From the second Timothée Chalamet gets spit out of a hitched ride at the edge of the George Washington Bridge in ragged clothes and a cabbie hat, clutching an acoustic guitar and a rucksack wandering the beat carnival on MacDougal Street, A Complete Unknown is, as the biopic form requires, a two-hour compression of music mythology that plays loose with facts. And every minute is a total blast. Digging straight into the exaggerated fable of how Bob Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and drew a line and cast a curse—in two hours and dozens of eternal songs performed, at Chalamet’s insistence, live on set—A Complete Unknown is a pitch-perfect fiction made of history that will never stop changing.
If there is a moment in A Complete Unknown that could move a Bobcat to tears, it comes in these opening scenes. After the young prodigy blown in from the Midwest cons a taxi driver into taking him to a New Jersey hospital to visit his ailing hero Woody Guthrie—the radical folk singer-songwriter 29 years his senior—Dylan plays an early original at his bedside. Performing “Song to Woody” for Guthrie and his one-time Almanac Singers bandmate Pete Seeger, Dylan repurposes an ambling, bittersweet melody from Guthrie’s own “1913 Massacre.” The 20-year-old songwriter’s ode to his Dust Bowl North Star is an explicit act of carrying history forward, protecting Guthrie’s ethos of collectivity through autonomy, telling a previous generation you understand that which could have easily been unknowable in the future.
Dylan is not yet channeling Ginsberg but “Song to Woody” is Whitman through and through, transcending time by tracing it backward and forward. “Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men/That comeeee,” Chalamet sings, drawling the last syllable into a 10-second locked-eye stare, picking the guitar into a rolling low drone, “with the dust and are gone with the wind.” Hearing “Song to Woody” sung by the zillennial icon sends it towards its destiny: traveling on. It’s the closing track on A Complete Unknown’s soundtrack, but in the movie, it’s Chalamet’s first and only chance to convince us he can be Dylan, and he pulls it off: in his weary eyes, in his careful phrasing, in his unprecious trim of the lyrics, in the steadfast conviction of a guy with everything to prove.
To watch a Hollywood depiction of the most sanctified songbook in modern music—of the trickster, the prophet, the sage and liar, mainstream outsider, visionary pop poet, inspiration to the Beatles and the Black Panther Party, Nobel Prize winner—is a good time. (I saw Gerde’s Folk City in IMAX!) The songs carry the story. We don’t learn much about who Guthrie actually was besides in Dylan’s song about a world “that looks like it’s dyin’ and it’s a-hardly been born,” while the real stakes of the ’60s political contexts are mostly limited to a brief performance of “Masters of War.” The true mark left on Dylan by artist, activist, and red-diaper baby Suze Rotolo (named Sylvie Russo here at Dylan’s own request) feels thinly sketched in A Complete Unknown, but her impact on culture by way of introducing her then-boyfriend to the civil rights struggle and Brecht and Rimbaud are present in many of these folk standards, not least in the question marks X-raying our still depraved civilization in “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
It is through Chalamet’s unvarnished performances that the songs are able to do the talking. When his voice strains, flattens a syllable, or sounds more nasal than Dylan ever did, when he sings through gritted teeth, this does the songbook justice by not over-manicuring anything. If you haven’t seen A Complete Unknown, the soundtrack might feel like a funny novelty record, Chalamet’s Dylan karaoke, which in some sense, it is. But in the context of a generational actor portraying a musician who was himself constantly acting, these 23 tracks are more like A Complete Unknown’s audio supercut.
Timmy Dylan—and, on some tracks, his rollicking would-be Hawks—is joined by Monica Barbaro (of Top Gun: Maverick fame) as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Seeger, and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, representing the angels and devils on Dylan’s shoulders. These studio recordings were originally intended for use in the movie before Chalamet made the case for playing everything live instead. Norton sings the interactive Zulu song “Wimoweh,” popularized by Seeger’s blacklisted folk band the Weavers, and clearly selected to paint him as hokey. Among the three pristine Baez solo tunes is her haunting rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” in which Barbaro’s vibrato silences a room on screen as she places her hand over the mic to sing a capella. The Timmy-Monica duets vividly reenact “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Girl From the North Country” (though there’s no evidence Dylan and Baez ever sang this together).
