In Dylan’s Orbit

by Syed Mowla

How can a film on a musician as well known as Bob Dylan be made?  If you’re Todd Haynes you don’t even look for the man’s center. Instead of trying to portray Dylan as a whole, you break him up into pieces, with several actors portraying different parts of his character.

James Mangolds ‘A Complete Unknown’ succeeds in being good in any case, it also finds a perspective on Dylan that is as surprisingly powerful, magnifying the Newport set. The movie navigates a number of typical biopic tropes, but Mangold realizes he doesn’t have to provide a series of cliched justifications for Dylan’s behavior to depict what it was like in the Greenwich Village folk scene when Dylan landed like an asteroid out of space. The musician is viewed as a force in ‘A Complete Unknown’ rather than as a protagonist. Its strongest scenes focus more on what it was like to be in Dylan’s orbit. I’m not referring to the increasingly escalated crowds he performs for, particularly the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where the movie concludes this Dylan’s rise. The 2015 novel Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald served as the inspiration for the script, which Mangold co-wrote with frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks. It’s the people more intimate with Dylan that carry the film — the collaborators, colleagues, and lovers around him as he makes the ascent from gifted upstart to rock star.

Is the Bob Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown” a good one? I’m not sure. It’s an excellent film about talent and what it’s like to be around someone who is so brilliant that it seems like they’ve been touched by the divine.

It has a group of sincere folks, many of whom are gifted in their own right, who want to move in time with Dylan’s burgeoning star until he furiously shakes them all off. The Greenwich Village that has become the subject of legend is given a crowded, tactile feel in “A Complete Unknown”, yet Dylan looms above it all. He rides his bike past Suze’s apartment late in the movie, and even though they are no longer together, she gets on and follows him to Newport because, really, who wouldn’t? It would make a great album cover. But once she’s there, you can watch her sparkle disappear as she understands that she’s just an accessory to the newest fashion Dylan’s putting on. “A Complete Unknown” makes no effort to provide an explanation for the mystery that is Bob Dylan. It demonstrates what it’s like to bob around in the wake of brilliance, which is a more attainable goal