A COMPLETE UNKNOWN
dir. James Mangold
starring Timothée Chalomet
Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro
We live now in the time of what might be termed “a complete known”: to invert the famous Warhol quote, in the future, nobody will be anonymous for fifteen minutes. The hunger for terminal transparency visits itself upon us as a type of virus - or better, viral - commanding in us a compulsion to love, like, and share ourselves to excess, to deny ourselves the dignity of anything elusive or hidden. In Sam Peckinpah’s 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' Bob Dylan gamely, knowingly, and comically plays in cameos a character called “Alias”, a fey nod to an artist who by that time towered over and surveyed the terrain of popular music as a celebrity-king, yet whose rejoicing merit resided in his ability to maintain a mystery and weird slipperiness that those beloved now of the herds would find intolerable because it would deprive them of some of their self-importance.
The roots of the “complete known” phenomenon may lie in immediately post-war America, when ascending from the maelstrom a nation embraced its newfound confidence in being the most powerful nation on the planet and was catapulted upon a trajectory that would in short New World Order frenzy take it from American dream to American meme. Infecting the world with its relentlessly positive energy - and I am not at all an anti-American, and loathe reflex denigration of a country that for all its flaws I love - even through Cold War, the Vietnam War, nearly civil war, and much else, the Americans remade most of the world in their self-image, forgetting in their enthusiasm that for most the world it didn’t fit. But the American will is formidable and, though it took some time, it bent the world to its designs.
It was into the embryo of that world, in Minnesota, in May, 1941, months before Pearl Harbour, that Robert Allen Zimmerman was born. As he once said when asked if he was, as a youth, a rebel, it was too cold where he grew up to rebel. And, sure enough, Paul Westerberg, in recounting meeting Dylan, when asked what they talked about, said “the weather”, just two Minnesotans chewing the fat about the brutal Midwestern winter.
It is hard to imagine, in America, a more anonymous place to grow up than the Midwest, which despite its post-war, Fifties thriving, was so far between the outfacing coasts with their overshadowing pinion cities, Los Angeles and New York, that it was experienced by most of the cultured as much as invisible. And so the young Zimmerman, to paraphrase - of all bands - the Buzzococks, came up from nowhere…but did not go back there. He went east, compelled by an intense sense of destiny he spoke to in a rare and remarkably revealing 2004 interview with Ed Bradley on the worthy CBS weekly 60 minutes news program:
“It’s a feeling you have that you know something about yourself that nobody else does – the picture you have in your mind of what you’re about will come true. It’s kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it’s a fragile feeling. And if you put it out there, somebody will kill it. So, it’s best to keep that all inside.”
Beginning, logically and methodically, with Dylan's arrival as "a complete unknown" in New York City, the narrative steadily builds momentum and fascination as a presumably Midwestern nobody proceeds in under five years to revolutionise popular music and then defies the folk music norms that nurtured and championed him by going electric. The recreation of period New York is slick to say the least, detailed lovingly, and convincing for its evocation of the Greenwich Village folk scene crucible where the once-Zimmerman reinvented himself breathlessly, not least as former carnival crew. Now, Dylan’s choosing to embed his myth in carnivals is in itself interesting; no doubt, as a child, he would have known of and probably been to Minnesotan carnivals with his parents, wowed by their effervescent yet earthy energy. And the carny people - some figuratively and even literally “freaks” - must have amazed him with their explicit, inescapable otherness. It is that very explicit, inescapable otherness that Dylan shared and still shares with those “freaks” of a lost America - because, after all, in our world now what does the word “freak” even mean when so many aspire by definition in some way to be one, thereby ironically and paradoxically demonstrating to others only their sameness and sometimes mediocrity - enshrined soon in lyrics as likely fictional characters that, at his Highway 61 peak and beyond, witnessed an outpouring that resembled nothing less than Beat Generation cutup mania run amok, a sort of IV drip from the beating heart of the sundered American psyche without recourse to hope of adequate analysis.
