When You Ain't Got Nothing

On Bob Dylan and 'A Complete Unknown'

Bob Dylan performs at The Bitter End folk club in Greenwich Village, 1961, Photograph, Sigmund Goode/Michael Ochs Archive via Getty Images

Hello and welcome to movie week at The Metropolitan Review! With Oscar season upon us, we are going to be bringing you a spate of bold and excellent reviews of films that came out in the last year, a few of which are in awards contention. Today, the film critic Elroy Rosenberg, one of our favorites, shares his views on the Bob Dylan biopic that we couldn’t stop talking about. Rosenberg, in only the way he can, casts a skeptical eye at what Hollywood has done to an American prophet. If you at all like the work we’re doing at The Metropolitan Review, please pledge $50 today or $5 for the month. Every pledge guarantees the future of what is fast becoming one of the most talked about literary publications in this fine nation.

-The Editors

“Someone’s got it in for me
They’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out quick
But when they will I can only guess”

-Bob Dylan, “Idiot Wind”

Bob Dylan isn’t dead, but he may as well be. With a slate of books, think-pieces, and, now, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, we’ve condemned the man born Robert Zimmerman to a fate usually reserved for those already playing their great gig in the sky: becoming fodder for a few Golden Globes. It would be heartrending if it weren’t so absurd. The insanity of it all was not lost on a group of young cinephiles attending the Angelika in late October who, during the previews, caught their first big-screen glimpse of Timothée Chalamet’s mannered impersonation, and began laughing.

How could they help it? Their giggling was merely an honest response to a preposterous reality. Whichever button-up at the Walt Disney Corporation thought it would be a good idea to make a Christmas Day studio biopic out of Bob Dylan – one of the 20^th century’s most capricious, uncorporatized and disinclining cultural celebrities – should get the Hollywood equivalent of the Silver Star for sheer deviancy. One can only speculate at the girth of the money sack they dropped at Dylan’s doorstep to get his “approval” for the film. Not that that guy who wrote “Idiot Wind” feels much autobiographical propriety… “I been double-crossed now / For the very last time and now I'm finally free … ”

If it’s doubtful that Dylan ever wanted the responsibility of telling his own story, A Complete Unknown is the latest, sternest, and most punishingly expensive sign not merely that his story no longer belongs to him but that it can never belong to him ever again. So it is that Dylan’s six-decade career, struck through by a sheepish irreverence, a penchant for stylistic reinvention, and a slippery kind of authenticity, has culminated in a studio film that stars a talented impersonator, telegraphs its every emotional plot point, and looks like network TV. No handheld shots, no off-kilter cuts or sounds, no obscure lighting, and certainly no random dramatic incursions. All novelty is sacrificed at the altar of popular taste, a taste that hardly befits the subject, but that we’re given no option but to gulp down.

Being closer in spirit to fan fiction than to biography, A Complete Unknown can only genuflect to the inevitability of Dylan’s talent, and so must we. Mangold’s Dylan is a stock movie genius, as blandly and inexplicably “brilliant” as Sherlock Holmes or Rain Man. This Bob Dylan wakes up, briskly lights a cigarette, makes a quippy little observation about the war, and then starts writing “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Access to his genius remains unfettered by circumstance; it is the easiest thing in the world. When, in the first light of a post-coital morning, Joan Baez overhears Dylan strumming his newly-composed “Blowin’ in the Wind,” she responds with a sopping set of fuck-me eyes. The audience, it seems, is supposed to as well. Yet despite the best of what Chalamet can muster – and boy does he muster – the poignancy of Dylan’s iconic compositions founders against the movie’s tepid presentation of how they came to be.

The narrative presents Dylan as an unequivocally inspired rock star trapped in a scrawny folk-strumming body, an expansive artist held within a movement and an attitude which he feels doesn’t define him. His response is to open the valve of his virtuosity and let it all out, as often and dispassionately as possible. How his friends, fellow musicians and, later, legions of admirers react to this virtuosic output is where Mangold attempts to locate the story’s drama. But in its conventional plodding-around to establish character and setting, it loses any and all sense of thrust and bravura.

“Let’s say,” ponders Mangold in a Rolling Stone interview, “40 percent of the movie is music, right? Now you only have 75 minutes left, including credits, to tell the human story. It’s incredible how fast you have to pick and choose what you investigate.” This would be an insane thing to say if it weren’t simply the reality of studio filmmaking, and, as it happens, the best possible argument for why A Complete Unknown should never have been made. In other circumstances, A Complete Unknown could have been 95% music, and it probably would have been a more satisfying experience. The musical set pieces involving Dylan and his band are the closest A Complete Unknown comes to realizing its full potential, Chalamet relishing a collection of songs simply too good to deny.

