Dylan: Two-hundred people in that room and each one wants me to be somebody else, they should just let me be.
Neuwirth: Let you be what?
Dylan: I don't know. Whatever it is they don't want me to be.
A Complete Unknown is a 2024 American music biopic film directed by James Mangold, his second after Walk the Line, with a screenplay by Mangold and Jay Cocks, adapting Elijah Wald's nonfiction book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.
It follows a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) from 1961 to the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 as he shakes up his act on the Folk Music scene by going electric and siring rock as the voice of a generation, defining one of the most transformative moments in 20th century music.
The cast also includes Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, P. J. Byrne as Harold Leventhal, Norbert Leo Butz as Alan Lomax and Dan Fogler as Albert Grossman. Chalamet and the other actors performed the singing themselves.
For a broader and less formal depiction of Dylan's life, see I'm Not There.
A Hard Trope's A-Gonna Fall:
- The '60s: The film begins in 1961, climaxing with Dylan's performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The characters react to several pivotal moments in history around this time, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis phase of the Cold War and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
- The Ace: Dylan is already shown to be a gifted songwriter, but throughout the film he's shown to easily get a handle on various different types of music, aweing the other musicians.
- Adapted Out: Allen Ginsberg is not depicted in the film, despite being a big influence on Dylan during much of the time period that it takes place.
- Advertising by Association: "From Academy Award Nominee James Mangold, director of Walk the Line and Ford v Ferrari".
- Artistic License – History
- Sylvie Russo is loosely based on Suze Rotolo, Dylan's girlfriend from 1961-64. Dylan himself requested that the film not refer to Rotolo by name; and in a scene where fans are buying copies of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the cover art is always out of focus, enough to give a vague impression of what it is without clearly showing the iconic image of Dylan and Rotolo walking down the street.
- Dylan's climactic show at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is a composite of two live performances from around the same time. Dylan opening his set with "Maggie's Farm" to a mixed reaction from the crowd is from that very same festival
, while the heckler who yells "Judas!" and the crowd's mood turning from negative to positive after Dylan plays "Like a Rolling Stone" are from a concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester a year later. - This Vanity Fair article goes through other bits of artistic license in the film, which in general sort of mashes various elements of Dylan's life together.. Dylan did meet Woody Guthrie, but not in a hospital. Dylan never played "The Times They Are A-Changin'" at Newport. Johnny Cash didn't play at the 1965 Newport festival where Dylan went electric, but he did play there the year before.
- Betty and Veronica: Sylvie and Joan, respectively, for Bob. Sylvie is caring and stable and opens her home to Dylan. Joan is an artist in her own right, more of a kindred spirit to Dylan. He treats both of them terribly.
- Bittersweet Ending: Following his set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan gets the artistic freedom he long desired but it comes at the cost of alienating his fans and colleagues who are ardent supporters of traditional Folk Music, and on the personal side, his relationship with Sylvie is definitively over. It wouldn't be until decades later that his "electric" work became appreciated by folk fans.
- Bookends: "Dusty Old Dust" plays over the production logos, and again in the final scene of the film where Dylan visits Woody Guthrie for the last time.
- Brutal Honesty: Bob eviscerates Joan Baez's attempts at original songwriting.Bob: You try too hard. To write.
Joan: Really.
Bob: If you're askin'.
Joan: I wasn't.
Bob: Sunsets and seagulls. Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist's office.
Joan: You're kind of an asshole, Bob. - Casting Gag: Saturday Night Live's James Austin Johnson, famous for his Bob Dylan impression, cameos as a club M.C.
- Cool Shades: Dylan wears his iconic sunglasses on his face for about half of the film.
- Disabled Snarker: The fact he's in the hospital and, for most of the film, mute and bedridden, has done nothing to stop Woody Guthrie's sarcastic streak.
- Dude, Where's My Respect?: By the end of the film Dylan has been disrespectful if not outright contemptuous to almost everyone he's close to. The only people he doesn't mistreat are Guthrie, Cash, and the members of his band. Granted, those people encourage him to be what he wants to be, while most everyone else is pressuring him to live up to *their* vision of who Bob Dylan is. On the other hand, the women in his love life haven't done anything to deserve the way he treats them.
- Establishing Character Moment:
- When Dylan meets Guthrie in the hospital, the latter is mute and sickly. While Dylan and Seeger chat about his condition, Guthrie hands one of his business cards to Dylan. When Dylan turns it around, he sees what Guthrie had printed on it:Guthrie: I ain't dead yet.
- Pete Seeger is introduced trying to sing a protest song at his own HUAC hearing.