And yet, for all of his apparent egomania and self-aggrandisement, the strength, mystery, and extraordinary charisma of Bob Dylan lies in a sort of egolessness, or at least lack of self-consciousness that is far from a lack of self-awareness, because as an artist and probably as person it is hard to imagine an individual more painfully self-aware than the songwriter of, for example, Blood on the Tracks. So, rather than listen to my gabbling, let’s go right to the ultimate authority, Dylan’s mother Beattie, who died in 2000:
“Of course, I love everything he does. I’m his mother. He’s a remarkable, wonderful man. He’s a very ordinary person; he’s full of compassion; he has no ego. People don’t really know him. But I do, and I’m grateful for it. Every mother should have a son like Bobby.”
Let’s face it, Beattie: No other mother ever has had a son “ like Bobby”. But, from anecdotes and various other sources, it would seem that Bob Dylan really is somehow egoless. For which read: “enlightened”. Although, when asked once if he knew anybody enlightened Dylan, after a long pause, replied, “Allen Ginsberg.” Which is like one Zen master passing the buck to another, because who the hell in this dark world wants to be enlightened and live every day with the horror of regarding its lack of light…and compassion?
Ginsberg, with whom Dylan had a long, close friendship, also formed in the post-war period incubator. The first time I heard him reading America, my eyes filled with tears, its piercing, poignant rendering of Cold War climes in that country bringing up from deep within me my own bond with an ever-baying complex of buried experience. I was brought up in Canada, sure, but the Beats - who influenced Dylan as much as Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, the blues, country, and the carny - nailed that time, and which as a Canadian I grew up in the shadow of, as no others could, conjuring their love and hate of their homeland into a molten discourse as excoriating as it was brilliant, and bound to impact a young Dylan like a train fit to make you laugh..or cry. For Dylan’s enlightened aspect - and I swear that there is one - fed off of the same ordered chaos of rampant capitalism and cascading cultural explosions as Ginsberg, Keoruac, Burroughs and the rest of the Beats; he buried his antennae in the same trough and emerged with an equally illuminated, singular vision worthy of the William Blake texts Ginsberg exalted and echoed in his poetry. Dylan may have jokingly, at the height of his powers, called himself a mere “song and dance man”, but what he didn’t say - because it was too obvious - is that his songs were secular hymns, and his dance was that of a benevolent Kali, creating to destroy to create in endless, restless rhythm, the accelerated shuffle of one busily being born and dying lest he be trapped in the “big ideas” (Idiot Wind) of those too lacking in courage and imagination to contain a nearly terrible talent.
While enlightenment might appear to constitute a blessing, it can also be seen as a kind of curse, and it is this contradiction that informs the life and work of Bob Dylan, who was born with a great destiny but with it the burden of a blessing cursed by many crosses borne upon which he could, by the public and especially the critics, be regularly crucified. In his song Not Dark Yet, Dylan says “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear”, and maybe this is what he was referring to: the price of his own inborn genius. He wouldn’t be the first genius to be sanguine about the blessing of genius as a curse, nor the only “enlightened” being to sometimes feel its weight; even the Advaita sage Sri Nisargadatta once replied to someone asking what his state was like with, “It is terrible, I am burning all the time.”
It’s this fire inside, a holy fire consummately mapped by the great Christian mystic St. John of the Cross, that we can imagine burned in Dylan so brightly and mercilessly when, speeding and somehow divinely inspired, he was “sitting up for days in the Chelsea Hotel” (from Desire’s Sara) writing one masterpiece after another, traveling vistas of light within, as an alchemist heedlessly and helplessly turning the straw of the carny horse fodder to gold.
How did Dylan write such songs? Look, I know, I am well aware that Dylan’s gift is and was not unique: many other artists of the period enjoyed fabulous creative productivity. But there is something about Dylan that defies any categorisation or contexts. So how did he do it?
In the 60 minutes interview there is a very telling passage when Dylan comments, in his usual quasi-elliptical yet frank way, on what was going on:
Ed Bradley: Do you ever look back at the music that you’ve written and look back at it and say “Wow! That surprises me!”
Bob Dylan: I used to. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t know how I got to write those songs.
EB: What do you mean you don’t know how?
BD: All those early songs were almost magically written. Ah… “Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, a handmade blade, the child’s balloon…” (“It’s Alright, Ma,I’m Only Bleeding” was written in 1964.) Well, try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It’s a different kind of penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time.
EB: Do you think you can do it again today?
BD: Uh-uh.
EB: Does that disappoint you, or…?
BD: Well, you can’t do something forever. I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can’t do that.
