Completely Unknown, and Somewhat Unknowable
So I got what I could find to prepare for this film: D.A. Pennebaker's groundbreaking film about Bob Dylan's 1965 UK Tour, "Don't Look Back," that revealed Dylan in metamorphosis yet leaving events to speak for themselves. Then, Scorsese's "No Direction Home," a thrilling 200 minute document covering Dylan up through the end of his 1966 UK tour, and finally the somewhat more difficult (for me) to find "Festival!," Murray Lerner's film covering the Newport Folk Festival from 1963-1966.
Yesterday afternoon, thus armed, having seen some documents purporting to show actual events and first person recollections we saw "A Complete Unknown," literally and metaphorically, the next line after "No Direction Home." I'll start with the good news: It's really good. Timothée Chalamet so inhabits my perception of the spirit of Bob Dylan that I had no problem believing that I was seeing, in some meaningful way, Bob Dylan. Ed Norton is arguably even better as Pete Seeger, serving in this film as Dylan's paternal foil without being the heavy.
Director James Mangold and writer Jay Cocks didn't attempt to create a historically accurate film. If the screen said "1963," maybe we were seeing something from 1963, maybe from 1964, or maybe we were seeing something that never happened at all. As Chalamet's Dylan says in the film, "People make up their past." He doesn't want to be "known," I don't think. The main through-line here seems to be Dylan's emerging personal ambition to be completely his own creation, no matter the peripheral cost. This comes through in the fantastic songs that he wrote and performed, and ultimately in his break-through performance at Newport.
Several moments in the film stood out for me: First, Pete Seeger's courtroom speech at the beginning of the movie as he was about to be sentenced for Contempt of Congress, a sentencing that was many years in the making due to his infamously uncooperative testimony to the House Un American Affairs Committee (HUAC) in 1955. Seeger's speech is eloquent, and the movie presents it very nearly verbatim, basically editing out only the name of the song that Pete proposed to play for the judge.
The movie also had plenty of humor: In one scene, folklorist Alan Lomax openly insulted Peter, Paul and Mary -- favorites of the Newport Folk Festival and managed, as was Dylan, by Albert Grossman -- to Grossman's face during an emergency Board meeting during the 1965 festival. The scene didn't really happen, of course, I don't think Lomax was on the Board. But hearing him call "Peter, Paul & Mary" a "confection" was hysterical, and the animosity between Lomax and Grossman was real. Ironically, according to accounts I've read, Lomax's condescending introduction of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band early on at the 1965 festival infuriated Dylan and helped seal his decision to go electric during his own closing performance.
Another movie standout was Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash; Cash wasn't even at Newport in 1965, but it's fun to imagine him as the guitar gunslinger, tracking mud on their carpet. Cash was a huge Dylan fan. He was there in spirit. I was also fine with placing the "Judas" moment, arguably the most well-known heckling incident in recorded history, at Newport rather than when it actually occurred, the following year in Manchester, England. I just wish they had left Dylan's full response intact, including the expletive: "Play it fucking loud."
One of the great totally fictional scenes in the movie involved an airing of Pete's television show "Rainbow Quest." For those who have never seen "Rainbow Quest," it's well worth finding episodes on youtube. I'm pretty sure the show did not yet exist at the time of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (it first aired -- on a Spanish language New Jersey UHF station - a few months later), Bob never appeared on the show, and the blues singer exists (so far) only in this movie. But it's just the sort of thing I wish were true.
Then, of course, there is Dylan's music. I don't know what magic was done to make Chalamet's voice sound exactly like Dylan's, nor to make Norton sound so much like Pete Seeger. But, per the credits, they each did their own vocals the entire way through. The performances are completely first rate. And if Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez didn't quite make it to that standard, she was still perfectly enjoyable to hear. There, too, we see choices: We see Baez and Dylan perform a fictional duet at Newport, yet we don't get to see a depiction of the real one they did during the March on Washington in 1963.
