How Many Roads?

Film: A Complete Unknown
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I used to be a music nerd. Before I was a movie nerd, I was very much the sort of person who would name a bunch of obscure bands. And, honestly, then I grew up and I stopped caring about knowing more about stuff than other people. I’m old enough that there’s a lot of music that I like that’s gone past the category of “oldies.” I’m a huge Beatles fan, I love Steely Dan, and most of my musical roots are in ‘70s prog rock and early ‘80s punk. I’m also a fan of Bob Dylan for his lyrics and because of, not despite, his voice. There’s a part of me that seems to love singers who can’t really sing. Anyway, A Complete Unknown just started streaming on Hulu, so I figured I’d give it a watch.

Like any biopic, or at least like most of them, this is going to cover a period of the person in question. For Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), this means from his beginnings in 1961, his rise to folk music prominence, and his controversial move to electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. I mean, I get why folk fans were angry about the move to an electric guitar, but a ton of Dylan’s best songs were played on electric guitars.

Here's the thing—there’s not a huge amount of plot to A Complete Unknown, and while some license is clearly going to be taken with things, I don’t know that there’s a great deal here that isn’t at least close to the real story. There’s probably some compacting of multiple people into one character and some name changes, but it certainly seems plausible that this is the real story.

The film starts with Dylan hitchhiking to New York to meet Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who at the time was withering away in a hospital. Dylan shows up while Guthrie is being visited by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and plays the two men a song he wrote for Guthrie. Impressed, Seeger takes him home and starts to introduce him to the local folk music scene, which introduces him to Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). It’s also around this time he begins a relationship with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, a character based on Dylan’s girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo). Dylan’s first album, consisting of folk covers, is something of a failure. Around this time, Sylvie heads to Europe and Bob both starts a relationship with Baez and also starts to write socially conscious songs that seem to tap into the feelings of the time.

The whole point of the film is Dylan’s break from folk tradition and into electric instruments. In 1965, he had broken with Sylvie and his relationship with Baez had become contentious. More importantly, he felt shackled by the constraints of the folk music world despite his dominance of it, hence the move to an electric guitar and the release of Highway 61 Revisited, which is still a hell of an album.

The truth is that while this is all about Bob Dylan, it’s really all about the music. This is a non-traditional musical, certainly, but don’t kid yourself that it’s not a musical. It’s packed with classic folks songs, but also with Dylan’s early classics—Girl of the North Country, Maggie’s Farm, Mr. Tambourine Man, A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, Masters of War, Blowin’ in the Wind, and a bunch more. If you like Dylan, this is like listening to your own private Dylan Spotify channel. If you don’t it’s like that, too, but you’ll hate it. Genuinely, if you are not already a fan of Bob Dylan, you won’t become one from this, and this will be a tough 141 minutes for you.

It's said that no great movie is ever too long, and I kind of feel that with A Complete Unknown. It is long, but it never really drags. A lot of that is because it’s a story told very well. The music keeps things moving, and the pace never drags. Timothée Chalamet is very good in the role, and both looks like and somewhat sounds like Dylan. It’s hard to fault it in any significant or meaningful way.

This reminded me a lot of Walk the Line, and not just because Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) appears in the film. I liked this more than I thought I would, and that’s always a pleasant surprise.

Why to watch A Complete Unknown : Because Bob Dylan is a boss.
Why not to watch: If you don’t like the music, you really won’t like this.