- When Dylan meets Guthrie in the hospital, the latter is mute and sickly. While Dylan and Seeger chat about his condition, Guthrie hands one of his business cards to Dylan. When Dylan turns it around, he sees what Guthrie had printed on it:
- The Gadfly: While Cash's motivation to convince Dylan to go electric can be seen as him wanting to see Dylan reach his full potential,
it can also be argued that he was also tired of the folk purism of Newport and was egging Dylan on to stave off his own boredom. - A God Am I: Played for Laughs when Dylan complains about Sylvia being gone from him for several weeks, since, as he put it, "God made the world in six days":Sylvie: Are you God, Bob?
Bob: Sylvie, how many times do I have to tell you? (Beat) Yes. (Sylvie chuckles) - Good Old Ways: Deconstructed with the Newport Folk Festival committee, with Bikel being the most open with his disapproval of any and all music that isn't folk, with zero regard about stifling Dylan's artistic progress. Their ardent disapproval of anything that's not traditional folk blinds them to the fact that they're losing touch with the wider culture that folk music is supposed to reflect.
- Groupie Brigade: By 1965, Dylan is being mobbed by fans whenever he shows his face in public.
- Happily Married: Seeger and his wife Toshi are a very loving, stable couple with three children, despite the former's run-ins with the law. It's a contrast to Dylan's much more turbulent relationships with the women in his life. They would be married an astonishing seventy years before Toshi's passing in 2013, just six months before Pete died as well.
- Hero of Another Story: Walk the Line, the previous music biopic directed by James Mangold, is pretty much what's happening to Johnny Cash whenever he's offscreen. Note that Cash plays "Folsom Prison Blues" at the 1965 Newport festival, and he's drunk in the morning after his performance at said festival—Cash's drug and alcohol problems were a main theme of Walk the Line and his 1968 concert at Folsom Prison was the triumphant climax. Similarly, there's the heavy implication that Dylan's colleagues and mentors have interesting stories going on whenever they aren't onscreen, particularly Seeger and Guthrie.
- Insult Backfire: When Joan calls Dylan "kind of an asshole" (see Brutal Honesty above), he replies, "Yeah, I guess so."
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Dylan is abrasive and dismissive of everyone around him. He's very apathetic to hurting his friends and partners' feelings and disregards almost anything they say or ask of him if he finds it even mildly inconvenient. Still, he clearly does care, which is shown most clearly with Sylvie and Guthrie, the only two people he shows any real vulnerability around.
- Lonely at the Top: The 1965 sequence opens with Dylan surrounded by phonies and hangers-on at a party.
- Nice Guy: Seeger is nothing but supportive of the new generation of folk artists including Dylan, even as the latter grows more and more discontent with with the folk music scene as a whole.
- Passing the Torch: From Woody Guthrie (and to a lesser extent Pete Seeger) to Bob Dylan. Guthrie is Dylan's personal hero, and the first music he plays in the film is a personal concert for Guthrie in the hospital, performing "Song to Woody" for him. He even gets a chance to play "Blowin' In The Wind" for Guthrie on the latter's iconic "This Machine Kills Fascists" guitar later on in the film. Guthrie is the only old-timer folk musician to never doubt Dylan's abilities; whenever Seeger has his own concerns, a visit to Guthrie's bedside always puts them to rest. In the final scene of the movie, Guthrie gets up out of his wheelchair for the first time while watching Dylan ride off into the sunset, confident that Dylan has become a powerful voice for the newest generation.
- Race for Your Love: Bob attempts this with Sylvie when he finds out she's leaving Newport via ferry. He catches her before she gets on, but she's already made up her mind and leaves anyway.
- Shout-Out: Bob and Sylvie go see Now, Voyager early in their relationship.
- Soapbox Sadie:
- Pete Seeger, to the point where he tries to sing a protest song during his own HUAC hearing.
- Baez is this too with her penchant for Protest Songs, and her relationship with Dylan falls apart when he doesn't share the same interest in social change as she does.
- The Spook: Dylan reveals almost nothing about his past, and a recurring theme is that none of the other characters can figure out who he actually is under the surface or what he wants. Sylvie only finds out that he's actually Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, MN, when she opens some scrapbooks in the apartment. The fact he keeps reinventing himself into new personas, and it isn't clear if any of them are realer than the others.
- Technician Versus Performer: Elements of this pop up in contrast between Joan Baez's angelic voice contrasting her subpar songwriting vs. Bob Dylan's ragged ramble and lyrical poetry. Dylan notes that she "sings pretty... maybe a little too pretty. Hmph."
- Titled After the Song: The film is titled after a lyric of Dylan's Signature Song "Like a Rolling Stone", which is sung by Chalamet in the trailer.How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone - Trolling Creator: In-Universe. At the 1965 Newport festival, Dylan knows the organizers want folk music. He knows the audience wants folk music. He plays his new electric set anyway. He even tells his band to "Play it loud" before they rip into "Like a Rolling Stone."
