"A Complete Unknown" Opens to Riches Far Beyond This Movie
1961 to 1965 teemed with Creativity and Passions for Justice
January 5, 2025
“A Complete Unknown,” the new movie starring Timothée Chalimet as Bob Dylan, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Elle Fanning as Suze Rotolo, and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, unfolds within the time-span 1961 to 1965.
The movie misses many riches.
Riches in the Folk, Blues, and Rock ’n’ Roll into Rock musics that figure in its Soundtrack. Riches in the Jazz that seeded all the multi-racial milieu that was Greenwich Village, the Bowery and East Village in those four years.
Riches in the ferment and hopes arising from people’s struggles that won Rights and Liberation in the United States’ South and in dozens of Nations round the world during those years.
“A Complete Unknown” is also lacking in colors bold as Pop Art and painters’ portraits of that time.
Lacking in the flamboyance and rebellion of Movies both Hit and Underground from England, France Italy, Japan, India, Russia, … of those years.
(La Dolce Vita, I Am Cuba, Tom Jones, The Balcony)
Lacking also in the empathic bite that informs earlier rebels’ Movies and Plays, such as “The Bicycle Thief” and “The Threepenny Opera, celebrated with vibrant enthusiasm by Bob Dylan in his 2005 book Chronicles.
Less by more than half, then, this Movie is in delivering the fierce energies and multi-layered complexities that catalyzed its real-life characters during first half of the 1960s.
It also fails to deliver the multiple, touching dimensions of its lead characters. For one thing missing, both Bob Dylan and Joan Baez flashed marvelous senses of humor during those years.
You may remember—or you may discover now—Bob’s Talking-Blues’ ‘Dreams’ from his Freewheelin’ and Bringing It All Back Home LPs. How inventive and surreal and rollicking and witty those Dreams! How ultimately SINCERE even in their satires.
And Joan in both documentaries and her friends’ anecdotes is always cutting up, making faces and taking hammer and needle to her own persona.
Joan as scripted for Monica Barbaro to portray has not a second of Slapstick. She’s forever serious and assessive. Her role is like rolling reel of Responses-to-Bob. Reaction-Shots. Scant evidence of any Being questing to fulfill itself through work … such as the real work that the real Joan undertook in Mississippi and Alabama.
Likewise the scripted Being of Suze Rotolo. Not only her and Bob’s very warm and infectious love—caught in the photo fronting his Freewheelin’ Album—is missing. Missing completely for Elle and Timothée to portray are nuances of a Complex Relationship. Missing for her, too, is the firm will that led her to break State Department bans and visit Cuba in July 1964.
Timothée clearly practiced hard to sing and play close to Bob as Folk and then Bob as Rock performer. One good and true thing, I think: Timothée’s Bob appears happiest when sharing music. Timothée’s Bob comes alive in duets: with Pete at the record-industry Party, with “Jesse” in the odd tuning of a Blues on Pete’s Public-TV show, and especially with Joan/Monica at Newport 1965. Such smiles, such infectious enjoyment, between that couple, there and then, in the “Unknown.”
But—again—vital elements that might have helped “A Complete Unknown” emerge as equal to its times and its real-life artists’ gifts are missing.
The songs of love that especially prove Bob’s romantic genius are unheard in this “Unknown.” Yes, “Girl from the North Country” receives extended treatment, but nothing is heard of “To Ramona”, “Spanish Harlem Incident”, “I Don’t Believe You”, “She Belongs To Me”, and—the song that closes the documentaries “Don”t Look Back” and “Concert for Bangladesh”—“Love Minus Zero / No Limit.”
May the audiencess who appreciate “A Complete Unknown” go onward to the movie’s sources. As one who listened like a grateful devotée to Bob’s mid-60s LPs in our family’s charcoal Naugahyde recliner, ages 15 to 17—listening particularly while smoking Tareyton cigarettes after our gang’s and girlfriends’ nights of Frivolous Drinking—let me urge all of us to great people and artists who were and are kindred spirits and and consanguineos accompaniements with Bob, Joan, and Suze.
JEROME SMITH, ORETHA CASTLE HALEY, DOROTHY JEAN CASTLE, JULIA AARON, DAVID DENNY, …