Your Own True Love
On James Mangold’s A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, "Biofic," and the Living Wake of Bob Dylan
Cool that the first voice you hear singing in James Mangold’s long-gestating Dylan-biopic A Complete Unknown (2024) belongs to Woody Guthrie. The man himself, not an actor playing him. The footage onscreen is of a mostly obscured Timothée Chalamet as young Bobby—at an angle that would conceal his identity if we didn’t already know who the star of the movie is—stowed away in the back of a family station-wagon that he’s catching a ride in from parts westerly. “So long, been good to know ya,” sings long-ago Woody, in his signature earnest and ingratiatingly hokey register, on the approach to New York City. What was written as a Dust Bowl lament begins to take on different meanings, in this movie mainly concerned with Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame.
Last year, around this time, I drove back east from a six-week California apartment swap and made a stop-off in Kansas City for the AWP conference. Just as vacuum cleaner salesmen of yore filled convention halls every so often, so too do the writers and editors and MFA program administrators who make up the wider writing community; it was my first time attending with the responsibility of overseeing a table. For the better part of a week, convention attendees mill by, and you do your level best to attract their attention to your weird little project. There’s a busking element to it all, albeit one anchored by the look and feel of the publication you’re there to represent, and not something so ephemeral and teasing as a song. After closing shop on the final day, rather than go out for a last merry-go-round of nightlife, I hustled my dented Honda Civic toward Tulsa, OK. I didn’t know when I’d next be passing through the middle of the country, and at the end of a shorter-than-expected drive, there I was in the Greenwood District, on Reconciliation Way, home to both the Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan Centers.
As I’ve documented elsewhere I’m a thoroughly far-gone Dylan fan. I know more than the general outlines of his story, or at least think I do, and of Guthrie’s; going back for over a decade now I’ve caught a Dylan show whenever he passes through New York. It’s a pleasure to hear how the songs change each year when refracted by the prism of skilled musicians who comprise his current band. For Dylan, perhaps, it’s a way of staying a step ahead of pure unadulterated nostalgia, a forced Play the Hits! march; not only is he, now thoroughly embarked on his eighth decade, still producing new work, but even the old stuff is adopting different guises. The fracturing of self, and of romance, and of grand political aims is still today, as it was then, native to his quintessentially American project. I don’t want to call Dylan a deconstructionist, per se, but his work undoubtedly complicates the far more straight-ahead output of his idol Guthrie, in both political valence and self-presentation.
I was on my own, but had a fine enough time taking in the Dylan Center: behold, the iron entrance gate ornamented by wheels and spikes welded by the man himself; the fractally vertiginous documentary film room where the balladeer’s life and work spins against the cavalcade of history like a baby’s mobile; the teeming artifacts of a fast and whirling time, the concert-used harmonicas and leather jackets and lyrics scrawled and scratched out on fancy hotel stationary, the bursting bag of fan mail dating to his motorcycle accident; the little “recording” studio in the back that grants visitors, young and sometimes older, a chance to play around with the levels on isolated tracks for some his songs, both hit and lesser known. All of this born out of a mass obsession ignited in the early ’60s, the artist become emblematic of a time in a way that is far tougher today for those striving to break out, when our icons are more tech oligarchs who own the platforms than dedicated artists who need the platforms to be known. Is it possible that we have too much information about our contemporaries—and that, on whatever level, familiarity ultimately breeds contempt when it comes to the necessary conditions for awe and wonder?
