A Complete Unknown – it’s close, but it’s not right. As wonderful as this film is in parts, its lack of interest in getting important facts right, means that it doesn’t quite hit the bullseye in the same way that Elvis did.
Did you ever see Amadeus? In that film, Salieri, Imperial Kapellmeister, and Court Composer to Joseph II, occupies a position of seniority over the fledgling Mozart. He recognises his genius but cannot believe that the God he worships has chosen to vest it in such an unworthy vessel as Wolfgang Amadeus. As far as it tries to be an actual movie, A Complete Unknown, is based on a similar premise. The ‘asshole’ Bob Dylan, is the genius that Pete Seeger, pioneer of the folk scene in America, can only dream of being. Seeger here, portrayed as a man incapable of so much as a bad thought (in a beautifully wrought performance by Ed Norton), comes over better than Salieri’s jealous, evil plotter, but for the movies’ purpose they are the same – exceedingly talented musicians, the best in their respective fields at what they do, until the prodigy arrives into their midst and sets about doing things with his gifts which, were they theirs, they’d use in an entirely different way.
In its early stages, A Complete Unknown made a stab at finding another leg to its story too: Dylan, prolific talent that he was (we see new songs which we now know to be time-served classics, flow from him like the way the rest of us get a runny nose), is in awe of the terminally ill Woody Guthrie, now rendered mute by his illness. The push and pull of the folk music love triangle posits Guthrie as the master, Bob(by) his natural successor, and Seeger the proselyte to both, and the shared cause, willing and eager to back the new man to take his music into the future he’s always dreamed of for it. All of that makes for an intriguing opening to the movie, but it doesn’t really develop beyond a box-ticking reprisal of the idea towards the end. Once it all gets going, and Bob becomes famous, the film switches into a simple monster vs exploited-commodity story, with the Dylan goes electric thing as its main driver and the pivot around which it gives up on being any sort of movie, and opts instead to be a simple biopic. Mmmh. All well and good, but a) don’t pretend it isn’t for the first twenty minutes before you do; and b) be aware that a biopic obliges the maker to have a different relationship with the truth.
Insofar as it is a biopic, by the way, it’s great. Particularly if you’re a Bob Dylan fan/aficionado. And even more so if, as I did, you owned those first seven albums, and knew every song off by heart. There is hardly a moment in the entire two hours and twenty minutes of it, in which there is not a song being sung, composed, or in the soundtrack. None of the favourites are omitted, and it’s as good as Walk the Line and Elvis in terms of the lead actor’s ability to do the singing and inhabit the character without resorting to caricature, or doing an impression.
But it counts, this stuff – movies are allowed take liberties with facts in a way that biopics, the new sacred document of the life they depict, can’t. Here, when it gets to its moment, Seeger, never not in awe of Bob, hints and cajoles gently from the sidelines to have him see the damage he might do to the growing folk music movement by his change of preference towards electric rhythm and blues. His colleagues on the organising committee of the Newport Folk Festival use a more direct, puritan Christian Nationalist-style rhetoric when they realise that their newly anointed messiah is planning on renouncing them. Well, that’s how they saw it. Bob didn’t. And I’m with Bob here – through the long lens of history, the row does seem a bit semantic; hardly so much as a schism, let alone an act of self-excommunication. I mean, in what world is stripped down Delta rhythm and blues, less folk music, than the acoustic, go tell it on the mountain stuff that they preferred? I get that for those who found themselves at the centre of the row at the time, it mattered, passions run high when new movements splinter and evolve, but did it really divide people like that? Johnny Cash was on the same bill, and he wasn’t exactly singing Puff the Magic Dragon.
Perhaps the best answer is, as it is with most other sacred texts that can’t be reconciled with historical events, it didn’t actually happen. Fair enough, but if that is the case, they should have gone the whole hog, and made a movie. I never quite stopped enjoying the biopic, but when faced with so many fundamental re-writes of the story that some of us knew going in, you do begin to wonder whether there was purpose behind it. Was it all just for the convenience of filmmaking? Was Dylan Goes Electric, which inspired the film, a flawed source document? Were there other motives? It never quite says visionary Jew appears amongst evangelical bigots, upsets the established order, and destroys all that they consider holy. But it leant into it. So, it does matter. It matters because, for many people, this is now the record. Ask anyone in Manchester, the place where they did shout “Judas”, not Newport, as the bio-movie would have us believe. They’re honest to a fault there.
Cubby Begge
Eyes face forward
Dickie White's Diary 