His Bobness Unknown.

 

(The picture is of Dylan’s childhood home. Or not)

It was always going to happen. As a Dylanfreak (or Bobcat), even if not a film buff, I was always going to go and see “A Complete Unknown.” 

What a masterstroke the title is. It embodies all the ironies and ambiguities of Dylan’s life, at least as we can know it. Like the Scorsese documentary film “No Direction Home” the film takes its title from one of Dylan’s most iconic works, “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song is on the album “Highway 61 Revisited,” close to the period with which this brilliant biopic closes.

It is a sensible and frequently used marker for one of the great shifts of Dylan’s life, when he, symbolically speaking, “went electric.” He did. And he didn’t. He has and hasn’t “gone” many things.

Unlike Scorsese’s 2005 documentary, “A Complete Unknown” does not strive to embody so-called “historical accuracy.” Historians, and no doubt film makers (of whom I know less), have long since realised that such accuracy is impossible.

James Mangold and his colleagues tell a representative narrative of Dylan’s life. They start with his arrival in Greenwich Village. To do so is to preclude analysis of the years in which Dylan grew up in the small and, by American standards, isolated mine belt town of Hibbing.

Dylan’s unpretentious family home still stands, more or less unchanged from the 1940s and 50s when he grew up. Several years ago I stood outside it and listened carefully as it told me nothing.

It learned well the methodologies of its guest.

It is possible to sleuth around a handful of publicly accessible stories and glimpses of Dylan’s early life. They add nothing to the interwoven contradictory glimpses he has permitted through his lyrics, other writings, artwork and behaviour. He remains a complete unknown. Psychoanalysis of the spicks and the specks that he permits us is fruitless. Get a life.

The film masterfully captures this. It waives away the unattainable. Dylan’s family and first attested girlfriend, Echo Helstrom, to whom he perhaps alludes in his enigmatic memoir Chronicles: Volume One, don’t feature.

The infamous 1966 “Manchester incident,” when a lapsing fan cried “Judas” is reset in the USA, placed a year earlier, the male transformed to a female, and Dylan’s reasonably emphatic response loses an F-bomb.

Which is a little surprising, because F-bombs are not a rarity in the film, or one suspects in Dylan’s verbal repertoire: plenty more reverberate through the film, and it was a powerful moment in the Dylan journey. “I don’t believe you.  You’re a liar,” snarled Dylan back at the heckler. 

“Play fucking loud,” he instructed the band, all on mic and clear to hear near 60 years later.

Actually he doesn’t swear that often at audiences, or even in songs. It was a moment and the only moment really that “A Complete Unknown” fudges. That and Pete Seeger’s infamously and near-universally misrepresented call to cut the sound.  

Joan Baez’s “You’re a kind of an arsehole, Bob,” makes up for it. Or “Asshole,” maybe? Did Baez say it? She could have. Justly. But so was she, really. And that’s a theme of the film, masterfully cached in a blink.

But Dylan’s early successes and failures, loves and losts, school reports and sporting achievements ... the interests and hobbies and moments of his childhood remain in this film a blank page.

Dylan described (Marilyn Monroe lookalike) Helstrom as his “Becky Thatcher,”  an allusion to “Tom Sawyer.” Dylan is Tom Sawyer. 

His next chronicled girlfriend, the better-known Suze Rotolo, becomes in his Chronicles a “Rodin sculpture come to life.” 

¿Que? 

He describes both, publicly at least, with words that befuddle. Alice-Dylan is behind the looking glass. Behind the shades that come on and off in the film. 

Through a darkened glass.

“A Complete Unknown” obfuscates Rotolo. Deliberately. She serves to highlight Dylan’s propensity to use those around him, particularly his struggles with fidelity, to fiends or lovers, apparent throughout phases of his life. 

Dylan: running. Dylan, whose station wagon in real life allegedly has “world’s greatest granddad” stickered on its tailgate. Dylan’s Triumph T100 didn’t. Life changes. 

Rotolo is interwoven with Joan Baez. She is tortured by Baez. Records (including Dylan’s own) indicate the truth of that painfully clearly clearly. All was not love and roses. 

Both were phenomenally strong women. Dylan needed strong women. Or didn’t. But don’t analyse his relationship with Betty, his mother. The evidence is absent. The film didn’t. Thanks be to God. 

The Baez relationship has always been a symbiotic relationship. Rotolo, it is often suggested, was the one great lost love of Dylan’s journey. Perhaps.

Dylan has outlived both Helstrom and Rotolo, and it is tantalisingly right that we will never know more. Baez herself has and continues to trade on, not necessarily malevolently, her tortured relationship with Dylan. 

Symbiosis: symbiotically exploitative. Symbiotically beneficial. Whatever. Neither of these socialists is poor. 

The phase of Dylan’s life following this film features Baez prominently, interwoven with the story of his marriage to music and to Sarah Lownds. But while that is a potential film in the making, and paradoxically a convoluted film already made, I doubt any of us will ever live to see it.

That convoluted film of that period, the one that does exist, is “Renaldo and Clara.”  “A film that no one is likely to find altogether comprehensible,” as a reviewer said at the time. Four hours long, shaky camera technique, and utterly execrable. Tantalising. Brilliant. Don’t watch it unless you are as crazy as I am (and it has been 40+ years since I last watched it).

So what does “A Complete Unknown” tell us about Dylan?

It tells us that we will never know anything but speculations, spick, speck, flotsam and jetsam, carefully controlled by Dylan himself, and remarkably well respected by the film-makers.

Dylan created a persona, not only by giving himself a new name, but by manufacturing a myriad, myriad stories about himself. Dylan ran from his stories, and ran from people, and ran from you, and bugger it, runs from me. Dylan becomes like the naked man who escapes arrest in the garden of Gethsemane – he alludes to that story in what I consider to be his best album, but that is a decade-plus beyond the reach of this film.

Bu, yes, he does allude to it. Often, in his lyrics. He becomes the one “betrayed by a kiss on a cool night of bliss" in the song “No Time to Think” on the album “Street Legal.” Google the cover of that album. Dylan peering out, appearing to ascertain the risks of the world around him whilst knowing he never can.

But we are back in the early 1960s in this film. Back when Dylan tried “to harmonize with songs / The lonesome sparrow sings.” That was never going to be easy. Sparrows fall. 

Like the naked man of Mark’s gospel Dylan escapes capture.  He is the one who will never be imprisoned on celluloid, pixel, print or canvas. Dylan is (and I think this is no accident) the "the man in the macintosh,” of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Google!

Dylan has ferocious lawyers. Try citing his works in print and you will soon hear from them. But that too is highly symbolic. His two wives, Sarah and, later, Carolyn, remain tight lipped. His descendants likewise – though his son Jakob occasionally provides carefully vetted glances which tell us little.

This is the man who was hounded by A. J. Weberman, self-proclaimed garbologist who trawled through the songwriter’s garbage bins to find the meaning of a life disguised.

Dylan will always slip away. 

That is what “A Complete Unknown,” its outstanding cast and crew, capture sublimely. Dylan will never be the property of folk, or electric, political gospel or any other form of music or writing. Will never be owned by his producers and managers or even friends. He was the “property of Jesus,” he told us at one stage. But was he? Yeah, I reckon, but I am a universalist. 

Dylan was and is running endlessly. 

Dylan will always be, until and long after he isn’t, the m-dash between dates. Dylan will always be a captivating, infuriating inspirational complete unknown. Until there are no shades.