A Complete Unknown

Or: The Electric Hour

Fair warning, dear reader. I’m not the person you want to take to a Bob Dylan biopic. As a man and as a myth he’s just not my cup of tea. As a musician and a lyricist though not even I can deny his power and grace, whether acoustic or electric or christian or whatever his latest incarnation is. And A Complete Unknown certainly puts the music front and center and is sure of that, even if the rest of what its saying might get swallowed by the noise. It’s a movie that I walked out of with a bad taste in my mouth bt a sweet echo in my ears and a song in my heart. Make of that what you will.

We start and end with the young prodigy (Timmyjohn Shamwow) taking a great leap of his life, hitchhiking to New York to see his recently hospitalized hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot Mcnairy). This act of devotion and courage introduces him to Guthries close friend and fellow folk titan Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who in turn introduces him to the city’s folk scene and starts his rocket fast rise of fame. But the lofty heights prove to chill and lonely for the young bobart who seemingly perpetually reinventing himself, seeks to change himself and to his own self be true.

Along the way Bobo spends his aimless embryonic time in the orbit of two women who each have their lives much more together then this jungian archetype of the feckless musician you share a bedsit with in your twenties. Elle Fanning plays the activist and artist Sylvie Russo who takes Hobnob under her wings (it’s important to note, Sylvie is not in fact a factual person but is based on Suze Rotolo, an artist and activist who dated Bob Dylan during these years and who never wanted her life to be explored in conjunction with her ex, a fact that Dylan himself insisted upon honoring after her death. Fair play.) He almost immodestly cheats on her with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), a folk superstar, with whom he will have an adversarial on again on stage and off stage relationship with for the next four years. Meanwhile, the only person who ever sparks a flame behind Bubbie’s dark glasses and makes him catch his breath, is Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). Make of that what you will as well.

The movie is spectacularly casted and I wish we could have left Bob the cypher and spent more time with the other characters. Seeger and his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune) are twin beacons of quiet nobility, and under voiced but highly expressive presences as Peeler’s supporters to his unwilling adversaries. Barbaro (who sings with the same polish and weight of her character) is magnetic as she strides the streets of New York, or smilingly disses Dylan in front of hundreds of fans. Her Baez is a consummate artist and I would have gladly watched a three hour feature of nothing but Joan (“sings too pretty” indeed! Keep your opinions to yourself, Bib*). Meanwhile Fanning’s Sylvie keeps a note of normality, a good, independent soul snookered by a mysterious past a massive talent. My heart bled for her when she watches her boyfriend perform on stage seeing that he is entering a world where she cannot follow.

For Turbo Shellamalam himself, his Dylan is pitch perfect: downcast, with the a mutter like a faulty fan belt, and the dead eyes of a shark. But when he steps up and starts to sing, either in quite hospital wards or festival stages his poetry and that fan belt voice snags the heart and sends a thrill across the nerves, wether you’ve heard it for the first time or a thousandth. The music is undeniably beautiful but its up to the viewer to see if its outweighed by his massive a*sh*lery (don’t look at me, dear reader, every time I watch Amadeus I’m right in Salarie’s corner. As the youths say, Go off, King! Fight G-d and destroy that brilliant jerk!) Shambleman off ways his stupid chuckles and negging ways by showing the artist slowly deformed by the weight of his fame. He diminishes under the hungry eyes of his fans, (first time I’ve seen the female gaze used for evil, all those ravenous groupies) becoming a crumpled tin can in fancy clothes, hiding the pearl of his true self inside.

Still there’s something off about the stakes of the movie. We begin with Dylan taking a huge risk and ends with him doing the same: the night he “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It’s pitched as an artist regaining his freedom, but it feels like an act at the expense of everyone else. It feels like a defeat.

Norton’s Seeger has Fred Rodgers-esque aura of sweetness and utter faith that music can bring people together to change the world for the better. And his heartbreak when the boy he took in off the street wants trample on that dream (not only for Seeger but Baez, Sylvie, anyone else who isn’t tied to his star) seems a perfectly proportional response. The moment Dylan goes electric comes across less like a musical paradise shift and more like the murder of a dream, a shift to the society who values not connection or poetry doing whatever you want, damn the consequences. It’s telling that while the last we see of Dylan is him riding off into the sunset, abandoning Guthrie for his next life of fame and fortune, Seeger, the major folk star is helping strike his own festival, pitching in, despite everything, whatever hard rain might fall.

* said the critic, opinionatedly.