Dylan Rebels: A Review of A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown is a film that celebrates the "creative spirit of the quintessential American songwriter" Bob Dylan and "tells the story of triumph of aestheticism over socialist realism."

Bob Dylan’s timing—not his musical timing but his social timing—has a knack for being either completely off or uncanny in its clairvoyance. The new biopic covering his life, A Complete Unknown, beginning with the young poet looking for Woody Guthrie in New York and ending with Dylan’s scandalous triumph over the folkies at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, is like that, too. He could be very wrong or perfectly placed—but he is always singular. As it happens, A Complete Unknown landed at the perfect time—it’s a natural fit for the post-Obama era we are now entering.

The film is interesting not just because it doesn’t hit the audience over the head with the sort of predictable, heavy-handed moralizing to which American audiences have become accustomed. It is interesting, in large part, because James Mangold (Walk the Line, Ford v Ferrari) directed a picture that celebrates Dylan’s singularity and the individualist genius that eviscerated the socialist realist tropes of his day. This is the story American needs now.

Socialist Realism was an artistic movement developed in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin with the directive to depict “life as it is becoming.” In practice this meant keeping the creative intelligentsia busy with articulating to the proletariat the way their current conditions would eventually matriculate into a communist utopia. In American shorthand, socialist realism came to mean left-wing propagandistic art dictated by institutions and designed to conform to easily quantifiable rubrics of social justice, the kind of aesthetic that squeezed the remaining signs of life out of mainstream pop culture during our own COVID closures.

In the beginning of his career, Dylan fell in with the Greenwich Village communist crowd and his first recordings reflect ideological affinity with that counterculture. A Complete Unknown is—somewhat faithfully—based on the folk musician and author’s Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! It recounts the performer’s break with the folkies, finalized in 1965 at the Newport festival he headlined and where, instead of delivering an orthodox acoustic performance, he shocked the crowd of fellow travelers with a commercially appealing bombast of rock-n-roll.

A Complete Unknown is not an overly political film and it doesn’t concern itself with Dylan’s intellectual maturation. The film only glances over his activism, most notably the performance at Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. It feels suitable to the subject matter—partly because the singer-songwriter himself is notoriously cryptic and partly, no doubt, because to show him moving away from protest songs and embracing an ostensibly conservative position would be a step too far for most in the contemporary social climate. There is no doubt that such an intellectual transformation took place—he wrote two pro-Israel tracks for his 1983 album Infidels, albeit in the ’80s that sort of thing was still welcomed on the left, and covered Cole Porter’s standard Don’t Fence Me In for last year’s Reagan biopic. Mangold doesn’t get fixated on politics; he does something better— he tells the story of triumph of aestheticism over socialist realism.

The folkies had their conventions about how the music that withstood the test of time — the music of the masses, a key component of any socialist realist creative universe — ought to be performed and policed the boundaries faithfully. Those conventions ultimately existed at the service of the Communist Party USA and the end goal of CPUSA is not racial harmony, freedom or constitutional order, but worldwide revolution. Dylan was a godsend to them—the generational visionary they were looking to exploit.

Just like the Soviet Socialist Realism that adhered to very strict aesthetic guidelines, American folkies were inflexible in their tastes. Their brightest star felt constrained by the canon and, naturally, was poised for a clash. He is depicted as a force of nature—a complete unknown to them. The musician’s rebellion is fundamentally American, populist, and serves as a timeless example of liberation from oppression. If Dylan didn’t bow down to the pinko artistic norms, we don’t need to list our pronouns on name tags and start every corporate meeting with land acknowledgments.

That is not to say that that A Complete Unknown is immune to the racial prescriptions common to a Hollywood production of the sort that have been germinating since the Civil Rights Movement and, since the election of Barack Obama and especially the COVID madness, have pushed to the side previously existing aesthetic criteria. The gratuitous scene in which the future Nobel laureate is drinking, jamming, and vibing—as the kids today would say—with Mississippi Delta Blues singer Jesse Moffette (Big Bill Morganfield) on live TV does nothing to advance the narrative or the structure of the film.

Although Dylan’s scandalous persona is well established and I have little doubt that he did, in fact, vibe with black musicians on multiple occasions, Jesse Moffette is a fictional character. There is no fathomable reason for the scene to exist other than to show that Dylan, his breakup with the CPUSA notwithstanding, was not a racist. It was a fun episode and I understand why an artist working within a socialist realist diktat would need to bend to the will of the censor at least occasionally, but it’s very sad that the filmmakers thought it was a point that needs addressing.

In this day and age, if a movie gets produced at all, it’s because there is an opportunity to showcase a diverse cast. A Complete Unknown is lucky to fit the bill—the Latina Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, the Japanese Eriko Hatsune as Toshi Seeger and a myriad of black talent, are all superb. Although I didn’t understand why Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash needed to be so cartoonish, all the other acting is most excellent.

Critics used the word hypnotic to describe Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. Like the folkies in Newport, I have nothing to add. Because he nails the performer’s eccentricities without making a shtick out of them and the chemistry between Chalamet and Monica Barbaro is visceral; the seduction scene, set against the backdrop of the Cuban Missiles Crisis, is spellbinding. Mangold’s touch is critical; the director cut his teeth on rock-n-roll romance cinema—see his 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line.

The part of Dylan’s mentor, Pete Seeger, is written as almost comically maternal. The card-carrying Communist is humbly bumbling childlike singalongs and oddball collectivist parables. But Edward Norton makes the character come to life as someone tragic and relatable. Another way to play him would be as a villain—after all Seeger admits to his brilliant protégé that the movement is using him to promote its political goals. That said, I’m far from certain that America is ready for a cinematic portrayal of CPUSA’s actual malignancy.

The high-profile Socialist Realist artists didn’t usually have happy endings. For instance, Socialist Realism’s founder Maxim Gorky lived his final years under house arrest in his Crimean mansion and, historians speculate, was poisoned by Stalin along with his son. I don’t know how aware Dylan was of any of this while in his 20s but, given that his grandparents were refugees from the Russian Empire, he was interested in the USSR. He might have had a clue.

I am grateful for a film that celebrates the creative spirit of the quintessential American songwriter. And while many of our socialist realist conventions are likely to stick around for awhile, A Complete Unknown is far from being a pick me of overzealous social justice entertainment. Beneath the occasional—and obligatory—woke etiquette, the message of resistance is unmistakable.

Photo Credit- Leonard Maltin