For Bruce Springsteen, it was the starting snare shot of “Like a Rolling Stone” that kicked open the door to his mind. He’s not wrong. And he’s not alone.
That iconic Bob Dylan song has and will stand the test of time. Sixty years later, it still crackles with energy and urgency — even if a sizable portion of Dylan’s audience back in 1965 wanted nothing to do with it.
One year after Dylan “plugged in” at the Newport Folk Festival in July, he went on a whirlwind tour of England, playing the first half of the concert acoustic and the second half electric. Audiences bought tickets just to boo him. They hurled insults and jeered. In one concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, a fan screamed “Judas!” from the audience.
“I don’t believe you,” Dylan sneered from the stage. “You’re a liar.” And then, turning to the band, said: “Play fucking loud.”
That scene, transported from England to Newport, rolled back from ’66 to ’65, and missing the four-letter expletive, is recreated in A Complete Unknown. It is not an improvement.
Written by Jay Cocks and James Mangold, who also directs, A Complete Unknown adapts Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties and regurgitates a thin slice of Dylan’s early days. It opens with Dylan arriving in New York City looking for his hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), hooking up with fellow folkie Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and then meeting all the right people: Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison) and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning).
Only Russo is fabricated. Based on Suze Rotolo, who was Dylan’s then-girlfriend immortalized on the album cover of 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Russo plays an aspiring artist in love with the cute boy with the floppy hair and funny voice. Meanwhile, Dylan (Timothée Chalamet, who does his own singing) ricochets off the gravitational pull of Seeger, Baez and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). They all love Dylan, but only Grossman and Russo realize he is different.
A Complete Unknown plays like a Wikipedia article. Dylan lands a record deal at Columbia and releases a disc full of standards. It goes nowhere. He comes back with a disc full of originals and explodes. He drifts from Russo to Baez and back to Russo. Chalamet plays these scenes timidly, vacillating between a Dylan caricature and a typical genius frustrated that everyone wants a piece of what he’s got. Skinny as a twig and with a great pile of hair, Chalamet cuts a profile similar to Dylan. But he spends too much of the movie playing Dylan as an actual person and not the character Dylan himself expertly crafted.
Born well before the age of hyper-information, Dylan always was a slippery fellow. Where he came from, where he learned to play, what his name really was and what really happened in that hospital room with Guthrie are the stuff of Dylan lore. But six decades of archival recordings, books and documentaries have pulled back the curtain on the enigmatic troubadour.
Yet, he still seems inscrutable. Just look at 2019’s meta-documentary Rolling Thunder Revue, where Dylan and director Martin Scorsese giddily toy with the truth. Sharon Stone fabricates a story of meeting Dylan as a young girl, while Scorsese inserts a completely fictitious character from another movie.
So, am I upset that A Complete Unknown takes a few artistic liberties or because it doesn’t take enough? Honestly, as frustrating as it is to have the facts of the 1966 Free Trade Hall “Stone” performance applied like a coat of paint to the significance of the 1965 Newport concert, the fault of Unknown lies in the latter.
There’s nothing remotely interior about Dylan or his music in A Complete Unknown that comes close to Springsteen’s comment. Nothing as explosive as that English concert, which remains one of the most combative performances of the song ever set down. And nothing that kicks open the doors to anything.