Known unknown

I went to see A Complete Unknown for a second time over the weekend. I enjoyed it the first time I saw it and thought it a work of art the second time. If Bob Dylan’s music rings your chimes, as it does mine, you won’t want to miss it. Here are a few observations and resources that may enhance your enjoyment in case you go.

I grew up listening to the music around which the film revolves. It means a lot to me as it does to many others. One of my friends wrote a thousand-word background memo for his family so that they would have a better understanding of the story onscreen. We want to share our passion. It’s important to us. I don’t think it can ever be as important to those who weren’t there even if they care. The Auden poem suggests limits: “If I could tell you I would let you know.”

The film begins in May 1961 — in reality it was January — with Dylan’s arrival on the folk scene in Greenwich Village. It continues continues through his 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival backed by a rock band. The film is based on Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Might that Split the Sixties (2015). Wald is a musician and author of related books including Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir (Dave Van Ronk’s memoir), the source of the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis. The Coen Brothers movie seems to me to stand on the high level of A Complete Unknown in its treatment of the same scene if not exactly the same subject.

Wald is a terrific writer. He treats the subject with the attitude that it is important to our history. The best piece I have read about the movie is Ron Radosh’s Quillette essay “Printing the legend.” Ron says what needs to be said about the book and the movie.

Timothée Chalamet plays Dylan and Monica Barbaro plays Baez. Their performances are uncanny. They closely imitate the appearance, the speech, the singing, and the vocal intonations of their characters. Ed Norton is also stellar as Pete Seeger.

Chalamet and Barbaro play the songs live in the film. They harmonize together on Dylan’s songs better than Dylan and Baez did in real life. Chalamet accompanies himself on guitar and harmonica, like Dylan, but plays the harmonica with a better sound than Dylan. Wondering who was playing harmonica for Chalamet in the film, I discovered that he worked on the instrument for five years with Rob Paparozzi.

I am afraid that only those who already know the true story can fully enjoy the movie. Important figures flit in and out without explanation. Thus my friend’s memo to his family. It’s easy to miss those such as Harold Leventhal, Al Kooper, Dave Vank Ronk, and Tom Wilson, to take a few examples. I think Van Ronk and Wilson remain unidentified by name. Only Leventhal’s first name is mentioned.

Shelton flits in, but his importance to Dylan’s career is manifest in the movie. His review of Dylan in the Times in September 1961 helped launch Dylan. Within months of his arrival in New York Dylan was on his way. He had some songs of his own, he had a manager, and he had a contract with Columbia. The film compress this time slightly. However, it was in fact unbelievably brief.

The reviewers have pointed out the liberties the film takes with the facts. This is Hollywood. Everyone understands that the departures from fact mostly contribute to the dramatic arc of the story. Yet the film powerfully conveys the pressures exerted on Dylan and his triumph over them. It didn’t come from being a nice guy.

If you have some knowledge of the facts, the film’s departures may be amusing in some cases. The film shows Joan Baez ending her relationship with Dylan when he gets up from bed to work on a song. She is disgusted. She throws him out of her room and tells him to get lost.

The portrayal of how Dylan worked at the time is perfect, but Baez appreciated it. She writes in her memoir: “[I]n the dead of night, he would wake up, grunt, grab a cigarette, and stumble over to the typewriter again.” That’s how the movie has it. However, Baez adds: “He was turning out songs like ticker tape, and I was stealing them as fast as he wrote them.”

In reality, Baez ended her romance with Dylan when Sara Lownds answered the door of his hotel room in London in the course of Dylan’s 1965 British tour. That tour preceded the Newport Folk Festival that concludes the film. For Dylan’s 1965 British tour, see D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Dont Look Back (the omission of the apostrophe is sic).

Back to A Complete Unknown: I loved the film’s portrayal of Johnny Cash’s friendship with Dylan. You get the feeling that Cash was man of his own who recognized a kindred spirit in Dylan. He certainly recognized Dylan’s talent. I learn from Wald’s book that Cash’s appearance at Newport was mildly controversial in its own right.

The film shows Dylan performing at Gerde’s in 1961 with Shelton and Baez in attendance. Chalamet gives a moving performance of Dylan’s “I Was Young When I Left Home.” Dylan recorded it in December 1961. The recording was not extracted from the vault for another 40 years. This is exactly how it goes down with Chalamet in the movie.

The line the film draws between Dylan and rock in this period is not quite as stark as the film portrays. Dylan’s first single on Columbia was “Mixed-Up Confusion” in November 1962. Wald calls it “a self-penned rockabilly romp[.]” The single didn’t go anywhere, but “in hindsight these [rockabilly] sessions clearly presaged Dylan’s later musical evolution[.]” Just fyi, here it is.

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