But this, after all, is a studio movie, and it needs the studio movie charade. That means a studio script. So it is that we have a roll call of secondary characters padding out the story, trying to fill in the blanks of the Dylan enigma. Most of them only end up getting in the way. Monica Barbaro is an unconvincing Joan Baez, all huff and puff with none of the living Baez’s charisma. The “romantic” arc between her and Dylan holds no surprises. Dylan’s other early-60s squeeze, Suze Rotolo, is renamed Sylvie Russo and played by Elle Fanning, who proceeds to wield a buzzsaw to every scene she’s in. Her natural inexpressiveness and limp screen presence finds no favors in a screenplay comprised of too much sulking and too many inanely peremptory declarations. “You’re ambitious,” she tells Dylan. “I think that scares you.” A line positively quavering in falseness, not only for the movie Dylan, but for the real one too. Anyone who’s listened to his records knows that, if Bob Dylan is scared of anything, it’s certainly not his own ambition. When Dylan later plays his Newport duet with Baez, the film insists on cutting to Fanning, who can only look on in mushy jealousy. As if we care about any of this.

The film’s climactic moment — when Dylan famously strolled out before a sea of unsuspecting flannel shirts at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, plugged in his Fender, and let rip — becomes, through the warped necessities of Hollywood “story-telling,” merely another vehicle for characterization en masse. Each character dutifully reacts in their own predictable way. Johnny Cash grins. Spectators exclaim that Dylan is “Judas.” Dylan looks on disbelievingly. Pete Seeger shrivels up. One of the event organizers is so horrified he tries to kill the power. Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman socks him in the face. In other words, the moment is so stuffed with dramatic bluster that even a willing audience has no space of their own to react. And no time either — it is nearly the final scene of the movie.

This is what happens when a movie is too wedded to a philosophy of setups and payoffs, of character motives and film school melodramatics, of an imaginary Suze Rotolo emoting to an imaginary Bob Dylan. Could there be anything further from the spirit of Dylan’s preconceptions-be-damned post-‘64 output?

Viewers tantalized but ultimately dissatisfied by this Dylan might find relief in D.A. Pennebaker’s remarkable documentary Don't Look Back, covering Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. Pennebaker’s Dylan — captured in the back of cabs, in waiting rooms before performances, in business meetings, and, yes, handheld — is ostensibly much like Mangold’s Dylan: an irritable, charismatic talent with an indomitable will to work and a beguiling sense of humor. Except that one is the product of a verité documentary, with all the spontaneity and lo-fi inscrutability that you will never, ever find in the other, a $70 million biopic. Pennebaker’s Dylan is a protagonist in fearless close-up; Mangold’s Dylan is a property of Searchlight Pictures.

Even the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis is a better Dylan biopic, and it’s not even about Bob Dylan. Ostensibly narrativizing the struggle of a lowly, peevish, only mildly-talented folksinger establishing himself in the heyday of the Greenwich Village folk revival, Llewyn Davis expresses so purely the conditions that fostered Dylan’s early fame — the allure of folk music, the competitiveness of New York City, the determined, convivial, and somewhat paranoid attitude of the Kennedy era, the schizophrenic pleasure of creation, and the pitfalls of an artistic movement which devolves into an aesthetic one — that all the biopic is missing is Robert Zimmerman himself.

Which brings us to the grand disappointment of Mangold’s film. One wanders through A Complete Unknown fully comprehending why James Mangold was handpicked by Steven Spielberg to succeed him in directing the latest Indiana Jones film. Technical bona fides aside, he’s a director who knows his way around an art department, especially one with lots of “history” to “recreate” (and lots of money to burn). No surprise, then, that A Complete Unknown commits the same tired error Hollywood has, with few exceptions, been guilty of for almost its entire existence: mistaking historical detail for historical sensibility. Mangold is a creature of the dream factory of Hollywood, where the past is only a few props away. The notebooks, the cars, the microphones, the hairpieces, the Cronkite cameos and the radio clips are all wonderfully, resolutely, unmistakably appropriate. But what A Complete Unknown peddles in 1960s ephemera, it lacks in 1960s feeling.

Nowhere is this more apparent as when the movie dramatizes Dylan’s performance of “The Times They Are a-Changin’” at Newport in 1964. The film’s approach is resolutely anti-contextual: the song is presented plainly, the lyrics left to speak for themselves. Yet, like a stop sign on the highway, the moment passes without incident, because the film gives, or has, no sense of why this song matters, nor why it connected with audiences in 1964, nor, really, why Dylan wrote it. Ultimately, the film cares about none of this; it wants only to wrangle the song’s prophetic symbolism into the narrative of Rotolo and Dylan’s failed romance. This, if you’ll permit me some un-Dylanesque heavy-handedness, seems to encapsulate something about A Complete Unknown. Call it a misbegotten conception. There is no feeling in this movie; only money, acting, and bare craftsmanship. A Complete Unknown squanders an uber-talented lead, an uber-enjoyable soundtrack, and an uber-ambitious art department, for the sake of a frivolous escapade that runs counter to the very things the Bob Dylan of 1965 epitomized: formal novelty, the soft charisma of misdirection, and an incredulous attitude towards narrative. Hollywood has rarely made such an exceptional subject seem so drearily normal.

Elroy Rosenberg is an arts journalist from Melbourne, Australia, currently based in New York.