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Music biopics are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, and often, for critics and fans alike, dicey propositions that can either shed new light on an artist or trample on that person’s legacy.
Now, Bob Dylan, one of the most significant musicians in American music, is the latest legendary artist to get the biopic treatment in “A Complete Unknown.”
Starring Hollywood’s actor of the moment, Timothée Chalamet, “A Complete Unknown” has been picking up steam this awards season with its depiction of the bard’s early success in the New York City folk scene up through the infamous moment he went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
But how much does “A Complete Unknown” really get right –– and wrong –– about Dylan, his music and his story?
“A Complete Unknown” largely succeeds in its depiction of Dylan by sidestepping accuracy in favor of emotional truth, says David Herlihy, a teaching professor of music at Northeastern University and the award-winning, Billboard-charting musician and songwriter behind the band O-Positive.
“It’s entertainment; it’s not a documentary,” Herlihy says. “It’s not truth telling, so it’s more like an impressionist painting than a photograph. It’s poetic, and I think the poetry is right. … I wasn’t looking at it as a documentary. Had it been a documentary, I would have had a lot of issues.
Instead of trying to explain Dylan, the filmmakers instead opt to just portray him on screen. It’s a key distinction because of who Dylan is as an artist and the mythology that he constructed around himself early on, changing his name (from Robert Zimmerman) and fabricating certain things about his past. Dylan was known for telling truths about the world in his songs –– while lying about himself to the press.
“He’s such a mercurial figure and enigmatic,” Herlihy says. “You can’t even see him anymore. All you see is the myth around him. There’s an unavoidable, almost palpable mystique. … He can’t be just a guy, so making a movie about him was going to be a real challenge.”
But Herlihy says Chalamet’s portrayal of Dylan effectively plays into the near mythic quality of “the bard” that is just as much a part of his story as his music and social activism in the 1960s. Biopic performances can run the risk of veering into caricature, but for Herlihy, Chalament “wasn’t aping it totally, so it never came off as somebody doing an impersonation.”
“It seemed to me like he wasn’t trying to be a photocopy, but he got the essence of it,” Herlihy says. “I really do feel like he nailed it. There are certain mannerisms, like Dylan has this thing he does with his hand, and [Chalamet] did that a number of times.”
The movie is also helped by the key creative decision to have Chalament perform Dylan’s music live to camera, not overdubbing the performances with perfectly crafted studio versions of these American classics. It not only brings a level of authenticity to these scenes, Herlihy says, but matches Dylan’s own creative approach.
“They made a very smart decision where form meets substance because Dylan was above [being] performative, about being in the moment,” Herlihy says. “He’s not into perfection. Even his early records were performance recordings. He’d sit down with a guitar and a mic and perform them. It’s like a Polaroid. You’re sitting there and you capture this moment in all its imperfections, in its rugged beauty.”
Like with any movie that attempts to stuff years of history into two hours, “A Complete Unknown” is full of historical inaccuracies. There are conversations and meetings between people that never happened and liberties taken with the benefit of historical hindsight. But Herlihy reiterates that while these moments are inaccurate, they are still truthful.
“Inherently, [the movie] is going to be a fabrication –– it is a fabrication,” Herlihy says. “Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan never sat in a hospital room together. That never happened. But there’s two degrees of separation there. Those people did all meet just not at the same time, so it’s not untruthful.”
The music world –– and the world at large –– has changed significantly since Dylan moved to New York with a guitar and a dream of speaking truth to power through song. But the themes, whether personal or political, Dylan wrote about remain timeless, Herlihy says: “He’s like Shakespeare.”
More than anything, Herlihy says “A Complete Unknown” is an effective introduction to some of Dylan’s early work, which is also some of the most important American music of the 20th century. Ultimately, he notes that the best thing that can come out of a movie like “A Complete Unknown” is renewed attention on an artist’s catalogue, more closely connecting current generations, who might not have grown up with Dylan’s music, with music history.
“Having some of Dylan’s powerful work reintroduced to the earbud generation is actually a positive thing because it’s going to turn them on to this vast iceberg of incredible richness that’s part of a larger historical tapestry,” Herlihy says.