Speaking of the known versus the mystifying, why in the world, people asked after my trip, is the Bob Dylan Center located in Tulsa? Minnesota, where he’s from, would have made sense. Or New York City, where he made his name. Or even, in the spirit of small town life, Saugerties, NY, close to where for a run of years he attempted a picket fence existence. Maybe Santa Monica, in proximity to where Dylan bankrolled a coffee shop (that closed around the time of the pandemic) and has been said to have lived mainly since the ’80s? The answer has to do with who ponied up for his archive and their stated plans for it, but that purchase is one that required Dylan’s approval. And the stated plan had everything to do with Guthrie. A city in one of the most rural and Republican-voting states in the country, known for wide-open skies, the Osage tribe, Bible-thumping, and long, barren highways, is also the one in which Guthrie grew up, the state after which all those Dust Bowl migrants from within the country’s own borders were known, self-effacing people let loose of their roots to take to the road in search of work, the subjects of so many original songs in the American songbook. There’s a kind of beauty to that, isn’t there, in contemplating the endless sweep of posterity, the Dylan Center set down over the dust beside the one honoring the artist and performer in whose identity young Bobby first explored the vestments of his own?
***
‘Biopic’ is how the category is generally named when it comes to retelling an icon’s life story on film, but Biofic is probably the more accurate label, whatever the medium. It isn’t simply a question of whether or not to “print the legend,” in accordance with the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), but of how much emphasis to place on a regurgitation of the facts. No, you don’t want to stray too far. But the facts exist, and are available elsewhere for those with a dedicated interest in the subject. What’s more important by far, for biofic: 1) which themes and motifs are chosen for centering this retelling?; 2) how credible are the character portrayals regarding the essence of the dramatis personae?; 3) whether or to what degree the changes to the historical record foster outright backwards or harmful understandings of the actual lives under representation? and perhaps most importantly 4) does this retelling of an old story resonate for a contemporary audience? I’m tempted to call the practice of fact-checking biofic a “cottage industry,” but ‘industry’ might not be right, because on the internet I’m not sure whether anyone who does the work is getting paid. All the same, a viewer who watches a purported true-life story on screen can now go online afterwards and type ‘what’s true v false in [insert fave biofic]’ and be reasonably assured of a bevy of results. (See, for example, Elijah Wald’s social media posts regarding Pete Seeger and Ray Padgett’s recent interview with Terri Thal.) New work provides the occasion for a surge of interest in such questions. As the writer, tinker with the truth a little: stretch it here, taper it there, have some fun. But people are ultimately going to find out where liberties were taken—at least those who care to know.
When the subject is Dylan, who himself reveled in fantastical misrepresentations of his origins, any storyteller will encounter extra temptation to wander off the path of established fact. If what’s desired is the unvarnished truth, or something like it, Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967) and Scorcese’s No Direction Home (2005) already exist, not to mention numerous other documentary films, biographies, and scholarly texts. While Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2008) remains to my mind the pinnacle of cinematic Dylan biofic, A Complete Unknown arrives as a worthy addition to the genre, speaking directly to the youth of today, just as Dylan spoke to the youth of his own era.
I recall a short story from my MFA years by a fellow student, Marie-Helene Bertino (then a complete unknown in her own right), whose premise was that a young woman brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving dinner with her family. The audacity of the premise transfixed me at the time, and I heard positive reviews from fellow students before chancing to lay eyes on it. As Michael Cunningham, our program’s ‘Oh Captain, My Captain,’ was wont to say, “A fiction writer is able to do whatever he can get away with,” before adding with a wry megawatt smile, “but no one’s ever gotten away with very much.” As if daring us each to put his aphorism to the test. The way Bertino handled the Dylan character in her story was to cast him essentially as an unspeaking cypher; the story was more about the dynamics for the young woman narrator of bringing a male celebrity into her mother’s humble Philadelphia home and the chaos that ensues. (Seem to recall a punch being thrown, by a jealous ex or an angry brother, though I might be only imagining that.) I enjoyed the story, but bridled a bit at this handling, the delimitation of her Dylan, once christened as the voice of his generation, to a kind of gnomic Chaplin-esque role. The audacity, indeed. At the same time, the Dylan of our own era had adopted a remarkably similar bearing from at least the early aughts onward: staring out, stone-faced, and rarely if ever addressing his audiences beyond the raspy crooning of his lyrics. (Which, sure, if you love Dylan, contain vast pageantries of experience.)