There were a few spots where I couldn't really comprehend why facts were altered. This is nothing new for me with respect to Dylan; I stopped attending his concerts nearly a decade ago when I finally surrendered to the reality that his shows had become nearly impenetrable for me. So I didn't really understand why they showed Dylan and Joan Baez bickering on stage in 1965; the reality in some respects was worse, and is shown (sort of) in "Don't Look Back"; Dylan didn't let her get on stage at all. Nor did I fully grasp the film role for Suze Rotolo (renamed for the movie) nor the ultimate reduction of her character to little more than a cardboard cutout. It's not just that she was long gone by the time of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, but rather her weepily racing off to return home after seeing Dylan and Baez perform together -- which obviously didn't happen either -- is just weak writing to me, unworthy of the characters in the film. The story goes that Dylan intentionally inserted one or more fictional scenes in to the film; I have to believe that Rotolo was part of that.
But those were more annoyances. The only diversion from "fact" that I found upsetting was the reaction of the Newport crowd to Dylan's electric set. Yes, there was plenty of booing, that much is evident even in "Festival!" But the crowd didn't become physically violent, they did not throw bottles on stage. That's an invention of the movie, and whether from Dylan or Mangold or Cocks, I can't really write that one off to "artistic license." Whatever the purpose was of including it that way, I didn't like it.
After Dylan finished his electric set that night, he came back for a pair of acoustic encores. The more well-known was the kiss-off, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." But he also played "Mr. Tambourine Man," and, realizing that Pete Yarrow had not handed him a harmonica that he could use, Dylan called out to the crowd, "Does anybody have an E harmonica? A E harmonica? Anybody? Just throw them all up!" And immediately, in "Festival!," we can hear what sounds like multiple harmonicas hitting the stage; Dylan quickly grabs one, calls out multiple thank-yous to a substantial bit of crowd laughter, puts the harmonica in his holder, adjusts his capo, and starts the song. Watching it dumbfounded, nearly 60 years later, I'm left wondering, "what kind of fans go to a Bob Dylan festival show carrying an E harmonica?" And what was the ethos by which Dylan could call out for one, get one, and no one seems the slightest bit surprised? To me, that was the spirit of the Newport crowd, not the insulting caricature shown in the "A Complete Unknown." In "Festival!," Dylan's performance of "Maggie's Farm," placed emphatically within the folk tradition, is the film's centerpiece. "Mr. Tambourine Man" is the coda.
I'd have also preferred a bit more exposition. The folk scene in 1961 New York is not given much context, and except for a couple lines for Dave Von Ronk, not much in the way of people, either. Only so much space in 140 minutes, I get it. Still, putting Woody Guthrie in as the patriarchal bookends to the film, with Pete Seeger as the active father figure, is a bit too conventional. Yes, that's how I got in to folk too, but still, there's a lot more out there. When Dylan played "Song to Woody" for Woody at Greystone, it would have been nice to know that Dylan had borrowed a melody that Woody used for "1913 Massacre," as a backdrop for the lyrics (Scorsese did show the songs back-to-back in "No Direction Home").. Or, for that matter, that Guthrie had taken the melody from a song that dates back centuries, and that had been recorded by, among others, folklorist Alan Lomax in a field recording in 1935.
During "Maggie's Farm," Dylan's opening song at the Newport electric show, he sang, "I try my best to be just like I am / But everybody wants you to be just like them / They say 'sing while you slave' / I just get bored"; it seemed about as direct a finger flip to where he'd been as could be imagined, save, possibly, his encore later that same evening of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." But then, "Maggie's Farm" itself was based on a folk standard called "Down on Penny's Farm," and Woody Guthrie had borrowed the same song to write an obscure song called "Hard Times in Durant Jail." Using Guthrie at the front and end of the movie provides a hint, but Dylan's roots and impact go far deeper than that.
On a somewhat personal note, I wish the film makers had found more vintage automobiles for this film. I say that as someone whose family owned a pink 1957 Chevy Bel-Air hardtop, and as someone who drove my own kids around in it before I foolishly convinced my mother to sell it. It's not just a 1957 Bel-Air whizzes by Dylan in the his very first scene in New York City. It's that I kept seeing it parked on the New York City streets. By the third time, I'd had enough of the Bel-Air -- and of the other vehicles that kept showing up.
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