Last night, I saw “A Complete Unknown,” based on Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties,” and I found myself haunted not just by the music and the excellent evocation of Bob Dylan —from his 1961 arrival in Greenwich Village as a gifted but vulnerable folk music newbie to his imposition of rock’n’roll on the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as its legendary, disruptive closing act. — but by an idea.
And that idea, beautifully embodied in the film by Timothée Chalamet, is this: Why Dylan? Why not somebody else, or, for that matter, anybody else? The Nobel Prize winner (for literature) was and is poetic and talented, to be sure, but so were Pete Seeger (Ed Norton), Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) — to name a few luminaries who have been in his orbit. Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary were arguably greater interpreters of his music. Hell, even Chalamet is a better singer, which is no slur on an actor who captures not only Dylan’s physical and vocal mannerisms but his transformation from raw nobody, hungry for fame, to aloof, unknowable superstar, seared by fame’s reality.
What people want to know, Chalamet’s Dylan tells his sometime girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning inhabiting a character based on Suze Rotolo), is not how he wrote his songs but why it isn’t them. Was it destiny or something in the zeitgeist, that made Dylan a legend where others were merely accomplished players? Or was it something else?
Dylan reflected but also helped create the narrative of an America at the promising but tumultuous crossroads of the early 1960s (“The Times They Are A Changin’”). But he — like many supernovas, especially American supernovas — continuously reinvented and mythologized himself, delegitimizing his past to fashion his present and future. And doing that has two affects. It keeps people —who see what they want to see anyway— off-balance and intrigued. But it also controls what they see (“Like a Rolling Stone”).
It’s telling that both the Chalamet movie and the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary “No Direction Home,” which covers roughly the same period in Dylan’s life, take their titles from “Like a Rolling Stone,” at its core a song about the mutability of identity. (That’s also the theme of the 2007 film “I’m Not There,” titled after another Dylan song, in which a host of well-known actors, including Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw, play incarnations of Dylan’s persona.)
When you remain elusive, you can continue to be a protean cultural symbol. (See the recent article “Up and Down With Bob: How Dylan Has Reflected the Death of American Optimism” by Win McCormack, editor in chief of The New Republic.) But elusiveness is not a great personal quality as it tends to keep even loved ones at bay, as onetime Dylan lover Baez evocatively explores in the autobiographical song “Diamonds and Rust.”
“A Complete Unknown” cuts both ways. Tht title refers to someone who has yet to make it yet seeks to retain that anonymity when he does as a way to address his newfound fame. (Although frankly what did Dylan and others who pursue fame think it was? It’s not a tiger you can ride.)
“Is it possible to find a real, hardcore Bob Dylan?” McCormack asks at the end of his essay.
Perhaps not, because there remains a possibility that Dylan is an enigma even to himself.