Rock and roll ghosts are possessing our movie stars. Austin Butler apparently went so deep into character over the years-long process of filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis that he got stuck there, eventually hiring a vocal coach to help de-Elvis him. Watching a trailer for an upcoming spy movie, it occurred to me that its star was not so much Rami Malek as Rami-Malek-as-Freddie-Mercury-in-Bohemian–Rhapsody, blowing up bad guys with a camp flourish. It is a storied tradition: some say Val Kilmer needed therapy to extricate Jim Morrison from his psyche after wrapping Oliver Stone’s very bad The Doors. This is to say nothing of the mortifications of the flesh: Malek’s prosthetic Mercury teeth; the gallons of microwaved ice cream Butler had to drink to achieve Elvoid proportions. Rock history weighs like a tub of Cherry Garcia on the stomachs of the living.
Time will tell what, if anything, the spirit of the still-living Bob Dylan will do to Timothée Chalamet after his performance as a young version of the artist in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. Some commenters have pointed out the actor’s vocal fry and mumbling in recent media appearances—could they be picking up on some lingering traces of the old master? And when Chalamet pulled a combat roll during his interview with Canadian media personality Nardwuar the Human Serviette—wasn’t there a touch of mid-’60s-Bob clownishness there? The set of deep-cut Dylan covers he performed on Saturday Night Live seemed to confirm it: Chalamet carries Bob with him yet. Maybe Chalamet and Butler will show up to shoot the next Dune unexorcised, bringing the spirits of Bob Dylan and Elvis to Arrakis, plowing the trackless desert on sandworms. This is the real dream of the rock biopic as a genre: imperial, interplanetary rock stardom, the old gods returning like Harkonnens to possess the bodies of the young.
Rock music is in need of new hosts. A spate of recent films betray an anxiety about this. The fittingly titled Yesterday dares to imagine a world where everyone has forgotten the Beatles except one no-name musician, who then acts as their vessel, stunning the public with his channeled artistry, even beating Ed Sheeran in a songwriting duel. The chirpy premise belies a deep pessimism: the world is exactly the same without the memory of the Beatles. The anxiety is even more palpable in proper biopics. These films treat not just their subjects but also their subjects’ music—rock and roll itself!—as functionally dead, something to be either eulogized wistfully or frantically resuscitated. We are constantly starting at the ending and then turning back time. Bohemian Rhapsody loops back from Queen’s set at Live Aid, which it presents as a retrospective, career-surveying farewell concert; already heritage. Elvis also loops back, starting with the death of the very Harkonnenian mastermind Colonel Tom Parker—but more tellingly it sweats trying to reactivate its subject’s music for a 21st-century audience, mashing up “Viva Las Vegas” with Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” inserting wailing distorted guitar and what sounds like a beat drop into an early performance of “Baby, Let’s Play House.” Seeing Elvis for the first time: it was kind of like dubstep.
The dead must dance again to make money for someone else. The appropriately named rights behemoth Universal Music Group bought a large stake in Elvis’s catalog in 2022. Queen sold its catalog to Sony for a cool billion pounds in 2024. Sony has been especially busy: in 2020, it bought out Dylan’s songs—Universal bought out his recordings two years later—and in 2021 it bought all the rights to all songs and recordings by Bruce Springsteen, the subject of another biopic due out this spring. These are considered shrewd investments. As the New Yorker reports, back catalogs have “replaced new hits as the primary source of income” for labels; “one report showed that catalogues represented about seventy percent of the U.S. music market in 2021.” With the rights to past masters’ catalogs, the majors gain more negotiating power with streaming platforms and other services that license music. (I imagine a Peloton session set to Dylan’s frenetic 1974 live album with the Band, Before the Flood, the virtual coach exhorting you to push every time Bob punches one of those guttural high notes.) As a genre, the biopic is too full of self-congratulatory reverence to think of itself as a commercial or an investment prospectus. The rock biopic in particular turns its nose up at hard commerce, often finding the star butting heads with philistine record execs and trying to escape parasitic managers. But it is nonetheless true that the rock biopic has a new job in the age of the financialization of music: it helps to produce, and ensure the reproduction of, an audience.
The domination of the past over the present is not a given; it requires an underwriting mythology. But what, exactly, is that mythology? These films want us to be very impressed by the fact that people such as these once walked, or in some cases still hobble, the earth. But lately they seem to have forgotten why we should feel this way. Stone’s 1991 version of Morrison was at least more compelling than the real thing: a sexy ethereal angel baby poet led astray by a satanic woman who makes him drink blood. Rocketman’s Elton John, on the other hand, played with lumbering unsubtlety by Taron Egerton, is a guy who yells at his coworkers. That film starts with an AA meeting and culminates in an Internal Family Systems–style breakthrough where Elton literally embraces his inner child. Self-actualized, he is free to go do The Lion King and bully Brandi Carlisle. We are resurrecting the dead, or rejuvenating the very old, for this? It is as if the possession got botched, the spirit returning mute, only capable of gurgles and moans.