Solo, Chalamet is faithful to Dylan’s acoustic scripture, from sweeping protest poem “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” to his ode to expanded consciousness, “Mr. Tambourine Man.” “The Times They Are a-Changing” stands out because it keeps in the movie’s explosion of fan cheers and chorus-catching at Newport ’64, a foil to the following year’s fiasco, as Dylan baits the crowd with bars on bars of “finger-pointing” ’60s idealism insisting the powers-that-be “don’t criticize what you can’t understand!” The movie’s truncations and tweaks to the songs can be baffling, however, like the decision to cut the harrowing epic “Masters of War” down to just two minutes (not to mention how the edit axes the best lyric, “Jesus would never forgive what you do”).
One of the joys of Chalamet’s performances is hearing the dizzying, transformative charge of getting into Dylan for the first time—as did Chalamet, who grew up on the work of Kid Cudi and Lil B. Those palpable kicks push into the red on the “electric” songs with their whirlwind poetry, irreverence incarnate, like the “God say no/Abe say what?” biblical bricolage opening of “Highway 61 Revisited.” I do wish the soundtrack would’ve kept the audience jeers and smashed bottles from the movie’s “Like a Rolling Stone” scene, mixed into the embittered dreamscape alongside the infamous “Judas!” shout (though even the most amateur Dylanologist knows that didn’t happen at Newport). But Chalamet personifies the cool thrill of putting it all together for the first time: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Wait… the answer is blowing in the wind! It’s supposed to be this fun. That first “electric” album—which had already been out for four months before Newport—was called Bringing It All Back Home, after all. Real-life Dylan was returning to his first love: playing in a band like he did as a Little Richard-obsessed teen. “i accept chaos,” Dylan wrote in that album’s liner notes. “i am not sure whether it accepts me.”
Extending the joyride, nodding to Dylan’s keep-them-guessing performances in the ’60s press, Chalamet has embraced surreality while promoting A Complete Unknown. His Narduwar interview was nearly an hour of shoutouts that mixed Dylan lore and his own: “Big shoutout Phil Ochs,” “Big shoutout Mike Bloomfield,” “Big shoutout Greta Gerwig,” “No shoutout to the blacklisting McCarthyist government of the late ’50s.” Another delightful recent video showed Chalamet interpretively vibing to the entirety of “Visions of Johanna” on a Manhattan pier. Adjacent to all this, he stunned sports fans with his real-head knowledge on ESPN’s College GameDay. This levity is welcome in the context of an artist for whom the idol worship can still seem incongruous with the art, which was out to fool you.
To sing Dylan, however, is to put oneself in the ring with history. Is there any reality in which one would reach for these Timothée takes over any of the other wonderful Dylan covers that exist? For Chalamet’s “The Times They Are a-Changing” instead of, say, Nina Simone’s? For his “Hard Rain” over the Staples Singers’? Hmm. For Chalamet’s “I Was Young When I Left Home,” disarming as it felt on screen, over Anohni’s? Does any “Masters of War” underscore its horrifying continued relevance more than Patti Smith’s? The answer is a fixed and unwavering no, but then, this is a soundtrack and not a covers album. Still, Chalamet’s “Song to Woody” is quite profound, in part because it's comparatively less covered: It’s so sincere for its author, expressing a gratitude that now also seems to flow from Chalamet to Dylan.
Because of Chalamet’s celebrity profile, it’s easy to imagine A Complete Unknown’s soundtrack serving as an introduction to Dylan for many young people to jam, laugh with, think to, perhaps even to locate different versions of themselves. Personally, I don’t want to know what my teenage life would have been like without the No Direction Home and I’m Not There soundtracks. It endears me to think another one is out there as an entry point for kids on their way to a home they’ve never been and—as Timmy Dylan says when meeting Guthrie—trying to catch a spark.
