“If you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail - if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there's no success like failure”
~ Bob Dylan

James Mangold was no stranger to American musical icons having examined Johnny Cash in his worthy biopic Walk The Line, and here he takes a look at a small but pivotal period in the life of one of Johnny’s friends, Bob Dylan. At one level it’s a straightforward unpacking of the time Dylan arrived in New York City in 1961 to the kerfuffle around his electric spot at Newport four years later, at another it’s a conceit and sleight of hand worthy of the subject itself. Timothée Chalamet positively embodies the Bard from Hibbing and is superbly supported by Ed Norton, Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro. Mangold and screenwriter Jay Cocks made a solid, linear and occasionally loose adaptation of the well regarded 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald.

Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in Greenwich Village and settles in to the blossoming folk music scene there. He is befriended and supported by Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who are at the top of the contemporary folk tree. Bob quickly becomes notorious and successful as the hot new talent and is offered a Columbia Records contract by producer John Hammond. Sylvia (Elle Fanning) is a key figure in giving Bob an insight into the political scene and becomes something of his muse and lover for a time. Dylan soon focuses on writing as well as performing, revealing a talent to distil the roiling politics of the era into memorable and urgent songs that are embraced by the political folkies who champion Civil Rights anthems and progressive anti-war stances. Bob upsets some traditionalist folkies by wanting to add electric instrumentation to his sound, and the clash of generations comes to a head at Newport.

Mangold wisely focuses on a small slice of the Dylan saga, and bookends the piece with Dylan visiting his idol, Woody Guthrie, in hospital. Woody acts as the conscience of the film, a beacon of integrity and an artist who didn’t compromise for the sake of money and fame. Bob is ensnared by Albert Grossman, a savvy manager who soon has Bob on the showbusiness treadmill as his talent and reputation breaks to a wider audience. Joan Baez is entranced with Bobby and the pair become lovers, even though Bob’s relationship status with Sylvia is unclear. Sylvia is a substitute character for Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s real-life girlfriend and the woman with him on the cover of Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dylan personally requested that Mangold not use the notoriously private Suze’s real name – ‘But I was cruel, I treated her like a fool, I threw it all away.’

As Dylan’s fame grows it becomes apparent that he seems to be perpetually searching for something other than he has – Seeger and Baez seem to think that Bob has elevated the traditional music they revere to occupy a place in the forefront of American culture, and that he would be content (as they would be) at having achieved that. What they fail to realize is that Dylan had always had his eye on the main chance, and after the British Invasion of 1964, spearheaded by The Beatles, the main game was having a band and a rock and roll stage. Dylan and his journey through the folk world was one of mutual convenience, destined to end at some point, and the Fab Four hastened that event, a key point overlooked by Mangold. Bob thought they had brought rock and roll back to its home, and promptly tipped his hat to them when he made the vibrant Bringing It All Back Home, which had fully one side with an electric band and one side mainly acoustic.

Mangold played loose with factual events to create a drama that at least feels authentic, and to nit-pick at the variations won’t achieve much. In this telling Pete Seeger gets an outsized role because of his reported outrage at the electric gig and the myth that he was stopped taking an axe to the cables. Also, Peter Yarrow convinced Bob to play acoustic after his (all of 3) electric songs and gave him his guitar to do so – Johnny Cash was not at Newport 1965 and most glaringly the ‘Judas’ jibe was months earlier at Manchester Free Trade Hall in England. But the film captures Dylan as an exotic animal in the blinding headlights of fame and that’s where it sings.

Dylan has always been a contrarian – a quasi-intentional complete unknown, and his wilful stubbornness alienated many a friend and supporter, driven by a huge ambition and the instincts of a chameleon. He considered himself (somewhat facetiously) a ‘song and dance man’ and his musical expeditioning has approximated that of a curious magpie, picking up or discarding different aspects of what he needed to feed his art as he went. He started in rock and roll, like Lennon and McCartney and others in thrall of the founding fathers of rock and roll, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. When he arrived in NYC that music was moribund and tame, but folk music was the buzz, so Bob cut his sail for that wind and made his mark. When the wind changed in 1964, Bob set a different course, as he would several more times in his singular career. Bob summed up the change of his rejecting the older mode of folk for youthful rock in the pithy line from My Back Pages, ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’

James Mangold has made an entertaining film with A Complete Unknown, but as a film it lacks the poetry and wit of the Coen Brothers masterful Inside Llewyn Davis, set in the same folk scene with prickly Llewyn a substitute Bob. Poetry and wit are, coincidentally, key ingredients in Dylan’s art. What should be studied by scientists and what could be termed the Zimmerman Sponge Effect is the methodology whereby Bobby’s brilliant brain could cohere Little Richard, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Rimbaud, 19th century murder ballads, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Guthrie and make it all magically work, break new ground and keep him one step ahead of his peers and followers.

A Complete Unknown, despite Chalamet’s mesmeric efforts and reasonable approximation of Dylan’s singing and playing, serves best as a reminder of how astonishing a songwriter Bob quickly became. In the current era when the formulaic, earnest whining of Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran roll out in predictable pentatonic cadences over sadly overused four chord turnarounds, how mind boggling it must be to encounter the wild, soaring poetry of Mr. Tambourine Man or A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall? How refreshing to hear the gentle strains and chromatic grace notes of Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright, or the heart stopping It Ain’t Me Babe. The idea that songs like Blowing In The Wind and Masters of War could be both poetic and political is also a cold bucket of water to the faces of Gen Z. And that’s just the tip of a mountainous iceberg.

Unlike Taylor and Ed and Co, Dylan changed songwriting and popular music. As did Lennon and McCartney with the Beatles. Together they changed what modern songwriting could contain. Bob found a form where he could be serious with his concerns and lyrics, and yet still retained his humour and playfulness as he moved from covering old folk tunes to writing Like a Rolling Stone within 4 years, just as The Beatles moved from covering Chuck Berry rock and roll songs to writing Eleanor Rigby and A Day In The Life in a handful of years. Incredible. When all is said and done, the startling catalogue of songs remain.

A Complete Unknown implies at some level Bob Dylan is an enigma, something that his fans obviously know blindingly well, but ultimately it feels like a film for people who know little about the man. That's fine as it goes, but a better title might be A Known Unknown, as Dylan remains one of the most analysed and examined characters of all time and Bob’s own voluminous, published content can’t help but to be revealingly autobiographical even with his penchant for mischief and misdirection. For all the many strengths of A Complete Unknown, it falls frustratingly short of adding clarity to the debate. Just as Todd Hayne’s worthy I’m Not There attempted to capture Dylan obliquely and mystically (and mostly overreached), here the direct approach proves just as inadequate. Mangold seems to think that if he approaches Dylan’s life as a police procedural, i.e., to lay out the clues on a cinematic whiteboard, then we’d arrive at the answer to Sylvia’s/Suze’s plaintiff, ‘I don’t know you!’ As if by connecting the strings on a suspect board he’d uncover the mystery and answer ‘Who is Bob Dylan?’- but as ever the answer is blowing in the wind.