I’m writing a review of the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown for Takimag.com. In the meantime, here’s the perceptive culture writer SJ on the flick:
“A Complete Unknown” misses Dylan’s humor—and his Jewishness
SJ
Dec 31, 2024
Bob Dylan is a humorist. A Complete Unknown, the new film about his life in the early 1960s, touches on his affinity for the circus but leaves out his likeness to one of its main attractions, the clowns. This side of his character as a performing artist was noticed, though, from his earliest days. “Mr. Dylan is both comedian and tragedian… a vaudeville actor on the rural circuit,” wrote Robert Shelton in the 1961 New York Times review that got him noticed by Columbia Records. The 1963 Newsweek article which exposed him as Bobby Zimmerman, “the elder son of a Hibbing, Minnesota, appliance dealer named Abe Zimmerman” also picked up on the comic aspect of Dylan’s self-creation:
“I don't know my parents," he said. "They don't know me. I've lost contact with them for years."
A few blocks away, in one of New York's motor inns, Mr. and Mrs. Abe Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, were looking forward to seeing their son sing at Carnegie Hall. Bobby had paid their way east and had sent them tickets, they had told friends in Minnesota. "He was home a few days in August," said David Zimmerman, Bobby's 17-year-old brother. "We were kind of close…”
“My past is so complicated you wouldn't believe it, man," said Dylan.
Bob’s past was actually being a Big Ten fraternity brother, whose parents then had agreed to pay his Greenwich Village rent for a year while he takes a crack at the music biz, before coming home, getting his degree, and going into a sensible career.
Which is pretty funny.
A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold, who also made Walk the Line about Johnny and June Carter Cash, feeds into Dylan’s reinvention through what it leaves out. …
In reality, Dylan in the early 60s wasn’t a listless bloodsucker but highly entertaining, even hilarious company, which was why he was able to charm his way onto so many beds and stages. What the movie misses is the participatory aspect of Dylan’s persona. Very few were entirely suckered by his tales of running away with the circus or hopping railroad cars. They bought into it because it was fun, and because the ragamuffin-like Dylan was an amusing embodiment of the heroic orphan story that has captivated Americans from the days of Huck Finn to Barack Obama. Mangold/Chalamet’s creation is a Machiavel, but the actual Dylan chose a better literary model, peppering Chronicles with half-concealed quotations from Jack London’s tales of turn-of-the-century orphans on the make….
To listen to the 1964 recording of Dylan at the New York Philharmonic is to hear a performer in intimate communion with his audience, drawing laughter quite as often as any other emotion. That’s why watching A Complete Unknown makes you wonder what two other Jewish humorists from Minnesota might have made of Dylan’s life story. Of course, the Coens already more or less gave us their version in Inside Llewyn Davis by focusing on a hapless Gentile singer quite outclassed by Dylan’s appearance in the very final scene singing “Fare Thee Well”.
The Coen Bros., as I may have mentioned once or twice over the years, are extremely funny. Dylan lyrics, in contrast, are extremely … well, extremely something (entertaining?) but not exactly laugh out loud funny. Instead, Dylan is doing something that it helps to recognize is related to humor, but also is not quite the same thing. I don’t know what to call it.
Hence, in the Coens’ movie about the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene, their focus is on a hapless Dave Van Ronk-type character and restrict Dylan to a brief but triumphant cameo performance.
What exactly Dylan does so much better than anybody else has been discussed by the most articulate critics for 60 years without complete agreement.
Read the whole thing there.
I didn't really dig Todd Hayne's I'M NOT THERE, but the idea was sound: casting the movie kaleidoscopically. Christian Bale was the only actor who didn't give a shit about doing a Dylan impersonation and just went nuts, enjoyably. Doing a square, traditional biopic in the manner of, say, Hal Ashby's BOUND FOR GLORY doesn't really cut it.
(Boyd Holbrook is quite fine as a cocaine-and-Jack-Daniels Johnny Cash.)
Dylan is a vocalist that occasionally was an excellent singer. Before the Flood captures a real rock star, as does the Rolling Thunder era official releases, including Hard Rain.
Viewing him as a playful humorist makes a lot of sense, and recalls his comments of derision when told about “academic study” of his lyrics: he just liked the way the words fit.