When the trailer landed this week for A Complete Unknown, the latest Bob Dylan biopic, even hardcore Dylanologists and lifelong fans would have struggled to stifle a yawn.
Into a clip lasting less than two minutes, director James Mangold has managed to cram many instantly recognisable signifiers of Dylan’s electrifying rise in the early 1960s. In the lead role, we see Timothée Chalamet pacing the streets of New York City in a peaked cap and carrying a guitar case; strumming 1962’s foreboding A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall; donning the 1965 electric phase’s tight suit and shades with a perpetual ciggie on the go, and blazing through upstate New York countryside on his motorbike, obviously presaging the 1966 accident that altered the course of the master songsmith’s career.
Already it feels like this well-worn narrative will be handled like a fusty old history lesson. Framing them, we hear the grey-haired folkie Pete Seeger eulogising the skills of the young arriviste; how hearing him play is like “getting a glimpse of the future”. At the end we see the young Dylan practising, presumably in Pete Seeger’s living room, before sheepishly admitting: “That’s all I’ve got so far.” Evidently underwhelmed but attempting to be supportive, Seeger’s young daughter concludes: “Good start!”
For the movie itself, the teaser’s anything but a good start: it looks like a boring story, way over-familiar to most pop aficionados, spiced up (aka dumbed-down) in time-honoured Hollywood fashion with lashings of love interest, as smouldering Chalamet snogs a succession of young admirers including Monica Barbaro, a baleful brunette we’re meant to believe is folk siren Joan Baez.
Much as I did when the advance heat began for this year’s One Love, a film about Bob Marley, I feel increasingly alienated by this latest crop of simplified but somehow far-fetched dramatisations of pop’s classic era. I found Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla all but unwatchable, often facile and blank in its presentation of what must have been complex situations during Elvis Presley’s military service, and Baz Luhrmann’s all-purpose Elvis wasn’t much better. Who knows what horrors await in Sam Mendes’s forthcoming four Beatles films, with the obvious risk of quadrupling the bland-out.
In the years following the 1960s and 70s, those culturally explosive years, Hollywood left well alone.
On release in 1991, Oliver Stone’s The Doors got a right old kicking for making myth out of recent documented history, and for casting a porky Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison. But viewed with hindsight the film was pretty good: atmospheric and in tune with the band’s exploratory, flamboyant essence.
The difference now is that, in the intervening decades, the sagas of classic-rock’s big-hitters have been told and retold many times, in movies, documentaries, magazines and every other medium – none more than Dylan’s.
The irony is that Dylan’s biography is more problematic than most to represent on screen, because it’s largely a mystery. The often elusive brilliance of his lyrics, and the restless evolution of his music through self-reinventions, remain wonderfully exciting for listeners following his creative arc, but they are almost impossible to dramatise – short of having waffly characters telling you how brilliant he was.
After that ’66 bike crash, the man born Robert Zimmermann in 1941 withdrew from public life. He had become horrified by the monster he’d created under his assumed name, was challenging authority, pumped full of drugs, causing controversy with every flick of his finger, deeply disgusted by media intrusion and by having to shoulder the unwanted responsibility of being labelled the “voice of his generation”.
Since then, he has lived a life of such fierce privacy that any attempt to piece together a narrative of the past 58 years would be a work of speculation, imagination or, at worst, fiction. In the 1970s, one so-called Dylanogist called AJ Weberman was so desperate for clues he resorted to searching through the rubbish in the bins outside Dylan’s New York apartment.
So media-shy was Dylan that circa 2001, an unauthorised biography by the British journalist Howard Sounes revealed that, between 1986 and 1992, Dylan had secretly been married to his backing singer, Carolyn Dennis – they even had a daughter together, without the public having the faintest knowledge.
Would it have been possible in the age of smart-phones and social media? Possibly not, but the fact remains that, apart from a divorce from his wife Sara Lownds in 1977 and that he’s been on what he calls a “Never-Ending Tour” since 1988, very little is known about the life Dylan has led since he was 25, when he came off his Triumph Tiger 100 in the roads around Woodstock.
For that reason, movies about him have always centred on his early-career rise, when events and romances are documented as facts. Judging by its title and teaser, A Complete Unknown would appear to have followed suit, unless the film-makers are holding earth-shattering revelations close to their chest.
Most notably, Martin Scorsese persuaded Dylan to give an unprecedentedly lengthy on-camera interview for 2005’s documentary No Direction Home (Scorsese, like Mangold, titled his effort after a line from the chorus of Dylan’s mid-’60s anthem of generational disaffection, Like A Rolling Stone). That interview only loosely went into the loss of professional confidence Dylan suffered after the crash, when critics turned against the more reflective music he made thereafter.
Two years later, Todd Haynes’ film, I’m Not There, served up a “non-linear” biopic of those fledgling ’60s years, with six different actors, ranging from Richard Gere and Christian Bale through to Cate Blanchett, each representing a different facet of Dylan’s creativity – a laudably experimental approach that cleverly sidestepped the sheer tedium of plodding through the history anyone interested enough actually to watch the movie would already know. Which brings us back to A Complete Unknown, whose scant advance materials suggest a film heading squarely for that particular snooze zone.
Might there be positives? Well, young Chalamet definitely has Dylan’s hooter and frizzy hairdo, and the 28-year-old star of Dune and Wonka appears to have affected an appropriately nasal whine for voicing the initial folk material.
Approximation alone, however, will never suffice. Mangold should hopefully know the difference, after the critical and commercial success of Walk The Line in 2005, in which Joaquin Phoenix put in a performance as Johnny Cash that really seemed to get to grips with the country/rock & roll star’s troubled soul.
If, against the odds, Chalamet has achieved that kind of depth in his characterisation of Dylan, A Complete Unknown may yet not be castigated as the turkey it thus far resembles.
Five rock greats who deserve their own biopic
Sinead O’Connor
The tale of how the Irish singer-songwriter suffered shocking maternal abuse, before striking gold with a Prince cover (she disliked him when they met – cue lively cameo), then losing everything after speaking out against abuse in the Catholic church, would make for meaty drama
Marvin Gaye
For soul music’s “Trouble Man”, fame accruing from his early Motown hits and masterpiece album, What’s Going On, brought only drug addiction, two divorces, financial ruin, exile in Belgium and eventually getting shot dead by his father when he intervened in an altercation between his parents.
The Kinks
Fraternal rivalry on an industrial scale marks the rise of Ray and Dave Davies from north London to Stateside stadia, one of them almost getting decapitated by a flying cymbal in an onstage bust-up, and Ray getting shot in later life on the streets of New Orleans. No happy endings here, though: the brothers’ relationship remains volatile to the last.
The Fugees
The New Jersey hip-hop trio of Lauryn Hill, Pras Michel and Wyclef Jean had it all in the early 1990s, making two of the biggest rap albums of all time, before disagreements about just about everything blew them apart. Recent efforts at reconciliation and reunion were scuppered by the Covid pandemic – so near yet so far.
Fleetwood Mac
Still no substantial biopic of the most inwardly troubled band in rock history, who suffered not one but two divorces within their ranks, amid colossal narcotic misbehaviour. This month’s emotional performance from Stevie Nicks in Hyde Park, which almost served as a mass day of mourning for the late Christine McVie, would make a fitting final scene.
