious Sylvie Russo, and, as happened in those days, he moves in with her.  But Joan Baez is also in New York, and she happens to offer something to Bob that Sylvie can’t.  (There is also a third woman in these years, Becka, so it seems clear that Dylan had little problem, at least initially, with the ladies.)

As his music becomes better known and he cuts more records, his reputation expands.  Soon he is communicating with the legendary Johnny Cash, who provides consistent and reinforcing motivation.  (That communication, remember this is the early 60s, was by letter sent through postal mail— something that seems totally archaic these days, but makes the wording more precious.)  So, in this short time period, the budding musical genius is being mentored by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Johnny Cash, and he is sleeping with Joan Baez— what additional ingredients can you add to this musical stew?

Curiously, Mangold doesn’t exactly paint Dylan as a sympathetic character.  He can, at times, be perfectly charming with the women in his life.  But he can also be cruelly dismissive.  He disses Sylvie’s paintings and, on two occasions, he finds Baez’s music just “pretty”.  Two beautiful and talented women, and he seems intent on sabotaging his relationship with them.  Why would he do that?

Possibly because, while I’m sure he enjoyed relationships as they were unfolding, ultimately he loved most his own musical creativity.  By focusing on Dylan’s music and using his own lyrics to tell much of the story, Mangold gets as personal as one possibly can with A Complete Unknown.  And the tone is set not so much as reverence but as a candid picture of a complicated man.

Related Movies:  Logan; Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny; Ford v Ferrari (Direction); Logan; Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Screenplay)

A Complete Unknown – Storytellers

Chalamet, Barbaro, and Norton all received Oscar nominations for their performances in A Complete Unknown. Those three, as well as Boyd Holbrook (Johnny Cash), also did their own singing in this movie – one of the reasons it works so well.

Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) – Bob Dylan was never one of my musical favorites, but I did appreciate how unique his voice was, with a raspy emphasis on adenoids.  Chalamet has noted in interviews that he isn’t trying to become Dylan but rather is offering his own interpretation of the man and his music.  Chalamet, apparently, set the tone for this movie by insisting that he would sing as Dylan live, not dubbed in later, and, by the look and sound of A Complete Unknown, the entire cast rose to and met the challenge.

Chalamet also interprets Dylan in surprising ways that give us at least some insight into this musician’s prickly character and impressive creativity.  As he looks out over his sunglasses, you can feel the arrogance flow – the man does not take prisoners.  With his lanky frame, we willingly follow him walking down the street.  When his pride speaks hurtful things to, especially, the women in his life, we sense that he doesn’t want connection but has his own special and consuming sense of self.

Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) – Even Joan Baez has said that her relationship with Dylan was “challenging”.  The movie chronicles their meeting, early romance, and a tour they did together.  It was on their May 1965 United Kingdom joint tour that she broke up with Dylan, and they didn’t speak to each other for ten years.  Baez has said that “Dylan broke her heart”.  Monica Barbaro is known to me only for her role in Top Gun: Maverick, where she played Phoenix, a fighter pilot.  Here she fleshes out the enigmatic Baez character with sensitivity and intelligence.  Although Barbaro doesn’t have quite the vibrato that Baez has, she interprets Baez’s music as if she wrote it.  She was impressively convincing and fun to watch.

Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) – Pete Seeger is the known folk singer who takes a liking to Dylan and finds his music to be a new sound in the folk world. Although they meet when Dylan visits his idol, Woody Guthrie, in a hospital, it is Seeger who serves as a mentor to Dylan’s budding brilliance.  Norton received his fifth Oscar nomination, for supporting actor, for his commanding performance.  We even learn that Norton can sing as he leads the audience in “Owimoweh”.  Reportedly, Norton is the one who contacted the real Joan Baez  and was told she would talk to Monica Barbaro.

Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) – Sylvie is Dylan’s grounded girlfriend in the real world.  He meets her shortly after arriving in Greenwich Village, and she is a strong and willing partner, at least initially.  Sylvie is based on a real-life girlfriend of Dylan’s, although her name has been changed.  She plays an important part late in the film when Dylan is forced to make some important decisions and finds maybe he can’t have everything.