“What’s all this shit about the Yardbirds?” Lester Bangs imagines a bunch of kids one day asking their grandfather in his 1971 essay “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.” This is really to ask, to those who weren’t there, what will it all have meant: the ’60s, the Beatles, the blasted years of Nixon and the off-gassing of American empire, the brief period when mass youth culture asserted itself through loud guitar music made not just by groups but by artists, when this music was invested with earnest hopes that a commercial product could be a world-historical vector for political consciousness? The rock biopic was never an especially good medium for answering these questions. But now it is not even attempting rote answers to them. It throws spectacle and verisimilitude and intensity at us to cover for the fact that it no longer knows what its object is. Its version of the rock star has collapsed into a black hole: contentless and unknowable, but still exerting an unaccountable pull.
Chalamet’s Dylan could be mistaken for another of these black-hole protagonists at first. He plays him halting, soft-spoken, often lost in thought and apparently impervious to social cues. “You shy or something?” Pete Seeger, played with masterful self-effacement by Edward Norton, asks him early on. The muttered response, eyes downcast: “Not usually“—before taking out his guitar and playing “Song for Woody” for Seeger and a bedridden Guthrie. Unfortunate souls who have imbibed too many rock biopics are primed for an instant transformation: the unassuming singer in the pub lurching for the mic, met always with a squall of feedback, the crowd restless, the music starting, and then—the inner source spills out light, proof visible of greatness, Guitar Hero Star Power mode activated. When this Dylan starts singing, he stays the same gawky kid. But there is something in the quality of his eye contact with Woody, the way he stretches out a note in the middle of each verse, like he is wedging something open in the music.
Where did this completely unknown kid come from? From the opening shot—New York unfurling outside a car window as Bob, shot from behind, scribbles on a notepad in the backseat—we are made to want to know. Potential movies that would flesh out this backstory present themselves to the lore-addled brain. We could start later and then look back: maybe with the 1966 motorcycle accident, a convalescent Bob reflecting on where it all went wrong, or maybe his late-1970s big-band tour, on which he needed to dig deep inside himself to deliver a hyper-polished spectacle grand enough to fund his divorce. These hypothetical films would follow recent rock biopics in their melancholic backward trudge: their reliance on traumatic flashbacks, their fixation on the dying moments of a career. As is customary in rock biopics from the past few years, music would be treated as an ordeal. Fun would have to be injected by borrowing tropes from other genres: from the latter-day mob movie, the call of one last job; from the sports film, the training sequence, the comeback, the big sweat-drenched victory.
A Complete Unknown does a complicated dance with its genre. It indulges in just enough of its conventions to attain a degree of solidity often lacking in films about Dylan, but it avoids the maudlin trauma plots and bloated sports-film-style build-ups of recent rock biopics. Refreshingly, it does not loop back. It chugs forward. At one point Bob and Sylvie, the Elle Fanning character based on Dylan’s early-‘60s girlfriend Suze Rotolo, throw a house party, and Sylvie catches a guest thumbing through Bob’s high school yearbook. “Bobby Zimmerman?” the guest sneers. Sylvie slams the book shut and places it out of sight, trying to protect Bob’s right to self-reinvention, his refusal to be defined by past versions of himself. We get the message. Bob Dylan is another figure in the long American tradition of LARPing. He tries out and discards personas, but not as a masquerade hiding the real man. For better or for worse, he really lives his characters. Which doesn’t prevent him from putting people on for a laugh: Chalamet’s Dylan, like the real one, tells straight-faced whoppers about his time in the circus and learning guitar chords from a cowboy named Wigglefoot.
This anti-myth of Dylan as confidence man is of course itself one of the many Bob myths. No major artist exists in so many distinct versions, both of his own and of others’ making: Kermit-voiced crooner, Guthrie disciple, voice of the Boomers, social agitator, esoteric mystic, amphetamine-addled rock-and-roller, rustic family man, circus performer, bolo-tied blues pasticher, literary hero, paragon of cool—but also betrayer of the folkies, ranting evangelist, spent wingnut, thieving magpie. Another film might be tempted to lean into this slippery quality, becoming so infatuated with its subject’s unknowability that it turns into an abstruse dissertation on images rather than anything to do with music. A Complete Unknown wisely limits itself to covering the transformation of just one version of Dylan, the cap-wearing folksinger, into another, the leather-jacketed rock star and author of oneiric putdowns. We see this process in fits and starts, against more or less iconic backdrops: Pete’s cabin, the dingy basement space of the Gaslight Cafe, the Columbia Records recording studio, and, finally, the fateful 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Plus a more or less unconvincing Hoboken-as-West Village.