Dylan’s expression when he says the above is one of muted perplexity and a little annoyance. Why ask? He goes on to infer that the writing was divinely - or at least mystically - derived: some power or force beyond him, call it “God” because basically Dylan does - had gifted him for a relatively short time with the privilege and burden of making words and music that could rattle off a production line in the unseen only to find purchase in the world. It was, to all intents and purposes, a Biblical moment, and given Dylan’s deeply-rooted Hebraic background, makes perfect sense: when in doubt, says the Old Testament God, send a prophet. Except that Dylan wanted least of all to be seen as a prophet: a prophet foretells the future, whereas Dylan foretold the present…and that is one heavy brief to be given, my friends. You’re living the future every day, and that collision drive can tear strips off you.
Ah, the Moses of Rock. No kidding, when I first heard Modern Times, Dylan’s tour de force 2006 comeback,it struck me like nothing less than some Biblical figure descending from a mountaintop clasping tablets inscribed with the distillation of fifty years of American music. It’s so hard to choose a top track by Dylan; it’s like asking for your favourite Psalm.
"Everyone asks where these songs come from. But then you watch their faces, and they're not asking where the songs come from. They're asking why the songs didn't come to them." Bob Dylan, played by Timothy Chalamet, in A Complete Unknown.
Overlook the minor spoiler the quotation above may represent, but I can’t find a better way to convey the essence distilled of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, the chief - but far from only - achievement of which lies in striking at the heart of the mystery that is Dylan by successfully hyper-mythologising an artist themselves whose mastery at supremely architecting his self-mythologising sowed the seeds for what would become the most unique story in American music of the past half-century.
Confounding and confusing - and angering - his acoustic-accustomed devotees (and it is made clear, believably, that - as Joan Baez [played wonderfully in the movie by Monica Barbaro], observed in Scorsese's riveting Rolling Thunder Revue documentary, that Dylan possesses a phenomenal charisma) - A Complete Unknown celebrates the mountaintop moment with Dylan at the height of his powers when he chooses to risk all his precipitate popularity with the folk crowd, who regard him almost as a musical Messiah, giving the movie a climax of maximum impact and poignancy.
It would be remiss of me, before closing, not to address Timothy Chalamet’s performance. My son - with whom I saw the film - and I agreed upon leaving that the Oscar nomination he has received for it is well-deserved. Beyond his marginal resemblance to the young Dylan, which is no doubt a bonus, Chalamet inhabits the character with a paradoxically wary commitment, which is exactly what is required to even remotely nail down an artist whose countless phases and transformations were triggered by the period the movie renders so credibly. It is easy to love Bob Dylan, and it is clear through his performance that Chalamet does, conferring upon it a background respect that happily never lapses into reverence, and keeps its edge as sharp as the wit of the lines the script has Dylan say, many of which are a matter of long record. In the same way, Ed Norton plays folk titan Pete Seeger as balancing increasingly uncomfortably between awe and quiet envy, a success seeing his world turned upside down by a pretender so real that he has little to become beyond humbled. Playing Dylan’s legendary manager Albert Grossman, Dan Fogler excels in capturing the spirit of a capitalist on the right side of history; Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash is lovably roguish, rebellious, and also delivers the profound regard in which Cash held Dylan. Elle Fanning is given the intimidating task of rendering Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s longsuffering great love of the period, and she does it with a simple dignity, and all of the deep sadness of a woman losing herself to an artist the lion in whose heart she can never change. And what of director James Mangold, who unsurprisingly also directed the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line? He manages to direct with a tight discipline that calls forth tangible intimacy, fantasy, factuality, and an expansive positivity from his performers and binds a challenging narrative into something resembling a Beat fairytale, with its antihero to the fore, being everything any nobody dreams of being but whose simpler destiny dictates they can never be.
It’s Chalamet’s show, though, really, from meteoric rise to fallen folk angel exit, and a real bravura gesture to a history being written still. So embrace this wonderful, life-affirming movie that is as moving as it is exciting and humbling. And what of the movie’s many critics? So to speak, idiot windbags: “One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzing around your eyes, blood on your saddle.”
Essential information
Main image and Bob Dylan/Joan Baez from wikicommons
Timothée Chalamet outside the Chelsea, screengrab from the movie.