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The gift of Bob Dylan’s music is to make the world seem weirder, or rather to reveal the world to be as strange as it really is. He sings of life as a flow of jumbled-up signs and sensations, some real and some not, carrying meaning beyond words. Even at his most strident, he wheezes out an anti-narrative: Thou shalt not simplify, classify, categorize.A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s biopic focused on the bard’s early career, understands this—and betrays it. The film portrays Dylan as a prophet bringing independence and idiosyncrasy to a world of rule-enforcers and followers. Timothée Chalamet does excellent work striking Dylan’s balance of unworldliness and humanity. Yet no movie about unconventionality should be as blandly conventional as this one is.The problem starts at the level of conception. Mangold has chosen to examine the most chewed-over chapters of Dylan’s career: his early days in the New York City folk scene, beginning in 1961 and leading up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he shocked acoustic-guitar purists by going electric. Newsie cap on his head, Dylan blows into Greenwich Village at the film’s start, gigs around, and quickly wins the admiration of his idols—Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash—as well as of the scene’s rising star, Joan Baez. Rebellion brings acclaim, which brings public expectations, which brings more rebellion: a cycle that’s true to Dylan’s life, but also that of many previous iconoclasts portrayed on film.Mangold knows the rules of biopics well; his 2005 Cash exploration, Walk the Line, set the modern template for how to bend a complex individual’s life into a satisfying arc. Here, the director and his co-writer, Jay Cocks, diverge from the template in one intriguing way. Dylan’s habit of lying and misdirection has made the question of who the man born Robert Zimmerman really is, and why exactly he does what he does, one of music’s enduring mysteries. Rather than try to crack the case with backstory providing psychological cause and effect, A Complete Unknown just lets Dylan be … unknown. When he tells Baez that he used to be a carnie, she exasperatedly replies that he’s full of it. He may well be. But he’s living out an idea that he professes in a key bit of dialogue: To succeed onstage, you have to inspire the same fascination as a freak show.[Read: Bob Dylan reveals himself through 66 songs]Chalamet does just that. He plays Dylan with heavy-lidded stillness, making him seem perpetually on the verge of dozing off, mumbling as if in a dream. The film overflows with performance scenes in which Chalamet captures Dylan’s controlled erraticism, singing in a way that spins folk conventions into a galactic spiral of feeling. The real-life Dylan of the 1960s was a bit lighter and funnier than the solemn figure Chalamet cuts, but his prankster soul flashes through occasionally, such as when he announces himself to be God and then breaks into a grin. And though Dylan himself had some input in the movie, Chalamet doesn’t dull the artist’s cruel edge; at one point, with glassy anger in his eyes, he tells Baez her songs are pretty like paintings in a dentist’s office.Unfortunately, the rest of the movie has that same antiseptic quality that Dylan stood against. New York looks as stagey and cheerful as an amusement park. Dylan’s romance with Sylvie Russo—a fictionalized version of his real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning—mostly seems to exist to give trivia about Dylan’s love songs. Historical giants are sketched in 2-D: Ed Norton’s Seeger is a gentle idealist with a hint of cunning; Monica Barbaro’s Baez is all confidence except for when she’s all insecurity. Most irritating are the groan-worthy winks to the audience. “Be careful on that thing!” Seeger admonishes as Dylan rides his motorcycle, a few years before the singer’s career-altering, still-mysterious crash of 1966.Thanks to Chalamet’s performance, the film’s hokiness isn’t totally fatal to the viewing experience. But if A Complete Unknown is Hollywood’s grand, Oscar-baiting summation of Dylan’s legacy, then the implication is sad: Even when trying to celebrate originality, the entertainment industry insists on predictability. The film need not be an art-house riddle—Todd Haynes already took that approach to Dylan in 2007 with I’m Not There—but a shaggier, more naturalistic version would have better suited its subject. The film does convey one true idea, at least: Worshipping an artist is different from listening to what they have to say.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Olmsted, S. Carniani, JADES CollaborationDay 25 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: the most distant known galaxy. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have found a record-breaking distant galaxy observed just 290 million years after the Big Bang. In October 2023 and January 2024, an international team of astronomers used Webb to observe galaxies as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program, obtaining a spectrum of the record-breaking galaxy featured in this image, highlighted by the small square at center, surrounded by an ocean of thousands of other galaxies.Merry Christmas, everyone!See this year’s full advent calendar here.