Ideally a rock biopic should be neither total hype nor total demystification. The trick is somehow to depict both the bare individual, desublimated and without mystique, as well as that individual’s life as symbol and spectacle. We who have absorbed untold hours of this stuff want to see characters toggle back and forth between the two: the awkward kid who transforms onstage, but also the hard-partying star spinning out of control, eyes pleading behind the mask. We watch for little signs of life: tremors, drops of sweat. This is especially important when the protagonist is as blankly laconic, bordering on inarticulate, as Chalamet plays Dylan. We learn to watch the eyes, direct and challenging. Most of all we learn to listen to the voice, not necessarily always the words. Chalamet does an admirable job capturing Dylan’s range of vocal textures, both sung and spoken. He mumbles, rasps, and keens—but the mannerism he nails most uncannily is the little Bob laugh, “heh heh.”
Actors who have worked on biopics like to talk about the difference between acting and doing an impression. Impressions, Chalamet has said during his publicity tour for this film, are only skin-deep and ultimately grate on the audience. To transcend imitation and really act, you need a working theory of your subject. A Complete Unknown’s Bob is foremost an observer and an absorber, a sponge Bob. He is quiet because he is processing. His music is not inward fantasy but the result of some highly attuned antennae. The first song we hear him writing is “Girl from the North Country”; he scratches at in in Seeger’s cabin. Like the yearbook, the song seems to carry something from his recent childhood in Duluth. But unlike the yearbook, the song transforms the merely personal, transposing it to a space both in and out of time where, as Sean Wilentz has written, “it could be 1927 or 1840 or biblical time . . . and it is always right now too.”
The film is not above twisting events to drive home this point. We see Dylan watch the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on TV and rush to the Gaslight amid the chaos to perform a new song. He has apparently just metabolized the whole scene into “Masters of War,” from which the movie cuts the second-best line, “I hope that you die.” We see him stop by a street peddler to buy the toy whistle that will eventually punctuate the Old Testament rave-up “Highway 61 Revisited.” The memory of a girl, imminent nuclear catastrophe, a children’s toy: the film correctly treats all these at the same level, as indifferent input sources for Dylan’s creative process. The three registers mix in the songs. By the end of “Highway 61,” that goofy whistle is heralding an apocalyptic vision of “the next world war.” In the north country, where “the winds hit heavy on the borderline,” later listeners with the special overactive imagination of true Bob-heads might detect the chill of nuclear winter, hard snow following hard rain.
Some viewers have objected to the way History with a capital H unfolds mainly as backdrop and newsreel in A Complete Unknown. Sylvie takes Bob to a civil rights demonstration as part of a thin montage; later we watch along with her as Bob sings “Only a Pawn in their Game” on TV from the March on Washington. Kennedy’s assassination: more TV. (We don’t see the speech a drunk Dylan would go on to make where he expressed his sympathy for Lee Harvey Oswald.) But this too is part of the film’s theory of Bob-as-assimilator. Like Baudelaire’s painter of modern life, he is looking for a form of art that can bring together the fleeting and the timeless: a musical language that could capture both the events of the news and the cosmic swirl of myth and articulate them together. In 1965, it seemed to Dylan that rock and roll, the music of his childhood that he had set aside to sing folk songs, could be that language.
Two moments are irresistible to rock biopics: the birth of a good song, and its activation in front of an audience. The scene where the initial idea strikes the songwriter, usually while tapping idly at the piano, is a virtual requirement in the genre. Malek-as-Mercury hits on the “Bohemian Rhapsody” theme while pecking at the keys lying upside down. In the truly lovely Love and Mercy, in which a mumblecore romcom slowly swallows a rock-and-roll trauma plot, Paul-Dano-as-young-Brian-Wilson pulls “God Only Knows” out of the æther in much the same way. He then plays it for his overbearing father and onetime manager, who more or less tells him it sucks.
A Complete Unknown does and doesn’t oblige this convention. We only ever see Bob composing in medias res. The first firings of an idea always happen out of sight, somewhere no film could follow. He rushes home mumbling some indistinct words, trying to catch them before they leave his brain—and what exactly is he saying? “Once upon a time, you dressed so fine . . .” This is likely not how he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone,” which seems to have been whittled down from a long ranting poem, but it is fun to hear the mind at work out loud. Sometimes he composes as an act of aggression, purely to annoy and unsettle others. He wakes up Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro with special sensitivity to her prickly side, to make her watch him write “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” She tells him to get out.