Related Movies: Call Me by Your Name; Dune: Part One/Two; Don’t Look Up; The French Dispatch; Little Women; Lady Bird (Chalamet); Glass Onion; The French Dispatch; Isle of Dogs (Norton); Top Gun: Maverick (Barbaro); Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Fanning)

A Complete Unknown – Cinematic Arts

As with any really good music biopic, there are a lot of scenes involving actual performances. Filming those sequences has many standard elements to it.  You, of course, have to capture closeups of the musician singing, and then pan out and get shots of the audience reaction.  And all of that has to be coordinated with the content of the songs themselves.  Bohemian Rhapsody is a recent example that is also done very well, although the cinematographers are different.  But, as in the case of this film, the performances only occupy about half of the movie, with the other half being taken up by life events.  So, cinematographers have to juggle between two different environments.  Papamichael (the cinematographer) had a similar challenge in Ford v Ferrari, where he had to change between the intensity of the racing events (the performance) and the off-track experience of the characters.

It is the editor’s job to tie those two different worlds together.  Andrew Buckland did it and won an Oscar for his work in Ford V Ferrari.  Although the two worlds could hardly be any different, the editing challenges are, it seems to me, the same – how to switch between performance/racing and real life and maintain the continuity of the total life story.  Often, and especially true in A Complete Unknown, the effect is achieved by continuing the sounds while the scene moves into a different setting.  However it’s done, the work here was very good – the movie never felt like it was lagging.

Related Movies:  Ford v Ferrari; Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny; The Creator (Film Editing); Trial of the Chicago 7; Ford v Ferrari; Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Cinematography)

A Complete Unknown – World Building

It is with no small amount of humility that I must face the fact that some decades in my lifetime are now considered settings for movie “period pieces”.  Such is the case with A Complete Unknown.  The movie is set in a rather precisely defined four years from 1961 to 1965 in, mostly, Greenwich Village, New York.  That particular time and place are of course where many artistic personalities began their creative careers.  Mangold and his world builders paid loving attention to creating the world of Greenwich Village through well-defined streetscapes, vintage (oh, that hurts) cars, and the stark absence of modern device technology – vinyl LPs, not streaming services.  Even Dylan’s desk is cluttered with all kinds of paper items, not devices, and the TV is a small black-and-white tube model. There is an important exchange between Johnny Cash and Dylan that channels through paper letters and the U.S. mail – heavens! And there is also a short scene somewhere in Jersey, I think, where Dylan spends a night at Pete Seeger’s home, which, befitting a folk hero, is off-grid with well water and a composting toilet.  How authentic can you get?

Costume designer Arianne Phillips outfits everyone in period-perfect outfits, largely centered on Levi jeans.  (Reportedly, Levi actually re-created a particular style from the period for Chalamet.)  Phillips also did great jobs on the women’s outfits, dressing them in garb that wasn’t overly feminine, but also not yet off the wall – like the late sixties and seventies.  We can see why a nomination was appropriate.

We can also see a similar period focus on hairstyling.  The women, generally, wore their hair straight and long, the men, tousled and somewhat long.  (The really long hair came later.)

The overall effect, even if it isn’t really all that difficult – because it wasn’t all that long ago – is creating a credible world that Bob Dylan could have actually lived in.  Good work.

Related Movies: Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (Costumes); Ford v Ferrari; Logan (Production Design); West Side Story (Makeup&Hairstyling)

A Complete Unknown – Sound & Music

On my second viewing, I came to understand how much A Complete Unknown relies on Dylan’s music to tell the story.  The songs, selected from Dylan’s work during the time period, reflect the dynamics of Dylan’s storyline.  Dylan is more than a decade older than I am, so I was barely listening to music in the early sixties and was probably more in tune with my parents’ Doris Day and big band jazz than I was Dylan-style folk music.  But listening to the songs in the context of this movie is enlightening and very rewarding.  We see how the key events of the early sixties (Cuban missile crisis, JFK and MLK assassinations, and the rise of the civil rights movement) resonate through Dylan’s mind and come back out as lyrical poetry set to harmonious music and told with an raspy, adenoidal voice.  The music and the near-perfectly mixed sonic balance used to deliver it are, perhaps, the strongest reasons to see this movie. “  Blowin’ in the Wind”; “ The Times Are Now a Changin’”; “ Mr. Tambourine Man,” and even “ It Ain’t Me, Babe” (sung with Joan Baez) take on so much more meaning when you hear how they fit so easily in this movie.

Related Movies:  Bohemian Rhapsody; Ford v Ferrari; West Side Story; Joker; No Time to Die; Killers of the Flower Moon; The Fabelmans; tick, tick…BOOM!; The Irishman, The Greatest Showman; Logan; Indiana Jones and Dial of Destiny; Nosferatu (Sound)

A Complete Unknown – What Others Think