A Complete Unknown
There were moments while watching the film A Complete Unknown when I was almost in tears. This was not because of the nostalgic revisit to Dylan’s music that I grew up with, powerfully though the film recreates its beginnings. Well, partly, of course. But mostly because of dissonance and disappointment across the decades since.
The tradition of US folk-protest music (Guthrie, Seeger et al) seemed to have found its new cool, incisive chieftain in early 1960s Dylan, musically responding to Civil Rights, Vietnam, and assorted other national and global crises. He was foremost among those who articulated the ambitions of new generation of youth, rejecting the failures, divisions and hypocrisies of their elders.
What sadness to watch this all recalled a week or so after the inauguration of President Trump, and at a time of so many cruel conflicts. The Times Don’t Be A Changing, very much it seems, in the end.
A Complete Unknown doesn’t attempt to explore the inner character of the young Dylan very deeply. It is content to show the enigmatic surface of an artist that, above all, didn’t want to be corralled into anyone’s pen, be they fellow musicians, fans or managers and label bosses. The film is right to take this tack. (Contrast the same director’s far more psychologically penetrating study of Johnny Cash in Walk the Line.)
Instead, the film is led almost entirely by the songs- which tell the story best. Especially the transition from folk-protest to the harder, allusive and elusive rock material.
More than any character acting (excellent though Timothee Chamalet is in the role), the songs show Dylan fashioning his own, defended world, where he’s free to meditate, scorn or be tender, to create narratives surreal or direct, visions public or private.
The film’s title signifies its limits. Beyond the songs, Dylan was and is, more or less, Completely Unknowable.
Feb 2025
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