A Complete Unknown, the movie

And finally the movie was released over here, after all the teasers coming from the U.S., the pictures, the snippets, how good Timothee Chabolet plays the young Dylan, everything but the music itself. Let me start there.

Dylan's first records are all in my collection but I find I do not play them that often, Dylan for me is foremost 'Desire', my first Dylan album, not my first single though, that was 'George Jackson'. I will always go back to 'Desire', and 'Blood On The Tracks' and a few albums released after 1976. Of course his "electric" albums are among my favourites as well. How can they not be? Although they were 20 years or so older when I bought them. In fact, I became a real Dylan fan thanks to the 'Biography' box set someone lent to me around 1985. From then on I back-pedalled.

And here is where A Complete Unknown took me by surprise. I knew and loved every single song played in the movie. If anything, the movie shows that enormous stream of consciousness that overtook Robert Zimmerman's whole essence and turned him into Bob Dylan. The change from an open young man enjoying the attention into an inner recluse, the dark sunglasses that come out everywhere, who does not really know who he is any more. Estranged from his past and leaving people by the wayside. If anything you see the disappointment, despair and even anger of them all. He has used them and steps into the new world that lays at his feet, on the road to do what he needs to do and time has proven him right. The most telling moment is his goodbye to the incapacitated Woody Guthrie, who understands as he refuses to take back his harmonica. If this happened does not matter. There is more that is not accurate, but that's fine, it's a movie.

The movie did not get a single one of the eight nominations at the "Oscars".  In a way, I can understand it. On the one hand the movie always made me feel an outsider. It made me watch without letting me in to the story, On the other, the movie is far too short. Pivotal moments are not even touched upon. By focusing on just a few persons, Pete Seeger, Suze Ratolo (here "Sylvie"), Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez, other important persons in the extremely fast development of Zimmerman becoming Dylan in the Greenwich Village folk scene are skipped. But not even Ratolo's influence on Dylan's political songs is touched upon really. Dave van Ronk? It is that I know roughly what he looked like, otherwise I would never have recognised him in the two short scenes he is in.

For a person who has read Clinton Heylin's 'Behind The Shades' and a few more books, there's too much knowledge to be satisfied by a two hour movie. A Complete Unknown should be a series and it would be even more interesting. What remains with me though, are two things. 1) The astonishing development of a young man who stuns the world, two times in this movie. Dylan morphs from a talented copycat folk musician, into a protest singer, "the voice of his generation", and if that was not enough into a rock hero. 2) The astonishing sense of betrayal felt not only by his fans, but also by all the people he left behind. Dylan not only saw the sign of the times but acted on it in time. Folk was marginal and would remain so. Pop and rock were the future. By jumping on the bandwagon he provided himself the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do in the future. Sure, also to be damned again, again at a point in time when he became too popular by his own estimation, by turning Christian in 1979. He ends, decades past these four years portrayed in the movie, as one of the most venerated artists of his time.

Who knows, maybe after his demise, we may find that he has left behind the documents that explain all of the mysteries that shroud the person(ae) Bob Dylan. The question is do we want to know? Or, are we better off with the mystery, with best guesses? For now, let's hope he still has a great album in him.

Wout de Natris - van der Borght