The costs of art, as “A Complete Unknown” sees them

In a 2002 play, “Vincent in Brixton,” Vincent Willem van Gogh betrays his early lover, Ursula Loyer. He deserts her, leaving London for Paris. And at one point he announces: “An artist doesn’t care for his wife or children, any more than for the pigeons in the park. He cares for himself and for his work.”

Such words, it seems, could be applied to Bob Dylan, maybe or maybe not in real life, but certainly in the partly fabricated, partly true biopic “A Complete Unknown.” The Dylan in the film comes across as the embodiment of Freud’s theory of selfish infantilism, pure Id that cares only about satisfying himself or herself.

Not a bad person, really, but not a nice one, either. He is honest about life to a fault, despite the mythmaking lies he tells about himself, but is not someone either easy to be around or someone much interested in other people. In short, the film’s Dylan is something of a narcissistic jerk stuck in adolescence.

Of course, he starts out at 19 and moves through his early 20s in the film, so he does a bit of growing up.

But in that process, the Dylan so remarkably portrayed by Timothée Chalamet betrays or deserts many, if not most, of the people who care about him. He betrays his mentor, Pete Seeger, by going electric at the famous 1965 Newport Folk Festival. He betrays his first real lover, called Sylvie Russo (not Suze Rotolo, as in real life), by taking up with Joan Baez. And then he betrays Baez. Ultimately, he marries someone else.

Beyond the broad strokes, just how much is true and how much is movie mythmaking is hard to tell. Still, many of the film’s literal untruths have been documented.

The New York Times, for instance, unpacks some of the facts from what director James Mangold calls a “fable” about Dylan’s early years. Dylan was not the Newport festival’s closing act, for instance. The fan there shouting “Judas” actually did so a year later at a British concert, then spurring Dylan to tell his band to “play loud,” as he did in the movie.

Time also reports that some of the movie’s convenient narrative about Seeger and Dylan’s idol, Woody Guthrie, is at best dubious. “The movie shows Dylan showing up to Guthrie’s hospital room to play him a song, and then Seeger being so impressed by the young man’s playing that he lets him stay with his family,” the magazine reports, noting that this didn’t really happen. While it’s true that both men did visit Guthrie, who was institutionalized with Huntington’s disease, the details are embellished in the film.

A journalist’s sensibilities may be offended by such filmmaking liberties, of course, but the movie employs them to make larger points that seem to be true about Dylan and, perhaps, great artists in general. Much like van Gogh or others who sublimated nearly everything – and perhaps nearly everyone – in their lives to their art, the film’s Dylan (and perhaps the real one) felt he had to betray many, even his fans, to realize his artistic visions.

Dylan has been notorious throughout his career for his peculiar relationship with fame and his fans. That comes across well in the film, where he sticks it to his folk fans by performing searing electric work and turning his back on the crowds. He flees from fans, mostly young women, in the streets of New York and at a bar where he goes, hoping to remain in the background so he can listen to a performer. He spurns sophisticated devotees at an uptown party.

In the five or six concerts of his that I have been lucky to attend over the decades, Dylan rarely interacted with the crowd. Unlike musicians such as Paul McCartney, James Taylor or Paul Simon, he was not a people-pleaser. In the movie he refuses to play audience favorites, insisting over Baez’s objection that it wasn’t a request performance. It was his venue and he would play what he wanted to play.

The last time I saw the now 83-year-old Dylan was at a small venue, Colorado’s Dillon Amphitheater, in July 2022. Musically, the show was pretty bad – discordant at times and canned-sounding the rest. Appropriately, “Things Aren’t What They Were …” was the motto on that three-year world tour, “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”

As a letter-writer to the local paper put it: “His set had no life, energy, pop, rhythm or chemistry and left many in the audience wondering and actually pleading out loud for at least one song from his massive catalog of hits. Instead we got a garbled lounge act that left many feeling cheated! He hid behind his piano box, never once acknowledged the crowd with a simple ‘thank you’ or a painfully obvious play on words that we all had fun with leading up to this performance — ‘It’s great to be Bob Dylan playing in Dillon!’”

At that show, he played without a spotlight, retreating into the background, literally in the dark. This was very much unlike the Dylan I had seen years before at Madison Square Garden and Philadelphia’s Spectrum and in a venue in Toronto. Perhaps that’s because at his age, he may feel he is fading to black. Certainly, he will do so, perhaps all too soon. And so, maybe, he was making a statement.

And yet, for all his odd disdain for fame, Dylan seems driven to perform. He seems to need the rush that crowds and stages provide. He needs that perhaps even more than he needs individuals, such as Baez or his first wife Sara Lowndes, with whom he had four children (along with one Lowndes brought into the marriage, whom he adopted). Dylan, who split with Lowndes after 12 years in 1977, had a sixth child with his second wife, Carolyn Dennis, from whom he divorced in 1992.

In his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” Dylan wrote that family was one of the most important aspects of his life, as People reported. “Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on,” he wrote. “Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me.”

