101. A Complete Unknown
I.
There is a new film about Bob Dylan and the title A Complete Unknown is well chosen. After the credits roll, the mystery surrounding the singer remains (thankfully) intact. It is thrown at him several times during the film: what do you actually want? Who are you?
Timothée Chalamet gives a good Dylan. A good version of the character Dylan, I should say. Chalamet plays and sings all the songs — and there are many — with remarkable conviction. He makes it his own while staying true to the original work without lapsing into caricature. The other characters are also well done, especially Edward Norton who shines in his supporting role as Pete Seeger.
The film begins with Dylan arriving in New York in 1961 with nothing but a guitar. He visits his musical hero Woody Guthrie in hospital, plays him the moving Song To Woody and is then put up at the home of Seeger, himself a giant of folk music. Seeger hears Dylan’s talent and takes him to cafés in the artists’ quarter Greenwich Village, where he performs regularly. There Dylan meets his muse Joan Baez. She is already an established artist and because they perform together often and she champions Dylan’s work, his career takes off.
The film shows how this unfolds at breakneck speed. In depicting the emergence of the phenomenon Bob Dylan, the film skips over a great deal, sweeps unrelated events into one pile and takes considerable creative liberties with the story. I could fill an A4 page with inaccuracies, but for purists like me there is the excellent Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. Director James Mangold is not making A Complete Unknown in pursuit of historical accuracy — above all he is making a feature film with a certain dramatic arc that will appeal to newcomers too. I therefore see this film as another layer wrapped around an already thick onion that makes the precise origins of Dylan ever harder to see through.
Mangold has made a classic biopic, the kind they used to make twenty years ago. There is nothing subtle about it, but it works. Ultimately the film is mainly about an artist escaping a straitjacket and, despite everything, following his own path. There is nothing worse than an arrived artist, Dylan himself says in No Direction Home. “You have to keep constantly working to ‘become’ something.”
Fans of his older work will not always appreciate that. Dylan received a torrent of hatred when he decided to turn his back on his image as folk and protest singer. Later in his career he changed voice and identity countless more times. In No Direction Home you see how the young Dylan is surrounded by people who tell him what he wants to hear and laugh at all his jokes. When he is booed, you see him raise his game on stage. As if he draws energy from it. “The booing… I saw it differently,” Dylan recalls. “You have to realise that even kindness can suffocate someone.”
II.
Martin Bril always wrote so beautifully about the enigma Bob Dylan. “Of all the pop stars the world has come to know, Dylan is the least well-known, despite an entire bookcase having been written about him,” he observed. “Nobody knows what drives him; everything is speculation. You can fish in the career and oeuvre of Bob Dylan as intensively as in the Beulakerwijde lake — and catch just as little.”
I searched for some old posts by Bril and found the website of my favourite Dutch columnist in an abominable state. The site was probably sold after Bril’s death and the new owner has let it go to seed. An eternal shame, at the very least — we have lost a treasure trove of columns. Fortunately much is still preserved via the Wayback Machine.
Anyway, back to Bob Dylan. Bril’s column ‘Dylan through binoculars’ always stayed with me. In the piece, Bril is standing at a concert watching Dylan but cannot see him. A white hat deflects all the light away from him. Even standing right in front of him, Dylan remains elusive. And the music offers no foothold either.
“[It is] an enormous body of work,” writes Bril. “But he is always busy changing that body of work, adapting it, turning it upside down, disowning it, deepening it, sharpening it, placing it in a different light, new light, dark light, or, as tonight, dazzlingly bright, breathtakingly white light, I would almost say: eternal light.”
As a Dylan fan you keep searching. For what exactly? “That’s why we’ll be there again (we too) in that grim Heineken Music Hall,” Bril writes in early April 2009. He was ultimately too ill to go; it became my first Dylan concert. “In the hope that we will hear or see something pass by that, in one magnificent flash, unlocks the riddle of Dylan.” That never happened, of course — it is a longing you secretly never want fulfilled. Bob remains A Complete Unknown. And that itself is the attraction.
PS.
A new Bon Iver song is already a treat, and it only gets better when John Wilson from the truly fantastic comedy documentary series How To with John Wilson makes the video to go with it. Good stuff.
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