Random thoughts on Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown

It augured well when on the way to the cinema we passed a busker playing ‘The Wicked Messenger’ (how many buskers know John Wesley Harding, in advanced years my favourite Dylan album?).  This is not a review of A Complete Unknown, not least as there are so many out there by cineastes far better qualified than me (best I’ve read so far? James Parker in the January issue of the Atlantic); simply a series of random thoughts by someone for whom Bob Dylan has been an ever-present since next-door’s John Tilbury called me in at the age of ten to hear his new record.  Distant memories of listening to the first album and the early Joan Baez LPs came flooding back when, early in the film, Dylan sings ‘Song to Woody’ to the man himself – it sounds pathetic but I was genuinely holding back the tears: this was my music!  OK, so most if not all of the hospital scenes with Woody Guthrie weren’t as in the movie (the Guthrie family other than Arlo were initially suspicious of a post-adolescent Mid-Westerner seemingly obsessed with a half-forgotten folk singer brought down by Huntington’s Disease) – but a lot of the scenes are wholly re-imagined or didn’t happen in the first place!  This is a Bob Dylan biopic, so we wouldn’t expect a linear, largely accurate narrative.  The story has to be conflated, and events moved around or reinvented.  If reports are right then Dylan stipulated that there must be a big ‘joke’ (apparently the same was true for Todd Haynes’s brilliant I’m Not There nearly twenty years ago), hence the infamous shout of ‘Judas’ in the Manchester Free Trade Hall is heard at Newport a year earlier, with Dylan’s instruction to The Hawks to ‘Play it f……. loud’ duly replicated, sans expletive – there follows a storming delivery of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ but nothing as thunderous and malevolent as the version unleashed that night in May 1966.  That said the band put together for when Dylan ‘goes electric’ is terrific, but I doubt if Eli Brown, looking uncannily like Mike Bloomfield, is actually playing that Telecaster.  The choice of instruments is needless to say spot on, and the attention to period detail throughout the film is especially impressive – Greenwich Village is a more dynamic, action-filled environment than in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davies (where Dylan is a looming present, waiting not quite off-screen to sweep away the old guard and the ever hopefuls).  The conservative dress of most of the audiences is recognised, emphasising the continuity between the ’fifties and the ’sixties until well into the latter decade (reinforced early on by relocating McCarthyism and Pete Seeger’s congressional indictment to the eve of Bob’s arrival in New York).  Timothy Chalamet’s uncanny capture of Dylan the man – in so far as anyone can actually ‘capture’ Bob’s ever-changing persona – has been rightly acclaimed, and on Radio 2’s The Folk Show he explained how an unintended consequence of the film’s extended production, owing to the pandemic and the screenwriters’ strike, was that he had five years’ coaching in guitar and harmonica playing by the best in the business.  No coach, however brilliant, could have trained Monica Barbaro to nail Joan Baez’s voice in such a convincing fashion – that was instinctive, unforced and natural (is this the second movie depiction of Joan Baez, with Ronee Blakley playing her alongside the real JB in the truly awful Renaldo and Clara?).  One wonders what Joan Baez thinks of the film – and did Peter Yarrow get to see himself on screen before he died last week?  Mention of Peter, Paul and Mary recalls how their inauthenticity is assaulted from both sides in A Complete Unknown: by Dylan as he seeks a way out of the growing artificiality of ‘the folk revolution’ and the ultra-purist Alan Lomax, arguably unfairly demonised in the film.  Yet the trio was Albert Grossman’s biggest act pre-Dylan, with Baez – as shown in the film – refusing to leave the Vanguard label for Columbia.  Dylan of course eventually broke with Grossman, but the latter by then had The Band to line his purse (no place for Robbie Robertson in the later stages of the film, with Bob Neuwirth portrayed as a more positive presence in Dylan’s life than was actually the case, perhaps because drugs scarcely feature at all).  Scoot McNairy is wholly believable as a still wild and vibrant Woody Guthrie overwhelmed by incoherence and paralysis (an echo of the most moving scene in the otherwise very funny Alice’s Restaurant), but the revelation is Ed Norton as Pete Seeger.  As an echo of the man himself Norton’s performance is so good it’s almost eery, and if there is any justice then Norton will receive an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.  The myth of Seeger at Newport trying to cut the power cables with an axe while Dylan plays ‘Maggie’s Farm’ is acknowledged but not realised, the latter displaying a lighter touch than a clumsy scene early in the film where Dylan signals to Seeger that he’s instinctively a rocker and can’t be categorised.  Three cheers for Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, whose portrayal is every bit as fragile and revealing as Joachim Phoenix in James Mangold’s other music biopic Walk The Line.  In the latter Bob Dylan is off-screen and yet ever-present, driving Cash to embrace the new and to keep going even in his darkest moments; here the relationship is cemented and reversed, with Cash at critical moments suitably inspirational.  Walk The Line is a complementary movie, as is DA Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, shot in London during Dylan’s last wholly acoustic tour – that’s the real record of how appalling Dylan treated Baez while embracing Neuwirth as his new bro, working his way through industrial quantities of weed and speed, and accelerating towards breakdown or total reinvention.  Ultimately of course he experienced both, culminating in his coming off that beautiful Triumph and retreating with his new bride Sara to Woodstock, Big Pink and the ‘Basement Tapes’ – and the rest is history (cue plug for my book Slouching Towards Big Pink and the Dylan, Guthrie and Roosevelt – the story of a song podcast: Dylan, Guthrie, and Roosevelt – the story of a song | Prof. Adrian Smith).  One final observation, playing the cantankerous bluesman Jesse Moffette is Big Bill Morganfield, son of Muddy Waters, whose performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1960 was arguably as significant as Dylan’s five years later, in recasting acoustic music as genuinely biracial and cementing the festival’s cultural importance.