These scenes are speculative, dramatizations of moments forever lost to history. Others painstakingly recreate classic images, tableau vivant–style. The rock biopic is among other things a fantasy of a living, responsive image. Witness again the cramped mise en scene of the 1968 Elvis comeback special, or Elton John in the shiny baseball outfit at Dodger Stadium in 1975, or Jimi Hendrix telling his audience to watch out for their ears before blowing them out with “Sgt. Pepper” in 1967. These scenes are restaged in obsessive detail—and then we get to see into the penumbral realms beyond them. As if we could take a classic broadcast and swipe a bit to the left and see the banks of screens in the control room, the whacked-out star rising from his stupor to bound onstage, the producer scolding the cameraman for lingering too long on Mercury’s crotch, Bob and “Sylvie” huddling together against the cold, then click: they appear as they do on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Life is frozen into myth before our eyes.
A Complete Unknown ends with Dylan’s most mythic media set piece: the disastrous electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It has been depicted before, perhaps most hyperbolically in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, in which Cate Blanchett’s Dylan figure—it must be said her impression of him is superior to Chalamet’s on a purely technical level—and her band open fire on the folkie crowd with Tommy guns. And then somehow they are playing, while the Seeger character looks for an axe to cut the cables and shut the whole thing down. It is black and white, and the music is an anemic blues-lawyer reading of “Maggie’s Farm.”
Haynes’s telling misses the ferocious musical energy of the actual electric set. In the surviving recordings, Dylan thunders through the festival’s underpowered sound system, while Mike Bloomfield plays guitar with loosely coiled anticipation, tripping over himself to slash out his most vicious licks once it is finally time for him to take a lead break. A Complete Unknown manages to capture much of this power, even as it makes the necessary tweaks and condensations (the audience member who yelled “Judas” at Bob at the 1966 show in Manchester is imported to Newport). The band sounds like they are having fun playing together, and they look bewildered to be the targets of boos and thrown bottles. More penumbral happenings: Norton-as-Seeger makes a halfhearted attempt to chop the cables, before his wife and collaborator Toshi (Eriko Hatsune) stops him. The axe business is based on a long-circulating legend, which Seeger sometimes denied and sometimes endorsed, for different reasons—was it an “axe” as in a guitar that he was reaching for, or maybe was he speaking hyperbolically, or was he frustrated with the sound system rather than Dylan’s performance? It hardly matters: like all the characters in A Complete Unknown, Seeger flickers between a contingent, flawed individual and a mythic, self-exceeding icon who stands in for forces beyond himself. What may not have been empirically true was more or less allegorically true.
This high drama is actually one of A Complete Unknown’s cheesiest moments—along with the “I’m Al Kooper” sequence during the “Like A Rolling Stone” sessions, which somehow manages to be simultaneously overexplaining and inside-baseball, as well as the approximately five cumulative minutes of reaction shots where Elle Fanning looks on with bitter tears in her eyes as she loses Bob to Baez, and then to the world. But in the Newport scene, at least, the drama comes from the event itself. It is not anxiously injected via flashback or pumped up with time-bending gimmickry. It is simply allowed to unfold: as messy musical reality and as myth in the making, as a betrayal for some but an expression of a new, more capacious idiom for others. This is the sort of parallax view that Dylan’s best songs give us. Which isn’t to say that A Complete Unknown is as good a film as Highway 61 Revisited is a record. It is just to say that the film has learned the right lessons from its subject and ignored most of the wrong ones.
Or maybe the film just draws most of its energy from the music. Maybe, finally, to make an assured, unselfconscious rock biopic today, one that treats its subject as something other than historical dead weight to be revived through spectacle and traumatic disclosure, you need a subject with a body of work as commanding and self-evidently transfixing as Dylan’s. If this is true, there are not many worthy artists left. Maybe these biopics will be remade for each subsequent generation until the sun swallows the earth, like A Star Is Born. Maybe then the ghosts that haunt the actors of the future will not just be those of rock stars from centuries past but those of the other actors who have occupied the role before them. (The ground is prepared: Val Kilmer has talked in interviews about the uncanny experience of seeing people with Morrison tattoos that are really Kilmer-as-Morrison tattoos.) Or maybe we will finally let these stories decompose, and rock and roll can return to the soil of folk culture, ready to be tilled and converted into something we can use.