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Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown. | Macall Polay, courtesy of Searchlight Pictures While he may be known for being an iconoclast, Bob Dylan has a public persona — aloof, remote, borderline misanthropic — that doesn’t exactly lend itself to the typical Hollywood treatment. That hasn’t stopped the new Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, from trying. Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric and starring Timothée Chalamet doing his own live singing and performing as Dylan, the film has picked up rave reviews for its performances. But some critics have had misgivings about the film’s many fictional liberties as well as the relatively little context we’re given for the beats of his life — not enough to either satisfy Dylanites or explain what’s happening for Dylan newbs. Why exactly was it such a big deal when Dylan “went electric” — plugging in his guitar and moving away from the folk music he made when he started out? What does his musical and personal legacy mean, and why should audiences care? Fortunately, I found a longtime Dylanhead who was able to fill in many of the gaps for me. Bill DeVille, a 40-year radio industry veteran, DJs near-nightly for Minneapolis public radio station The Current, in the city where Dylan first got his early start before traveling to New York. DeVille walked me through the context I was missing, and waxed rhapsodic about the experience of seeing the film as A Dylan Guy. I may be a Dylan fan now through sheer osmosis. Aja Romano: One of the central tensions of the film is this supposed tension between folk and rock. I know that’s part of the longstanding narrative around Bob Dylan, but when you were watching the film, did you feel like it’s an authentic narrative? Bill DeVille: I think it is. I think his musical love wasn’t necessarily folk music right out of the gate. I think it was blues and rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t want to say rock, because to me, rock is Journey. Rock ‘n’ roll is the real stuff. Fats Domino, Little Richard, Buddy Holly — I think that was the music that he really loved. He discovered Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie and stuff like that, and it took him toward folk. Plus, he didn’t have a band at the time, so it was easy to go out and just busk with your acoustic guitar at the coffee houses in New York. So folk was more of a detour for him. I get that impression. The first gigs he had were under the name Elston Gunn back in the latter ’50s. He was playing in Bobby Vee’s band — he was the piano player. He’s always talked about his love for Little Richard, too. That was his hero, more so or as much as Woody, I would imagine. It sounds as though it was the culture of folk, more than the music itself, that took him on his way. I think there’s some truth to that, but you’re constricted by this timeline. It’s a nifty timeframe, when he rolls out of Minneapolis in 1961 and immediately heads to the Big Apple. In the movie, they said he did it solo, but apparently he did it with a friend. That gets into the tropes the movie’s playing with — a small-town boy goes to the big city, right? Can you set the stage for us in terms of what the actual New York scene was at the time? Well, it was the coffee house scene. It was Dave Van Ronk and Pete Seeger. And Joan Baez was around in that scene, too, and Cisco Houston and some of the old folk guys and Dylan — in the film, it shows him just knocking ’em dead right out of the gate. And Joan Baez saw something — they saw something special in each other, which was pretty cool to see. It just seems like Bob had a handful of songs he was already working on at that point. Plus he was doing a lot of covers back then, too. The first album came out and it was pretty much all covers except for “Song to Woody.” The first time I heard that Bob Dylan song, “Song to Woody,” it made me cry. And man, in that movie, when it’s performed by Timothée, believe it or not, when he sang the song, it was just like, oh my God, this is so good. It sounds so much like Bob. He was very believable. I think people have been really surprised at the authenticity of that performance. I don’t think it’s something people would’ve expected from him. He’s gone the extra mile. At the big rollout red carpet deal, he shows up as Bob Dylan incognito. Yes! That was the New York premiere of A Complete Unknown, where Chalamet cosplayed Dylan’s notorious 2003 fashion at the Sundance premiere of his then-panned movie Masked and Anonymous. He had bangs and a stocking cap on and a scarf and a leather jacket that was pulled straight from Dylan. It was hysterical. He apparently had five and a half years to study the role, because of the pandemic and the strike. I don’t know that he was ever even any kind of a musician, but he sings with authenticity and plays the harmonica and the guitar. All the songs were performed live in the movie, which is pretty incredible too. That’s the draw. Most people are not going to go to this film being like, “I want to know all about this Pete Seeger dynamic. I want to know all about the Newport Folk Festival.” Most people are going to come for the music, and for them to nail that really shows a level of respect. Were there some moments that threw you? Too much fan service? I do feel like you have to approach this film with several layers of Dylan knowledge. I saw it maybe as a bit too much of a fanboy. I was in love with the film. Some of the younger generation, I don’t think, got it. But so much of it is based on things that really did happen. Like