Not Judas – Jesus. Timothée Chalamet’s hilarious and seductive portrayal of Bob Dylan makes him the smirking, scowling and unwilling leader of his generation, whose refusal to submit to the crucifixion of folk-acoustic purity is his own crucifixion. Chalamet gives us a semi-serious ordeal of someone who is part Steinbeck hero, part boyband star, part sacrificial deity. On being derisively asked if he is God, Chalamet’s Dylan replies: “How many more times? Yes.” Chalamet shows us the mysterious burden of celebrity and zeitgeist-ownership endured by a singer-songwriter who transcends John the Baptist (in the form of fatherly and sad-eyed folk mentor Pete Seeger – wonderfully played by Edward Norton) and finally has to wake up his dozing Apostles in Garden of Gethsemane with electric guitars played, in his legendary words, “fuckin’ loud”.
James Mangold’s biopic, co-scripted by him and Jay Cocks, is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties; it’s the story of Dylan’s musical and personal adventures in the first half of the decade as he electrified the world of folk in every sense. He was carried onwards and upwards by the folk movement appreciative of his poetic talent, but dissatisfied with what he saw as folk’s regressive, museum-oriented placidity (and Dylan is shown here not engaging explicitly with its socialist traditions); he is yearning for the new modern energy of rock’n’roll as the musical form which he has to master if it is not to surpass him.
Elle Fanning is gentle and sensible as Dylan’s first girlfriend in New York; she is called Sylvie Russo, but based on Suze Rotolo, who appeared with him walking arm-in-arm through New York’s Greenwich Village on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Monica Barbaro is an elegant Joan Baez, with whom Dylan ungallantly cheats on Sylvie and whose lovely if trillingly cultured soprano voice is described by him as maybe too beautiful; however he semi-graciously allows her to cover his famous songs including Blowin’ in the Wind and appear with him on stage, perhaps sensing that her more emollient, mainstream presence will accelerate his own success. Norton is gentle, wise Seeger who gives Dylan his big break and is deeply upset by Dylan’s sullen, mutinous rejection of purist folk at his beloved Newport folk festival; Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash, whose country stylings and unselfconscious stage power is a spur to Dylan (Cash, of course, was played as a far more complex and muted figure by Joaquin Phoenix in Mangold’s Walk the Line); Scoot McNairy has a recurring, thankless cameo as the totemic Woody Guthrie, stricken with Huntington’s disease, to whom Dylan sings at his hospital bedside.
And of course Chalamet is a hypnotic Dylan, performing the tracks himself and fabricating to a really impressive degree that stoner-hungover birdsong. He does a very passable version of Don’t Think Twice, with the distinctive, eccentric intonations, singing as if he’s not entirely sure of the tune and appearing to run out of breath at the end of every line.
Chalamet is also good at Dylan’s insolent comedy in art as in life: puckish, witty, insufferable and yet wounded, someone whose habit of wearing dark glasses indoors gets him beaten up. How did he get to sing and talk like that? How did Robert Zimmerman from Minnesota get to sound more raw and less intelligible than either Seeger or Guthrie? His claim to have learned guitar chords from cowboys at carnivals deeply irritates Baez who says he’s full of shit. But Mangold and Chalamet show his vocation lies in self-invention and reinvention; the shapeshifting which needs troubadour comedy as a cover, and which brings him to folk and then, footloose, on to something else.
In real life, the shout of “Judas!” from an audience enraged by his electric guitars was recorded at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, but this film transfers it to Newport. In fact, this film is very wary of acknowledging the importance or even existence of the British invasion; the Beatles are dismissed with hardly more emphasis than Donovan and their 1964 meeting with Dylan, at which he is supposed to have introduced them to weed, is not shown here – perhaps because the film only has room for one musical divinity.
To impersonate Dylan is a near-impossible job, and this movie itself risks the “Judas!” response from the connoisseur-fanbase. In 2007, Todd Haynes in I’m Not There split it into a number of enigmatic personae featuring Cate Blanchett’s hilarious turn; the Coens tackled Dylan in their own indirect way with Inside Llewyn Davis from 2014, with Oscar Isaac as the failing not-Dylan folk musician in the same period, doomed to obscurity. No fictionalised Dylan is going to match the real thing from documentarist DA Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back. Chalamet is more approachable and simply more present than the real thing.
Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance.
• A Complete Unknown is released on 25 December in the US, 17 January in the UK and 23 January in Australia.