In 2005, Bob’s youngest son, Jakob, spoke to The New York Times about the role his father played in his youth. “When I was a kid, he was a god to me for all the right reasons,” he recalled. “He never missed a single Little League game I had. He’s collected every home run ball I ever hit. And he’s still affectionate to me.”

Jakob’s older brother, Jesse, echoed this in an interview with U.K.’s The Times in 2021. “My dad’s great, he’s a totally kind, wonderful man,” he said. “He’s been nothing but supportive to me and my brothers and sisters.”

Perhaps these familial praises are true, truer than the self-absorbed betrayer Chalamet and Mangold give us in the film. Certainly, the Dylan in the movie was the young artist and post-adolescent just emerging, just defining himself to himself and the world. And it’s true that romantic betrayals are pretty common among folks at that age, so perhaps the real Dylan can be forgiven for at least those.

Still, in some ways the movie’s most interesting character is not the Id-consumed Dylan, but rather Baez. At one point, she tells him “you’re full of shit” when he spins nonsense about working in carnivals. She sees through his mythmaking to the real Bobby Zimmerman, the hungry and ambitious guitarist from Hibbing, Minnesota.

Baez, whom I was also privileged to see in the past, these days shuns the stage. Instead, the soon to be 84-year-old recently released a book of poetry, “When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance: Poems. After quitting touring several years before, she said in a 2023 New York Times piece, “I have been in a state of manic creativity: portrait painting, drawing, making prayer sticks, making a documentary and last but not least, finishing up a book of poetry …”

Baez, of course, wrote about her time with Dylan in the elegiac “Diamonds and Rust.” Her lyrics are both pained and scorching:

Well, you burst on the scene/Already a legend/The unwashed phenomenon/The original vagabond/You strayed into my arms/And there you stayed/Temporarily lost at sea/The Madonna was yours for free/Yes, the girl on the half-shell/Could keep you unharmed

Now I see you standing/With brown leaves falling all around/And snow in your hair/Now you’re smiling out the window/Of that crummy hotel/Over Washington Square/Our breath comes out white clouds/Mingles and hangs in the air/Speaking strictly for me/We both could have died then and there

Now you’re telling me/You’re not nostalgic/Then give me another word for it/You who are so good with words/And at keeping things vague/’Cause I need some of that vagueness now/It’s all come back too clearly/Yes, I loved you dearly/And if you’re offering me diamonds and rust/I’ve already paid

Many people around Dylan paid in various ways as he shattered musical conventions and challenged America politically and socially. He helped move us from the era of the sugary likes of Patti Page (“That Doggie in the Window”) into a time when popular music could be relevant. He brought us poetic so-called story songs that had messages that previously only fans of the likes of Woody Guthrie of the folk scene heard.

His work also could be searingly personal.

One the best scenes in the movie is when he and Baez team up to angrily sing “It Ain’t Me Babe,” firing one of his trademark songs at each other like prizefighters landing blows. The film suggests the song was about his turn away from Baez, plumbing the depths of their anger toward one another. In fact, the real 1964 performance at which they sang the song together was a playful affair in which they mangled the lyrics.

And the song was actually about the loss of his first serious love, Rotolo. While Rotolo and Dylan look to be very much in love in the cover image of his 1963 “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album, the song tells a rather different story:

I’m not the one you want, babe/I’m not the one you need/You say you’re lookin’ for someone/Who’s never weak but always strong/To protect you and defend you/Whether you are right or wrong/Someone to open each and every door

But it ain’t me, babe/No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe/It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe

Go lightly from the ledge, babe/Go lightly on the ground/I’m not the one you want, babe/I’ll only let you down/You say you’re lookin’ for someone/Who’ll promise never to part/Someone to close his eyes for you/Someone to close his heart/Someone to die for you and more

But it ain’t me, babe/No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe/It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe

You say you’re lookin’ for someone/To pick you up each time you fall/To gather flowers constantly/And to come each time you call/And will love you for your life/And nothin’ more

Lyrics like those are the sort that earned Dylan the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. And on that point, the film offers a final bit of distortion. In a screen crawl at the end, it says that Dylan didn’t show up to pick up his prize, implying it was yet another middle-finger he raised to the establishment. In fact, Dylan met with members of the Swedish Academy in a private ceremony the following April, with no media present, at which he received his gold medal and diploma.

And in a Nobel lecture posted on the group’s website, Dylan mentions musical giants who influenced him, such as Buddy Holly and Lead Belly. At length, he discusses three books that made deep marks on him: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Homer’s Odyssey.

“Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page,” he said. “And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.'”

For all of its inaccuracies and its fictions, though, the movie does capture something about this cultural titan, one who refuses to go quietly into the night, and is well worth seeing. Just hearing those remarkable songs — as performed so ably by Chalamet — is worth the price of admission. We aren’t likely to hear Dylan perform any of them again live, so this reasonable facsimile will have to do. While flawed, the movie is a fascinating take.