Such literary sleight of hand isn’t really an option on screen. I’m Not There took on the dilemma of whom to cast as Dylan and give him voice by assigning the role to four, five, six, I forget exactly how many actors. Chalamet, in agreeing to the lead part, carries a greater weight on his sleight shoulders than any other performer has before, applying the heat of his own fame to mimicking young Bobby who first broke onto the scene by mimicking Woody Guthrie. And yes, that’s Chalamet doing the singing. Mangold’s movie appears conscious of this nesting doll effect, down to the high-wire acts of those enlisted to play Pete Seeger (Ed Norton), Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) all committing themselves in kind to musical performance; the movie presents to contemporary audiences as a sort of Dylan-ing of every musician on screen by the actors playing them: energetic, nervy, at least a touch shambolic, but knowingly so, and beautiful in the commitment to re-enlivening these figures, just as Dylan once re-enlivened the music and persona of Woody Guthrie: imitation as the highest form of flattery. There’s something here that gets at the core of what Hollywood does, or can do, at its best. Chalamet’s singing isn’t perfect, and imperfect in a way that is certainly different from Dylan’s own signature imperfections… but it works, because the actor commits, and the lyrics carry across the meaning, now rendered as moments in a dynamic story sprung from life as lived, and not as hoary artifacts of a bygone era. This is, by the way, what Dylan’s greatest work reads as often being about: the freedom of a conscious mind to bristle at or embrace choice in the shadow of history’s big Catherine wheel.
Now, I’m just one more of the overeducated to have waxed rhapsodic in the direction of the celebrity figure Dylan cuts, and it isn’t so tough to imagine an audience with the guy circa the Dont Look Back era when he gamely made himself available, as a primary avatar of hip, to shoot the breeze with just such as my type: Hey, man, you just want me to say what you want me to say. At a time predating the likes of the Twitter hellscape, the public spectacle of a celebrity pushing back on his audience’s attachment to him has to have felt revolutionary, in one way or another. We live in a more polished, cleaner edged, antiseptic, P.R.-laden era embodied by the likes of Taylor Swift (whose “Eras” tour of shuffling between various personas seems like a sophisticated commercial outgrowth of the career of Dylan by way of the career of Bowie by way of the career of Madonna by way of…), the regimentation of which would seem to have taken final form in the omnipresent lattice of our social media platforms. For those in their 20s now, living without these platforms may seem all but unimaginable. Performers generally don’t step out of line because any stray remark, however flippant or knowingly ironic, can be blown up in a way that risks subsuming a successful career (for those not thoroughly established), or else kicking one out of orbit. What has become fashionable within artistically aspirational circles in response to that dynamic is a sort of deliberate lack of polish not dissimilar in tenor to Dylan’s unadorned Guthrie-speak: forget spelling, grammar, saying the proper thing, just be real, my friend. And at the same time, the silo-ed categories of personhood lie always in wait, ready to swallow anybody up within a prescribed orthodoxy. Drawn out volatility that shows no devoted allegiance to any given online tribe is isolating, and those who embody it tend to have to carry that weight alone in a way that can feel crushing.
Mangold’s movie does exceedingly well from the start at presenting Dylan as a kind of proto-social network poster: the lyrics of the first song that Chalamet sings, “Song to Woody”—in a fictionally inflected moment that smartly blends Dylan’s actual first visit to the hospitalized Guthrie with Dylan’s first time meeting Seeger, and the film’s somewhat fanciful vision of Seeger adopting young Dylan as a protégé and enlisted member of his pious resistance orthodoxy—plays on screen as a fresh and real “post” by the young artist, accounting for himself in a transparent manner for an audience: “I’m out here a thousand miles from my home/ Walkin a road other men have gone down…” As a member of that audience you see the precarity of his presence there, Dylan before Guthrie mirrored at some sixty plus years remove by Chalamet before us. (No matter that, in the imagined Jersey hospital, Chalamet is no more than a smattering of miles from where he was born.) The thing about Dylan the star is that he wasn’t supposed to be there, and just as easily could not have been (a sense evoked with killer precision by the perfectly selected clip of a plaintive harmonica solo, at the conclusion of Haynes’ I’m Not There) if he hadn’t caught the breaks that he did, if young Robert Zimmerman didn’t surrender to the sort of madness that drove him to put himself out there in the first place. He came to the lights from a long way off.
