Bob Dylan doesn’t strike you as the easiest person to make a biopic about. Todd Haynes tried with 2007’s I’m Not There, using an extremely innovative approach that saw no fewer than six actors, including Cate Blanchett, portray different versions of Dylan across scattered, non-linear narratives.
The film was brilliantly executed on its own terms and even got the approval of its subject himself. However, few Dylan fans would describe it as a definitive biopic. In this sense, as the title and the multi-actor conceit deliberately aim for, it was Dylanesque. Slippery, chameleon-like, full of character, artistry and verve, but never quite identifiable or personable. Robert Zimmerman, the person behind the artist, always seemed just out of shot, as intended.
Dylan’s own suggestions for actors he’d like to have played him in a biopic make you realise the uphill battle any casting director would face finding the right person for the job. Star Wars actor Billy Dee Williams, who, unlike Dylan, happens to be black, and now-deceased former Hollywood child star, were the two names Dylan plumped for back in 2012. As always with Dylan, it’s hard to know whether he was simply joking or being obtuse to make a mockery of the whole idea of a biopic about him.
Nevertheless, director James Mangold is taking a stab at his own Dylan biopic, with Timothée Chalamet in the lead role. Set for release next year, the film is called A Complete Unknown and follows the young Robert Zimmerman from his arrival in New York to visit folk idol Woody Guthrie in 1961 to his legendary decision to “go electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
But what does the name of the film mean?
Well, firstly, very much in the vein of I’m Not There, it seems to play on the idea that it’s impossible to know the “real” Dylan. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Dylan’s story will expect the movie to deal with at least three guises of his musical persona.
There’s the folk-blues wannabe who paid homage to “Sonny and Cisco and Lead Belly too” while lifting off Dave van Ronk and Rick von Schimdt Greenwich Village setlists. Then there’s the folk revivalist and civil rights poet of 1963-64. And finally, there’ll be Dylan’s complete transformation into a surrealist Beatnik of the avant-garde who storms Newport with his amplifiers and backing band.
No one Dylan seems to exist as his definitive identity, and none of his personas stick around for very long. Hence, his true identity remains “a complete unknown” even to those who think they know him best, and he is serially misunderstood (perhaps as he intends to be) by any circle he mixes in.
Secondly, the film title is a direct quote from the lyrics of the song, which many consider Dylan’s greatest artistic achievement. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was also one of the songs with which he went electric, debuting it at Newport to the disgust of folk traditionalists and releasing it as a single in July 1965.
The phrase “a complete unknown” refers to the character Dylan compares to a “rolling stone” in the song. Someone whose past reputation has vanished behind them, who feels placeless, directionless and with no one to trust. The most common literal interpretation of the song’s subject is future Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick, with whom Dylan had a year-long affair. However, he could just as easily have been writing about himself.
A Complete Unknown won’t be the first film to have used a lyric from ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ for its title. Martin Scorsese’s superb 2005 documentary No Direction Home takes its name from the line immediately prior to “a complete unknown” in the song’s chorus.
