Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown has enormous resonance – but doesn’t break with gender stereotypes
- Written by: Lisa French, Professor & Dean, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University
In 1961, aged 19, Bob Dylan left home in Minnesota for New York City and never looked back. Unknown when he arrived, he would later be widely described as the voice of a generation.
A Complete Unknown follows Dylan’s transformation from his arrival in 1961 to when he was booed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 for playing electric guitar instead of acoustic.
Loosely based on Elija Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, the film is a snapshot of an era of generational and social upheaval through the prism of Dylan’s music.
In the 60s and 70s, my home was filled with Dylan’s songs, and those relating to the antiwar movement had particular resonance. My mother, who loved Dylan’s music, was aligned with Save Our Sons, which campaigned against the Vietnam War and hid young men from conscription. She worried her eldest son might get swept into the war.
In 1978, three years after the war ended, I went with my teenage friends to hear Dylan play at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne. He began with A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, and it literally did. A transfixed concert audience endured the deluge of pouring rain through 29 songs.
Crafting a biopic
Director James Mangold looks at the period where Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) emerged from obscurity, using his shift to electric music to show how his artistic evolution and pursuit of his own path led to fame.
The film does not shrink from portraying Dylan in an unflattering light. His focus is on music at the expense of everything else. He hardly notices his impact on others and does not show loyalty to anyone. Male rock stars are Teflon: their mystique wins over, self-centeredness is accepted.
Music biopics about men often romanticise them as visionaries and laud the artist for their genius, from Mozart in Amadeus (1984) to Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys in the film Love & Mercy (2014).
Biopics about female musicians tend to emphasise their unique challenges, including sexism and exploitation, or issues around race or gender, rather than their status as legendary artists.
The Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues (1972) examined addiction and racism. Judy (2019), about Judy Garland, explored addiction and the pressures of stardom. What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993) depicted Tina Turner’s journey to become a solo performer despite an abusive relationship.
A Complete Unknown shares the major approaches of recent biopics, including a focus on a key period of the artist’s transformation, such as the portrait of the first 15 years of Queen’s Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).
Others explore the artist as innovator, as in the Elton John biopic Rocketman (2019). The majority examine the musician’s cultural impact, for example Aretha Franklin’s influence on civil rights and feminism in Respect (2021).
There are many traditions both male and female biopics share: the cost and burden of fame, the music as a lens for understanding struggle or triumph, the artist as a figure challenging society. A Complete Unknown examines those, and includes romantic and professional relationships, but they are secondary to the story of Dylan’s achievement.
A Complete Unknown is more open than some of its predecessors to acknowledging the difficulties women encounter, but it hints at them rather than fleshing them out.
The pressure on Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) as a woman in a male-dominated industry is invisible, and the film does not substantially break with gender stereotypes which inform the narrative, character development and themes.
The women of Dylan’s life
Chalamet’s performance as Dylan has enormous resonance. Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo, a character inspired by Dylan’s real-life girlfriend at the time, is played as a quiet yet strong presence. Vulnerable but independent, she supports and inspires him during his unknown early days, clearly motivated by genuine care for him rather than his stardom.
The film depicts Dylan as having simultaneous relationships with both Sylvie and Joan (although this is apparently a liberty of fiction, his manager at the time has said the real-life characters had relationships at different times). The film communicates this through the characters’ various gazes at Dylan. Sylvie watches Bob with Joan; Joan sees him with Sylvie.
Joan and Sylvie gaze at Dylan as if trying to fathom a mystery: Dylan is unpredictable and unknowable. Sylvie tries to go with the flow, but ends up saying she can’t do it. Joan, a singer with a reputation far greater than Dylan’s at the beginning of the film, ends up throwing him out of her room when it becomes clear all he wants to do is write another song.
They both cut him loose. Dylan’s 1964 song One Too Many Mornings is about the newly single man and a failure of communication. It speaks of a post-breakup reflective solitude, and how men and women don’t always understand each other.
A cultural turning point
Dylan’s artist girlfriend Suze Rotolo, upon whom Sylvie is based, reportedly resented being cast simply as a musician’s chick. In the film she stands in for the emotional and intellectual support women offer but she is not portrayed as the artist she was.
The only woman represented in the male dominated folk music industry is Joan Baez, which along with her forthrightness in calling Dylan out as “kind of a jerk”, symbolises the times were changing for women too.
Dyan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo, upon whom Sylvie is based, resented being cast as simply as a musician’s chick.
Searchlight Pictures
But the focus is Dylan. Everyone else is just those he abandoned along the way.
A Complete Unknown depicts the cultural turning point of the times as the context for Dylan’s own musical transformation – from acoustic folk to electrified rock. The film stays with you, ricocheting around in your memory. That, for me, is a sign of a good one.
Authors: Lisa French, Professor & Dean, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University
