Bob Dylan revisited: ‘A Complete Unknown’ tells story of unlikely rock star’s early-’60s rise

Timothée Chalamet stars as Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.”

How does it feel? To be on your own? With no direction home?

Bob Dylan knew, once.

But instead of unloading his doubts and fears onto lovers and friends, he characteristically put them into his music. And once those songs came out became, immediately, folk music’s great hero — and then, within five years, its villain.

That, at least, is the story of “A Complete Unknown,” the new Dylan biopic (to be released Dec. 25), made with his music — and his blessing.

Does it explain the musician? Dylan, a born fabulist — as soon as reporters started asking questions, he started making up stories — would have hated the movie if it had tried to. The movie also would have failed. Folkie, poet, rocker, recluse, Christian, Jew — the man is too many men to get on screen in full. (The quirky Todd Haynes film “I’m Not There” tried to get it right by showing half-a-dozen sides of him, played by six different performers.)

“A Complete Unknown” takes the man at his word, and his myth. Its onscreen Dylan says nothing about his real background and the people in his life. (When his first serious lover finds his old scrapbook, marked property of “Robert Zimmerman,” she is shocked — and then, protectively, hides it, already helping him keep his secrets.) People see him as he wants to be seen. A runaway who joined a carnival and learned the guitar from cowboys? Why not? It sure beats being the son of a Minnesota appliance-store owner.

The film — co-written by director James Mangold and screenwriter Jay Cocks — also, very smartly, looks at a concentrated and essential slice of Dylan’s life: 1961-1965. It begins with him arriving in Greenwich Village, getting a few local gigs, and almost overnight — and yes, it really was that immediate — getting a rave review in The New York Times and a record contract at Columbia Records. He is all of 20.

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, with Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, in “A Complete Unknown.”

It ends in 1965 with him closing out the Newport Folk Festival, where, to the shock of his mentor Pete Seeger, he comes onstage after the usual acoustic acts, plugs in an electric guitar, and launches into “Maggie’s Farm.” The audience, convinced that the savior of folk music had sold out to rock ‘n’ roll, pelts him with beer cans and curses. Which was something Dylan probably should have expected — and would eventually get used to, as he continued to shun labels and shed personas for the rest of his life.

Ironically, the actual music gets short shrift in “A Complete Unknown.” Not that the soundtrack isn’t full of Dylan’s songs, and those of other artists. But the movie spends far more time on Dylan the lyricist than on Dylan the composer. We get many scenes of an inspired Dylan rushing to jot down lyrics; few of him actually working in the recording studio, and none of him listening to a song’s final mix. It’s difficult to dramatize how a recording is really made — “Love & Mercy,” the Brian Wilson picture, did a rare good job — but not even trying leaves a piece missing. Back in 1965, “Like a Rolling Stone” was at least as astonishing for how it sounded as for what it said.

As a biography of a revolutionary artist, the picture is also strangely, artistically conservative, proceeding in a strictly linear fashion and avoiding any dream sequences or hallucinatory revelations. (For a man who famously introduced The Beatles to marijuana, young Dylan’s weed of choice here seems to be tobacco, although sunglasses can hide a multitude of vices.) For a diehard Dylan fan, this approach can feel a little dully dutiful, as if the filmmakers are going down a checklist of things they had to include — first meeting with Woody Guthrie, first gig at Folk City, first kiss with Joan Baez.

And even with that historicity, things can get fudged.

For example, Dylan’s first love in New York was the teenage artist and left-wing activist Suze Rotolo. They lived together during the early ‘60s; Rotolo encouraged his political interests and turned him on to Brecht and the French symbolist poets. (She also showed up with him, arm-in-arm, on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.) But this script gives her a different name, eliminates her pregnancy by him (and her abortion) and mostly turns her into that tiresome trope in great-men biopics: The Tearful, Long-Suffering Girlfriend.

It does the memory of the intelligent, independent Rotolo, who died in 2011 — and actress Elle Fanning, who plays her — no favors.

Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, in “A Complete Unknown.”

Most of the other actors — all of whom credibly play their own instruments and do their own singing — have far more luck.

Monica Barbaro recreates both the angelic, bell-like soprano of Joan Baez and her prickly take-no-nonsense relationship with Dylan (apparently a bad boyfriend even by ’60s pop star standards). And a banjo-plucking Edward Norton — as a squeaky-clean Pete Seeger, who seems to really believe the world would come together if everyone just got around the campfire and sang — is revelatory.

Of course, a musical biopic like this — and Mangold previously made the Johnny Cash one, “Walk the Line” — rises and falls on the performance of its star. Timothée Chalamet doesn’t disappoint. The physical resemblance is slight — it’s an impersonation that depends mostly on tousled hair, shades and thrift-store clothes — but Chalamet gets that famously strangled, nasal voice just right. Also the artist’s wild swings of energy — mumbling and distracted when he’s somewhere he doesn’t want to be, intense and energetic when he’s writing down a new lyric or spitting out the words onstage.

Yet while the actors truly get their characters, and the onscreen Greenwich Village — mostly Jersey City and Hoboken in disguise — passes for Beatnik Era bohemia if you squint, even this carefully concentrated story of Dylan’s life rushes past some important details and leaves others out. Casual fans might wonder what horrible disease landed Woody Guthrie in a Jersey hospital (Huntington’s chorea), or who some of these real-life characters (Dave Von Ronk, Paul Stookey) were. (Or if, in fact, all of the characters are real; Dylan has a devoted Black girlfriend for exactly one scene.)

The movie is good at telling familiar stories about Dylan, though, and indulgent in letting him tell some of his own. The performance scenes, particularly ones showing the changing vibe of the Newport Folk Festival, are terrific. It’s an enjoyable, nearly 2 ½-hour entertainment. But what really sent young Bobby Zimmerman to New York in 1961 to become a musician? Who and what did he have to leave behind? What did he gain, and lose, once his fame exploded? How did it feel?

Not surprising that was the question he asked over and over in one of his most famous songs — and that this movie just as stubbornly insists we answer for ourselves.

Which is probably just the way Bob wants it.