Movie Review: "A Complete Unknown"

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

The Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is finally streaming and I took a look. It's well put together, with relatively high production values, and Timothée Chalamet (Bob Dylan) and Ed Norton (Pete Seeger) do a nice job acting those roles.

It's especially poignant that the audience first gets to see Dylan at the hospital bedside of Woody Guthrie, one of the inspirations for the folk music of the '60s. When Dylan met him, Guthrie was in the final stages of Huntington's Chorea--a genetic condition that gradually paralyzes the sufferers. Dylan's idol was a genuine lefty whose guitar had an inlay reading "This Machine Kills Fascists"--not something you see every day.

Dylan floats through the 1960's folk scene growing ever more popular thanks to some iconic songs he wrote, and some help from Pete Seeger and other artists, but suffers as a result. He can't sustain a relationship with anyone sober; a drugged-out Johnny Cash is the one with whom he has the deepest connection. His first girlfriend (Sylvie Russo played by Elle Fanning), and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) both fall by the wayside as he almost completely ignores them to pursue his music career.

One side note: How sane and courageous was Pete Seeger!  Seeger married a half-Japanese woman (Toshi, played by Eriko Hatsune) in 1943 when the anti-Japanese sentiment was at a peak during World War II. Norton plays Seeger as even-tempered and steady, while Chalamet's Dylan is a brooding "artiste." Seeger apparently lamented Dylan's abandonment of political protest songs about peace, racial and class struggles like Blowing in the Wind for his later music that Seeger called "puzzles for Harvard students."

Yet the film's focus includes plenty of protest songs--Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm, Subterranean Homesick Blues among them--reminding me of many of the folk/rock classics Dylan wrote. It also reminds us that a song like Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land was viewed as communist propaganda during those days, so we've come a long way from the songs of that era.

Perhaps the most surprising twist in the plot (mini-spoiler) was that the folk song quest for justice turned into an artistic burden for Dylan. The movie ends with his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival with [gasp!] an electric guitar and five-piece band. The folk music fans were aghast, yet Dylan managed to please some people. His electric Highway 61 Revisited album was a big seller.