“A Complete Unknown” cuts out important details in the life of a colossal, complicated artist

You don’t have to be a Dylanologist to know or even sense that “A Complete Unknown,” opening Dec. 25, simplifies Bob Dylan’s early professional life and tones down his furiosities. To a certain extent, it hardly matters: Dylan is such a distinctive artist and fascinating personality that even when smoothed out, he’s still unusually sharp-edged, at least by Hollywood standards. The intrinsic joys of “A Complete Unknown” – a story of Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961, his rise to fame as a folk singer-songwriter, and his life risking everything in 1965 to become a plug-in noisemaker Rockstar – point out the purpose and pitfalls of all biographies. If Bob Dylan didn’t exist, he would be a compelling protagonist in a compelling but conventional drama about a musician doing what Dylan did. There’s just one catch: Such powerful and diverse characters have never been invented by screenwriters. They are only adapted in biopics – even in veiled pictures like “Citizen Kane.”

The subterfuges and omissions inherent in the format – like the condensation of four eventful years into just over two hours – are evident from the start in “A Complete Unknown.” Timothée Chalamet plays the film’s young hero, who I awkwardly call Bob to distinguish him from the real Dylan. Bob drives to New York in the back of a station wagon, the driver is unknown, the small talk between them is non-existent, and he is dropped off at the open mouth of a tunnel. He soon finds his way to Greenwich Village, stumbles upon a bar where folk musicians meet, and receives instructions from one of them on how to find the New Jersey hospital where the chronically ill Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is incarcerated is. But who does Bob know in town? Where will he stay? How does he start his musical career?

The film offers answers that range from empty to artificial, ignoring practicalities and manipulating dates and names to concentrate the drama on a small number of personalities. The main maneuver in these early scenes is to emphasize the role of veteran folk singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) in Bob’s first breakthroughs, so that Bob’s eventual adoption of what Seeger had disparagingly referred to as “electrified instruments” in 1965 makes the loss of his friendship all the more so perceived more clearly as the price to be paid.

The details that are cut out are important, not least because they embody the spirit of the times: how a young musician without a day job finds a place to stay in the Village is even more a symbol of the times than the exaggerated precision of the costumes, hairstyles and simulacra of street life from the film. Without the anchor of material reality, the artist’s life is reduced to a simple story of floating above banalities and complications – a story that is easily broken down into its few dramatic lines, as if the stars had aligned from the beginning. What’s lost is the way a colossal spirit like Dylan handles everyday challenges with a heightened sense of style and daring.

Thanks to a folk club performance hosted by Pete, Bob becomes an overnight success, marked by rave reviews in the scene Just and a record deal arranged by his aggressive manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). Bob gets into his first professional conflict: the record label Columbia rejects his original songs and only lets him do cover versions of folk classics. As for his own music, he plays it at open mike nights and hootenannies, and at one of these casual gigs he meets a young artist named Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who is very close to the real Suze Rotolo. She recognizes his greatness, encourages him to stand up for himself and introduces him to the city’s cultural life. They become a couple, but as Bob’s career advances and Sylvie travels to Europe for a few months to study, he finds himself in the company of a competitor and admirer, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the leading star of the popular scene, who is also in a relationship begins with him.

The best scenes of “Bob and Joan” revolve around the conflict between two strong-willed artists in the same field, capturing Bob’s unyielding arrogance and Joan’s doting but covetous appreciation. When Bob, the newbie, hears Joan for the first time in a club before his own debut there, he tells the audience that he finds her music “pretty,” adding, “Maybe a little too pretty.” When she was about a year old When they get together later, he compares their songs to “an oil painting in a dentist’s office.” (She subtly replies that he’s “kind of an asshole.”) But when she hears him privately singing a new song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” she asks him to give it to her so she can record it first. She recruits him to perform with her in a duo, and even when their relationships go wrong and there are arguments on stage, she maintains their musical partnership, which appears above all artistic and professional.

In contrast, Bob’s relationship with Sylvie reveals differences that shed more light on his character and his philosophy of life. Sylvie admires the man as much as the artist, but then realizes that she barely knows the man – she is surprised to learn that “Dylan” is his pseudonym and upset that he doesn’t tell her anything about his family, his hometown etc. told. his past. He responds with an observation that seems like a credo: “People invent things, talk about whatever they want.” (For example, he had told her in detail about working at a fair, which he had not done.) When she responded points out she Bob talks about what really happened to her and the people she really knows. He replies, “Do you think that defines you?” He lives in a realm of self-creation, where the mythology of the artist is part of the art itself. Still, she caps the argument with an insight so critical that it is a major failure of the film not to pursue it further: “They are ambitious. I think that scares you.”

Sylvie, a normal person, attributes regular inhibitions and self-doubt to Bob, although he betrays none. He understands what it takes to be successful and actually describes it to her the day they meet: “If someone wants to capture your attention on a stage, you have to be some kind of freak. . . . You can be beautiful or ugly, but you cannot be plain.” The ordinary is the enemy and the danger. What seems to frighten the film’s Bob is not his ambitions, but the possibility of not fulfilling them. He shapes his entire being to achieve what he sets out to do, exposing his identity to the heat of the same crucible from which his songs emerge. Bob’s creation of a self that connects with his music to make it and himself known to audiences is the energy on which “A Complete Unknown” is based.

But the bio-pic does not meet the requirements of this powerful topic – neither in terms of content nor in tone. “A Complete Unknown” conveys Bob a laughable naivety about money (e.g. his apparent surprise when he received a royalty check for ten thousand dollars) and nothing but unease about his sudden fame. He writes to his new friend Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook): “It sneaked up on me and pulverized me. To quote Mr. Freud: I’m getting pretty paranoid.” (When asked if he’ll have children later, he replies, “Thousands of them.”) Another moment in the film surprised me with its undeveloped abruptness: Sylvie sits at home and watches watching a television broadcast of the March on Washington in which who was supposed to be singing in support of the civil rights movement, but Bob Dylan. How? Who arranged it? What happened while he was there? Bob’s experience with such a historical event is omitted; The film only shows his public side.

“A Complete Unknown” also leaves out the Beatles, whose overwhelming popularity was an example that struck Dylan like lightning. The end of the film, a great set piece, is his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which outraged many in the audience and behind the scenes. Bob joins the pop paradigm and enters the world stage. The script gives no hint of such ambition; Rather, it connects Bob’s change of style to the enthusiasm he expresses for Little Richard and Buddy Holly, and to his joy at hearing a new friend, Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison), play electric guitar. It completely ignores what rock could satisfy and what the niche world of folk could not: the will to power.