The famous backlash against Bob Dylan’s switch to playing electric music in the mid-1960s is often misunderstood. It was not an objection based on musical aesthetics. Folk purists, such as the audience at Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and the man who shouted ‘Judas!’ at a Manchester show in 1966, were not enraged by the simple fact of the volume, rhythms, and brashness of rock and roll. Dylan’s adoption of what many saw as a popular fad was more a social question of the artist-audience relationship. By abandoning the acoustic folk paradigm in favour of rock, he was supposedly rejecting the communal, interactive aspect of performance (the singalong, the political unity through song) in favour of positioning himself as separate or aloof from his audience. As the critic Ian MacDonald put it, ‘this big sound ended the traditional relationship between artist and audience: listeners became implicitly demoted to passive spectators … Dylan had done a Napoleon: declared himself electric emperor.’

The absorbing and pacey film A Complete Unknown can be thought of as charting the course of this individuation, and the development of Dylan’s independent artistic voice, with a charismatic performance from Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. Directed by James Mangold (also behind the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line) and based on Elijah Wald’s non-fiction book Dylan Goes Electric! (2015), the film begins and ends with storied, almost biblical events in Dylan’s early career. It opens with him as an anonymous folkie visiting his hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) as the latter endures Huntington’s disease in hospital in 1961, and concludes with that famous plugged-in set at Newport. In between, we are mostly in New York to witness the development of Dylan’s preternatural songwriting, his rise to fame as the spurious ‘voice of a generation’, the ebb and flow of his relationships with friends, lovers, and fans, and the volatility of his character as it skids between causticity and sincerity, impatience and vulnerability.

In a biographical film such as this, plot is secondary to characterisation, thematic emphasis, and performances. The approach of Mangold and fellow screenwriter Jay Cocks is to view and define Dylan through his relationships. One is with the elder folk singer Pete Seeger (a predictably magnificent Ed Norton), who was a vital support in Dylan’s ascent. Here, Seeger is depicted as unfailingly wholesome but somewhat naïve. His failure to fully acknowledge the scope of Dylan’s artistry leads to upheaval between them, and indeed to the Newport debacle. Such lack of awareness cannot be said of the two key female figures in Dylan’s young adulthood: Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning, and based on Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo – the name change was reportedly requested by Dylan himself) and folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), with whom Dylan had a tempestuous affair. In A Complete Unknown, both understand Dylan in a way others do not, and both are presented as being more emotionally mature than the singer, as well as his intellectual equals (Russo/Rotolo introduced Dylan to one of his biggest influences, the poet Arthur Rimbaud, which goes unacknowledged here). There is a fine comic turn from Dan Fogler as Dylan’s scheming, ingratiating manager Albert Grossman, and Boyd Holbrook is enjoyable as a chaotic but gregarious Johnny Cash.

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown

Much has been made of Chalamet’s performance, and he is undeniably impressive. Learning thirty Dylan songs for the film and performing them live to camera is a sizeable feat of study and commitment, down to the intonation and timbre of the vocal. But it is the more subtle moments of Chalamet’s Dylan embodiment that resonate most. The actor has essentially perfected the ‘Dylan mumble’, to the point that in several scenes it is a challenge to understand him, and occasionally there is a one-word statement that is so charged with sardonic contempt that one might wonder how Dylan was so unconditionally adored by those sweet members of the folk scene in the first place. There is not a second when Chalamet lapses into caricature.

The film is not hagiographical. At times Dylan is petulant, childish, and arrogant, particularly with Baez, who becomes increasingly disillusioned with Dylan’s conceit as the film progresses and he is unfaithful to Russo. By 1965, when he is a cultural icon, he appears utterly spoilt.

These elements are important in the film’s attempt to explore Dylan’s nature around this time. A Complete Unknown does contain flaws, however. While it largely avoids buying into the artist-as-hero trope, there are too many instances of him playing a song and leaving someone conspicuously dazzled. By the umpteenth close-up of an observer’s thunderstruck face as Dylan performs, the impact of such a scene has long dissolved, and only a saccharine effect remains.

A full representation of an artist as famously elusive and changeable as Dylan is inherently difficult, probably impossible, in a ‘Hollywood’ treatment like this. The film is open to justified accusations of reductionism, and it certainly takes liberties with factual accuracy (one of many examples is that Seeger was certainly not at Guthrie’s bedside when Dylan visited the latter, as is the case here). If you accept the film as a conventional biopic that does not try to convey the full extent of Dylan’s ‘multitudes’ – as Walk the Line was with Cash – this is a fine work. Furthermore, it is easy to enjoy A Complete Unknown knowing that Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007) is also in the world. Surely the ultimate film about Dylan, that vastly more ambitious project embraced the contradictions of his life and persona by splintering his identity into multiple narratives using different actors (including Cate Blanchett as the version of Dylan in A Complete Unknown’s phase). I’m Not There does not view Dylan through the lens of the people around him, as Mangold’s film does: if A Complete Unknown defines Dylan according to his relationships, I’m Not There defined Dylan according to himself – or to put it more accurately, his selves.   

The titles of these two films (Mangold’s of course is taken from the line in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’) indicate the entrenched – and let’s face it, self-cultivated – idea of the unknowability of Dylan, who comes across so often as more myth than man. He was, and remains, committed to ambiguity and fluidity of character, consciously contrary, and stridently detached from any definitive personality, artistic style, or political conviction. Ultimately, Mangold and Chalamet do an admirable job portraying the Dylan mystery, within the confines of creating an accessible (and clearly Oscar-aimed) film.  

Finally, it is worth noting that to end the film with the Newport set is a rather arbitrary decision. Certainly, this pivotal event has assumed immense significance in the annals of popular music; its momentousness seems to increase every year. But absolutely nothing was resolved, either culturally or for Dylan internally, that day – his restlessness was only beginning. And of course, quite a lot happened to Dylan in the second half of the 1960s as well: the UK tour where he was called ‘Judas!’, a serious motorcycle accident in 1966 that required a lengthy recovery, marriage and children, more stylistic about-turns, drug use, and so on. There is a film in all that, too: A Complete Unknown is merely the first step on the electric emperor’s path. 

A Complete Unknown (Twentieth Century Studios) is in cinemas nationally from 23 January 2025.

The author wishes to thank The Edge Cinema, Katoomba.