Some critics have remarked on how the movie honestly portrays Dylan as a negging jerk to the women on whose good graces he depends—as Barbaro’s Baez puts it, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” casting him in shades of Daniel Day-Lewis’ volatile aesthete from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread—but Dylan wasn’t of a refined coastal milieu, what now is cast as “the elite,” like Baez or the Suze Rotolo stand-in character, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). To have allowed the relative power of one of these women—Baez, the Palo Alto-raised, previously anointed folk star, or Russo, the plugged-in New York City girl with all the correct politics—to have swallowed him up completely would have been to lose what made Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan. At the same time, a viewer of the movie might conclude that for him to have given himself over completely would have been the marker of true love. If only this alternate universe Bob Dylan, no star but just an ordinary citizen, were enough for her to love in turn.
Dylan, in the movie and perhaps life too, ends up playing one amorous connection off the other, without even fully meaning to; at the conclusion, this interplay of unwelcome feelings happens against his expressed wishes… It’s just unavoidable in a circus when the way that you mark your path is to sing beyond the closed circle of coupled intimacy for which leveler hearts have long ago settled, burning to forge instead an audience from the public stage. Doing so comes at a cost to the private heart, which A Complete Unknown, like Dylan’s life and work, makes abundantly clear. He didn’t arrive in New York City a knowing cad, but a squirrelly, wanderlusting boy, in need of some motherly attention while working hard at projecting an image of ferocious independence. One of the movie’s more wonderfully small moments comes when Russo, returning from a months-long trip during which she allowed her lover Bobby to occupy the apartment that she’s paying for, observes that oh, great, he has finally learned to brew coffee for himself. But we know that the coffee was brewed in her absence by new lover Baez, not Bobby, and Chalamet’s Bobby mutters an embarrassed, half-inscrutable nothing by way of assent to her mistaken perception. We suddenly are reminded of how young these people were, no matter that Dylan was at the same time the author of lyrics that cut across place and time in monumental fashion—and Suze/Sylvie the young woman whose largesse of spirit effectively gave birth to those searing words.
It’s a little sexy, a little confused, a little sweet, and a little, yes, interpersonally doomed—at least until such time, A Complete Unknown suggests, as the ascendant, self-enraptured Bob might be able to see around himself, his hungers, his tumultuous and growing egotism. Fanning’s Sylvie tells Chalamet’s Bob toward the movie’s climax that when she’s with him she feels like it’s the performer always spinning plates. Chalamet says, but he likes that guy, the variety show plate-spinner, and it’s a real A Doll’s House moment (all be the doll’s house Dylan is offering to her like an exploded opposite of the one in Ibsen’s play). The thing is, he’s seeing the image she’s invoked entirely from his side, not from hers, while still insisting that she carry on playing the role of his one true love. Fanning, in actuality an accomplished actress embodying Russo’s conscientious soul wary of the largest of public stages, responds that how he makes her feel is not like the performing spinner, but like one of the plates. If Dylan’s future catalog of lyrics is any indication the time of his seeing around himself arrived too late, at least for him and Suze, his "own true love” as early song “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” puts it. In an apocalyptic era marked by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dylan, a blink from being washed under and out of the spotlight, or fossilized by a Play-the-Hits! folkie orthodoxy, placed himself before that backdrop and gave mercurial voice to the first television-raised generation’s longing to speak in a meaningful way.
And after Dylan, the flood.
