I am a huge Bob Dylan fan, and I went into A Complete Unknown expecting to hate the biopic. Generally, when a biopic comes out about a celebrity I love, I don’t like it. I get frustrated with the liberties the filmmakers take with the history, and I get annoyed at the actors when there are actual videos of the celebrity out there that I can watch instead.
But I was charmed by Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of the iconic folk singer (he even learned how to play guitar), and I thought the storytelling was straightforward and on point, for the most part focusing on his music and staying away from the salacious. It actually makes me want a sequel of sorts. Another Dylan movie following the events of his infamous motorcycle crash in 1966, and the aftermath.
A Complete Unknown Portrayed Dylan’s Most Famous Career Moment
If I’m completely honest, though, I loved A Complete Unknown, which is now streaming on Hulu, but I didn’t love the climax of the movie, but not because it’s bad filmmaking.. Bob Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival is legendary, and it’s easily the most-told story in Dylan’s long career. It was a transformative moment, to be sure, and one of the most iconic events in rock and roll history, but it’s a story I’ve heard many times over the years. That includes having read Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, the book that the movie was based on.
For Dylan fans, even many casual ones, there wasn’t much to learn here. His early days in New York are the best part of the movie, as is Dylan’s relationship with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. The second half of the movie, building towards Newport and Dylan’s new sound, is cool and all, and Chalamet is wonderful in showing how the artist’s aesthetic was changing, but it’s nothing new. Things would change even more in the years right after the last scenes in the movie when he moved to Woodstock, NY.
Dylan’s Crash And Retreat From The Public Eye
Just over a year (almost to the day) after the performance portrayed in the movie, on July 29th, 1966, he was riding his motorcycle on the backroads outside Woodstock, NY, when he lost control and crashed. According to Dylan (who has always been a bit of an unreliable narrator), he injured his neck, and as a result, he retreated from the road and from the public eye completely.
Instead of touring, he holed up in his house in Woodstock and surrounded himself with the group of musicians who would soon make a name for themselves as The Band. The members of The Band (Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rock Danko, and Richard Manuel) were all characters themselves, and these months in the upstate New York countryside produced some of the most amazing music of the late 1960s with them all collaborating with no pressure, no media, and no prying eyes there to bother them.
Seeing this group of legends living together and working on some of that incredible music would be mind blowing. A Complete Unknown spends a lot of time showing Dylan the artist, and his time in Woodstock was when he could truly just be one. He wasn’t a counter-culture icon, he wasn’t a rock star, he wasn’t a pop star, he wasn’t anything but himself. If we are going to see Dylan the artist at his most pure, this is the time. He was confident in his abilities and didn’t need to compromise anything to do what he wanted to do artistically.
Some Amazing Music Came Out Of It
This self-imposed exile would last the better part of seven years, with only very sporadic public appearances in concert and elsewhere. He produced some amazing music with some amazing musicians in that time. Not only did that period produce The Basement Tapes with The Band, but he wrote and recorded albums like John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline (working with Johnny Cash), and one of my personal favorites, New Morning.
It’s also when The Band recorded Music From The Big Pink and convinced Dylan to do the album art for the now-legendary record. As Helm explained in his own autobiography, all the members of The Band, and Dylan, would work together on music almost all day, writing songs with a communal typewriter, with various members of the group adding a line here and there.
A lot of this time is glossed over in Dylan’s autobiography, and he’s always been reluctant to talk about anything personal in interviews, but boy, would it be cool to learn more about that time and see him interact with artists like The Band, Johnny Cash, George Harrison (who visited on multiple occasions), Eric Clapton (who supposedly broke up Cream so he could do rootsier rock, like Dylan and The Band were playing at this time), and more.
A Biopic Sequel Would Be Unique, But Worth It
Most biopics, especially ones about musicians, like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, set out with the goal of telling the whole story. It means many things get missed, and the history can be shaky. That’s not what A Complete Unknown does, and so it lends itself to telling more of the story, in the same way it told the story of Dylan’s early days in New York and then re-inventing himself at Newport. So, while biopics typically don’t get sequels, this story and Chalamet’s ability to be Dylan are worthy reasons to do one.
In his personal life, his children with his first wife, Sara Lownds, were born during this same period, including his now-famous son, Jakob Dylan, and his three siblings. Not only was Dylan finding peace as a musician, he was finding it in his home life, too. There might not be anything too salacious here, but that’s not the point.
Like I said, I typically don’t like biopics about musicians I love, but now that A Complete Unknown is streaming, I’ve already watched it for a second time, and I’m sure I’ll watch it again in the future. Let’s make a sequel happen! Please.