From Jesus to Judas

As Bob Dylan told it in his memoir, ”Chronicles,” when the shaggy, 19-year-old troubadour came to New York in 1961, he was writing “hard-lipped folk songs.” It wasn’t money or love he was looking for. He wanted to find the singers who inspired him. 

James Mangold’s ”A Complete Unknown” is a provocative film about a provocateur’s rise to fame between 1961 and 1965. It uses the singer-songwriter’s songs to map the era between John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam. At times, Dylan’s lyrics substitute for dialogue. The film is as much about the evolution of America and popular music in the 1960s as it is about Dylan’s own musical and political evolution. 

Upon his arrival in New York, Dylan pays his respects to folk legend Woody Guthrie (“This Land is Your Land”), then hospitalized for Huntington’s disease. At Guthrie’s bedside is Pete Seeger (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”), kindred folkie and political activist. Shyly, Dylan asks if he can play his “Song to Woody.” When he takes out his guitar and sings the musical ode to Guthrie in his gravelly twang, both men immediately recognize Dylan’s talent and moxie.

Inspired by Elijah Wald’s book, ”Dylan Goes Electric,” writer/director Mangold and his co-writer Jay Cocks create a Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) that is charismatic if conflicted. At first, he strikes audiences as the Everyman shaman whose prescient songs, especially “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “The Times They are A-Changin’” anticipate and articulate the zeitgeist. But he is also a self-creation and self-involved shit, characterized as being “kind of an asshole” by Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), reigning queen of folk music and his sometimes lover. 

Also critical is his girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a version of artist Suze Rotolo, the trenchcoated figure locking arms with him on the cover of ”The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Exasperated when she learns that he has fabricated his name and his past, she recognizes the insecurities behind his masks of mystery and mastery. “You’re ambitious,” she says. “That scares you.” 

Chalamet does his own singing, as do Norton’s Seeger and Barbaro’s Baez. Except for his slight frame and halo of curls, Chalamet doesn’t look much like Dylan but sounds so much like him that his performance is not impersonation but something closer to incarnation. Norton, personification of homespun warmth and empathy, is the film’s nicest surprise. Seeger, who kickstarted the folk movement, introduced Dylan to club owners and to John Hammond, his producer at Columbia Records.

The always-excellent Fanning has the thankless role of Dylan’s conscience, Sylvie, who introduces him to New York, the folk-music community, political demonstrations and to women, like herself, who have their own creative lives. Whether in duet with Dylan on “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” or sending him packing, Barbaro is terrific as the no-nonsense Baez, disillusioned by Dylan’s opportunism and what she perceived as his betrayal of folk music.

The film concludes at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when Dylan shocks the audience by going electric. The film suggests the hisses and boos were more than just a reaction to the musician trading his Gibson acoustic for a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. They reflected anger over Dylan’s shift from the socially unifying commentary of his early songs, to more confrontational, inscrutable and polarizing songs, like “Like a Rolling Stone,” which he first performed at the festival.

The tension in the standard music biopic — Ray Charles in “Ray,” Jim Morrison in “The Doors,” Johnny Cash in Mangold’s own “Walk the Line” — involves artists overcoming drug and alcohol addiction. “A Complete Unknown” is something more than a standard biopic. As Winston Churchill once observed of the Soviet Union, Dylan is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Mangold obliges the audience to figure it out for themselves.