***
Albert Grossman has gone. Alan Lomax, too. Dave Van Ronk has gone. Bobby Neuwirth has gone. Muddy Waters. Johnny Cash has gone. Toshi and Pete Seeger. Woody, of course, long, long gone. Suze Rotolo, now, too. Over the decades when these old friends, comrades, mentors, and lost own true love of Dylan’s bowed out from life, the performer maintained a stonier and stonier face toward his audiences. Following the self-righteous, agonized on-stage jags of his religious years, Dylan seemed to adopt a gradual vow of silence. I recall at the end of a show on the Upper West Side’s Beacon Theater in maybe 2016 how a well-coiffed middle-aged woman in the audience commented once the lights had gone up on “What an asshole he is… Didn’t even introduce the band.” Not long after that, at an outdoor show in Shelburne, Vermont, with a state fair atmosphere, meaning no seats and you could walk right up to the foot of the stage, I watched Dylan notice an audience member whom he took to have a camera, then speak a few words sotto voce to a band-mate that must have been relayed from one ear to another until a bouncer was wading into the crowd just behind me and commanding the camera-holder to get out. Afterwards, Dylan seemed to lighten up, and I noticed that while he maintained the stony mask when facing the crowd, he repeatedly broke into an enormous smile, his shoulders vibrating with laughter, once he turned around to face the band. There he is, I thought, there’s Bobby. From that point forward, through the years presided over by our 45th American president, Dylan began introducing the band again, then smiling at the audience, then, at last, post-pandemic, riffing to the crowd on the Upper West Side: “It’s good to be back here in the Big Apple. George Gershwin lived here, I know that. Jackie O. Herman Melville…”
As the world has gotten undeniably darker, and more like a riotous carnival prophesied in one of his songs (insofar as it hasn’t always already been that way: “I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world/ Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’/ Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’/ Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’/ Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter”), Dylan has been growing looser. Maybe a little freer. If the intrinsic politics of some of his newer elegiac numbers (“Mother of Muses”) seem flatly at odds with the spirit of his older “finger-pointing” songs (“Masters of War”), well, don’t the American greats just contain multitudes, or didn’t you hear? It’s another thing entirely, as Dylan’s arc has emphatically made known, to expect an artist to adhere to a prescribed political orthodoxy all along the way.
In New York subway cars, buskers grind out raspy voiced incantations of “All Along the Watchtower.” Aspiring performers post selfie vids of themselves singing “Mississippi” from their bedrooms. Dylan’s grandson, Pablo, who worked first as a music producer, puts out albums that place him as yet another of the multitude of carriers in the hallucinatory poetic singer/songwriter tradition his grandfather pioneered. Maybe performance is always the truth is what you learn by getting closer and closer to the center of the circus.
As Dylan’s work proves, performance doesn’t necessarily imply falsity. It may just mean dislodged, out-of-joint, broken thrillingly free. May just mean remembers what others have long forgotten, or let fall out of mind. To make what’s on stage real may mean, at times, in a given era, to lose the bearings for the nuts-and-bolts that first gave shape to any sort of realness.
A Complete Unknown does forecast much of the Dylan to come beyond 1965, the juncture at which Mangold’s telling ends: the motorcycle accident; the longing to live a happily paired life hampered by a reflexive self-involvement and, yeah, a dash or two of misogyny; the religious years as suggested by his bond with Johnny Cash; the string of broken—or dislodged—romances; the obsession with boxing as a means of hitting back at those who would hit him; the muted bromances and slipping into and out of masks; his present-day passion for painting as inspired by “Sylvie”; the oddball championing of an authentic and unruly blues sound as suggested in this movie by the composite character “Jesse Moffette,” a raucous guitarist from the Mississippi Delta played by Muddy Waters’ son, Big Bill Morganfield. Norton’s rendition of Seeger wants everyone to make nice, to stay in the correct lane, but Moffette, and this Dylan, too, desire nothing more deep down than to buck suffocating convention. It’s a lesson, if we care to learn it, suggested by Angela Nagle’s sharply perceptive tract Kill All Normies. (Yeah, maybe her personal politics have gone overboard since then, but that doesn’t make the original thesis any less apt.)
