Hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

That talks about the funny world we have ahead.

It seems sick, hungry, tired, and torn

It seems dead but it’s just been born

(Bob Dylan)

It’s 1961, and this is how the film begins.

Bobby, a perfect stranger, skinny and scruffy, goes to visit Woody Guthrie in New York but discovers that Guthrie is in the hospital at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, dying from Huntington's disease... here, he sings him a song in the presence of Pete Seeger, captivating both of them.

The title of the film, inspired by a line from Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, serves as a warning right from the start: A Complete Unknown. It’s the refusal of any attempt to illustrate or clarify, to reduce the incomprehensible to something digestible and understandable. The film, while depicting with almost sacred accuracy the folk scene of the '60s and the portraits of figures like Dylan, Guthrie, Seeger, Cash, and Baez, rejects the logic of any conventional biopic, in an attempt to render the "Dylan mystery" in all its unfathomability. The young Bob is a man who is simultaneously part of the people and above it, a physical body that participates in the great game of life but, at the same time, seems incapable of being absorbed by it. His challenge to social conventions, romantic expectations, and music itself is the beating heart of his existence, but behind that challenge remains a shadow, an unsolvable enigma. Perhaps his authenticity is real. Perhaps it is just a performance. And perhaps, in the end, we don’t even want to know.

The film paints Dylan’s dizzying rise to universal fame.

Soon, Dylan finds his place in the artistic jungle of Greenwich Village, where his figure intertwines with that of Sylvie Russo, a woman who is not just a muse but a companion of sharp intellect. Yet, this relationship is destined to clash with his existential fate: when Dylan finally finds his rhythm, the film jumps to 1965, a moment when his fame is solidified and his interest in the electric guitar becomes the focal point of an emotional storm, a rift between him and his fan base, between him and his roots, between him and his very essence. The electricity of that sound threatens to devour his myth.

In this dramatic portrayal, Timothée Chalamet is flawless, pushing Dylan’s character to his most brutal contradictions: brilliant and annoying, a hero and an antihero, a man who builds his own mythology through every word, every gesture, every silence. His existence, as fascinating as it is disarming, is a perpetual game between the need to be loved and the necessity to escape that love, a relentless movement that makes his essence indefinable.

In the context of his relationships, Dylan does not exactly embody the "fuckboy", one who moves without regard for others, yet is incapable of existing without their presence. Chalamet, with his magnetic performance, captures this essence: an artist navigating through chaos as if it were the only possible path to himself, but whose journey is never linear, neither for him nor for anyone else.

“To quote Freud, I get rather paranoid,” he wrote in one of his letters to Cash, a flash of self-awareness preceding the apex of his electric concert at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Here, an audience of beatniks stood with disapproving stares, as sentinels of a world where the shift from folk to rock seemed like blasphemy, a betrayal of a worldview. A transition that, for many, marked the end of an era: folk, as a tool of resistance—for civil rights, for peace—was being abandoned, and its abandonment threatened to dissolve the very foundation of the struggle. Yet, Dylan moved forward, as if driven by an impulse that transcended the demands for ideological consistency.

The women in his life, especially Joan Baez and Sylvie, embody the other side, the one that seeks the truth behind the mask, but ultimately finds only his incompleteness. In them, Dylan seems trapped, in a perpetual confrontation between constructing a myth and the need to be understood on a deeper, more human level. Dylan's tragedy is not his evasion, but his inability to let others travel with him in his total dissonance.

In the film, the scene of Pete Seeger nearly attempting to destroy Dylan’s electric cables with an axe—a gesture laden with symbolism—becomes the emblem of a fierce resistance to the electricity of change, as if an idea, a sound, could be separated from its revolutionary power. But Pete’s wisdom, whose speech about the "little spoon" is delivered in all its magnificence, evokes the silent battle of protest: one day, our small gestures, infinitesimal but relentless, will overturn the balance, and the world will wonder how everything happened so quickly.

A Complete Unknown is not so much a biography as an experience that transcends time and space, much like Dylan’s sound itself, an artist, a poet, who was never meant to be “understood,” but only lived.

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?

…

And how many times must a man turn his head

Pretending he just doesn’t see?

…

And how many ears must one man have

Before he can hear people cry?

And how many deaths will it take till he knows

(Bob Dylan)

17-Jan-2025 by Beatrice