Newport Folk, when Pete — they didn’t really get into the cutting of the power too much, but Pete really thought about doing it. He didn’t, obviously, but he considered it. That moment — when Edward Norton as Pete Seeger looks pointedly at an axe during Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival — did baffle people. And especially when you look at the commentary for the time, historians are divided on whether his decision to play electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was actually the controversial thing. When you look at primary sources, some people said that they were booing because the sound was bad and they just couldn’t hear what was happening. That it was not actually about him playing electric. I do think there was a pretty good round [of controversy]. That whole tour of ’65, it seemed in particular — like the person yelling, “Judas!” — that actually happened in [Manchester], England. And they put that in the film too, even though it happened across the pond, not Newport, Rhode Island. But I think there was some truth to the idea that people wanted him to be this folk purist. I think for Dylan that whole thing was a little too precious. He just wanted to rock. Why do you think the film ended on that particular note? I don’t know, but I think it was important. It could have gone either way. I mean, think about it: Bob could have been this legendary folk musician, purist guy, and he could have been twice as popular as Pete Seeger, but he chose not to. I don’t think he wanted to be constrained by the folk thing. The folk canon is good enough, but Bob had all these songs. He wanted to do it his way. He didn’t want to be manipulated, and his way was to play rock ‘n’ roll, I think. He wasn’t an old guy. He was in his really low 20s when he first started busking with his acoustic guitar. And the British invasion was just happening too. I think he saw that rock ‘n’ roll was what was going on, and he wanted to be a part of it. Nobody wants to be pigeonholed or typecast, and he was more than a folk traditionalist. I think the fact people didn’t want him to do it made him want to [play rock music] even more. It spurred him on. And he still continued to play some folk songs, so it wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. Maybe it was back then, but I never found it to be that big of a deal. It was, “there are two kinds of music, good and bad.” The film positions Pete Seeger in this role of mentor-doppelgänger, almost. When the film opens, Seeger is appearing in court on contempt charges for his conduct before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Then we see Dylan meeting Guthrie and Seeger at Guthrie’s hospital bedside. Though he did meet both artists soon after his arrival in New York, neither of these details is true. I guess it’s about setting Pete Seeger up as a kind of rebel in his own way. He was like the kingpin at the time. Woody was laid up with Huntington’s disease, so he wasn’t well. I think Woody was more of a mentor to him than Pete was, although the film doesn’t necessarily show it like that. Obviously he idolized Woody, but in the film, Pete took care of him, and he stayed at his house a few different nights. Pete didn’t really write songs like Bob Dylan did — that wasn’t his thing. He maintained the folk canon. But I do think that Seeger had a huge admiration for and was sort of a hero to Dylan. Folk was a vital form of resistance at that time, so it makes sense that, character-wise, Dylan would be drawn to that. Yeah — and the [1963 March on] Washington with Joan Baez, that was huge. But you see in [Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary] No Direction Home that the press were questioning him like he was some sort of radical, and he really wasn’t very radical. The film treated Johnny Cash as a giant Easter Egg, with Boyd Holbrook playing him as Dylan’s penpal. What did you make of their relationship? [Cash] just spurred him on. He loved it. And that is kind of true, because he took [Dylan] under his wing when he had The Johnny Cash Show back in the late ’60s, after Dylan made the Nashville Skyline album. I think that Johnny Cash had a great, great respect for Bob, and it was mutual. They wrote letters back and forth over the years. I do think that relationship contributed to the film’s commentary about the genre mixing. Especially to younger generations who are coming to see the film — they may not be as familiar with Dylan, but they’re definitely familiar with Johnny Cash’s many rock covers and other genre-mixing, and they’re bringing that context with them into the film. If I’m coming into this film for the first time, what should I know about Dylan’s legacy and influence? You should know that he’s one of the most important songwriters ever. I’d listen to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home. Those are the three albums that are focused on most in the movie. I couldn’t believe how blown away I was when he sat down in the care center, in front of Woody and Pete, and he did “Song to Woody.” And you realize the importance and significance of him meeting his hero, and how important it was that he found him and was able to play a song for him. I didn’t really expect that. I expected the big moments of the electrified stuff at the end of the film, but it was a touching sweet little moment. I was just so captivated after seeing that that I just loved the whole experience of seeing the film. It didn’t strike you as cocky? It probably was cocky. But I think it took everything he had to muster to do it. And he did it.

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