Whenever a Great Artist blazes a path across our collective cultural memory, innumerable imitators arise in that wake. At the same time the exact path and modes that the Artist took effectively close behind him/her/them: awe and wonder are no longer possible when we already recognize a type. Mere imitators may sell units, but they don’t sustain serious interest, and in cultivating an obsessive following, especially in this data-rich day and age, everyone gets wise, maybe too wise. We have too much information about our contemporaries. A certain billionaire class, wealthy beyond measure on people’s data, do their best to cultivate a Steve Jobs-like awe and wonder around themselves by withholding their own. Isn’t so hard, if you squint, to imagine a more contemporary rendering of Dylan’s origin story in which the Joan Baez character, as a hard-edged feminist, takes lyrics from Bobby, then freezes him out of the spotlight rather than inviting him to share her stage as a co-performer. Which, after all, may have been the savvier move for her—if the spotlight alone meant everything, and not the substance of the songs that they sang. The one hand, Escher-style, drawing the other, with finesse and deep care. Isn’t so hard, either, to see an alternate version of the story where Sylvie Russo, rather than wilting from the spotlight that her Bobby inhabits with such ambivalence and gusto, moves to occupy it with him, or even “usurp” the attention from him. Nothing, we might recognize, is owed anybody. Everything, ultimately, is up for grabs, when the gravity goes, when people get to floating a few feet off the ground and grasping for something to hold on to. The character Sylvie’s politics are, after all, the more righteous politics. Dylan’s turn at Newport in ’65, as portrayed in the film, smacks of the reactionary, and is at the very least, a marked swerve in that direction—unless a viewer happens to believe Seeger’s regimented progressives are somehow the true reactionaries (Steve Bannon has a bridge he’d like to sell you, if so). Either of those variations on the story might have made a compelling—even more compelling, because less familiar?—spin on the Dylan origin myth, sure. But for either to exist, they require the solidity of the Dylan figure to rebel against. How does it feeeeeeeeel, and all that. We can count ourselves fortunate to have him.
Ultimately, though, A Complete Unknown isn’t just a story about an alternately spiteful and sweet artist, up from no where and aiming for the far horizon. If Dylan were only that, he’d never have made it. When you go back and listen to the first self-titled album, the one Mangold’s version of the story makes a point of showing, like Al Cody and Llewyn Davis’s self-titled debuts in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), sold hardly any units (at least before a successful follow-up), what you hear there are Dylan’s committed mimetics: of Dave Van Ronk, to be sure, but also, in an alternating register, of Woody Guthrie. One of the album’s two original tunes is dedicated to Guthrie, while the other is a straight-up imitation of another song of his. The thru-line motif of death (track titles include In My Time of Dyin/ Fixin’ to Die/ Baby, Let Me Follow You Down/ See That My Grave Is Kept Clean), perhaps an odd-seeming morbidity for a young man in his early 20s, makes sense when you consider that Dylan was in the presence of his idol Guthrie—whose body was wasting away, his former gifts for communication rapidly freezing up, stranded alone in that institution—and singing what he did as direct odes. (Scoot McNairy’s stricken Guthrie, immobilized and wide-eyed, pounding on a bedside table in appreciation for Dylan’s playing, is the lynchpin to A Complete Unknown’s feeling of authenticity: haunting and great, and he speaks hardly a word.) Dylan, in Mangold’s version and in life, showed humility and grace when it mattered. Yet rather than the complete original true-fire genius Mangold and Jay Cocks’ script casts him as, Dylan started off—and to this day, remains, even with the guitar-playing for the most part fallen away, his voice craggy and cavernous, that thin wild, mercury wit withheld, or dissipated onto the air over decades of touring—an omnivorous mimic par excellence. All the originality came roaring out of an extended period of faithful and focused mimesis. Artists these days, in part because they are encouraged to be, always seem to be in a race to establish a focus-grouped brand identity before they’ve allowed themselves to absorb enough of what came prior. Or so a critic might opine.
Young Bobby, anyhow, knew when to bow his head.
And just because it was a performance didn’t make it false.
This Machine Kills Fascists read the famous banner on Guthrie’s guitar. That work, it seems, never truly ends.
