Sandpaper and Glue – ‘A Complete Unknown’

‘Oh, hear this Robert Zimmerman
I wrote a song for you
About a strange young man called Dylan
With a voice like sand and glue.’ 

(David Bowie, ‘Song for Bob Dylan’)

*

It hits me instantly and I wonder why so many others haven’t been saying it. The voice is close. But it’s too polished, too smooth and safe, and, crucially, doesn’t give you that initial fizz and shock. Timothée Chalamet nails the look, the insouciance and occasional obnoxiousness, and - to be fair - when talking summons up Bob Dylan perfectly. But when he picks up his guitar and delivers ‘Song to Woody’ at the dying folk singer’s bedside, I wince and sense the desire - the director’s? Chalamet’s? The film studio’s? - to sanitize an instrument that David Bowie described as sounding ‘like sand and glue’. 

I was quite excited about seeing A Complete Unknown, even after I’d been reminded by a friend that I don’t get on with biopics. Something about James Mangold’s film, and the buzz around Chalamet’s performance overrode that scepticism. I should have known though. It’s not a bad film, but it feels too obvious, and is over-dependant on building up to the famous moment of Dylan going electric (I’d been given a heads-up that the cry of ‘Judas’ would be ringing out in Newport, Rhode Island and not Manchester, but was all too ready to forgive that).

The narrative is told too straight. And along with the smoothed-out voice - spit those lyrics out, Timothée … ‘It ain’t me babe’ is not a love-song’ - there are no surprises. You never find yourself discombobulated. And Bob Dylan should always leave you a bit punch-drunk.

So yes, it’s the old problem with biopics. They need a twist, and a really big twist to work. It’s already been done with Dylan, of course: with Todd Haynes’ non-linear, six-charactered I’m Not There. I think of other great films that are on the surface biopics, but when you sit down veer off somewhere completely different, my favourite of this ilk being Shirley, all about the novelist - and yet not really about the ‘novelist’ - Shirley Jackson.

Todd Haynes' I'm Not There

 

Still, it’s been a couple of days since I saw A Complete Unknown and I’ve been revisiting Dylan much more frequently than usual. Not just the songs that Chalamet took on, but a mixture of the obvious - ‘Visions of Joanna’ and ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ - and also some of the more underrated albums. Infidels, his post-Christian comedown effort, is suddenly revealing itself as magisterial. “Oh, oh, oh Jokerman!” In addition to this, I’ve been listening to some of the artists who cover Dylan. One of these, in particular, cuts right to the heart of of how you take on that voice of ‘sand and glue’. You simply don’t. Nina Simone’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb Blues’ breaks my heart. She gives it a female sensitivity, loses Dylan’s vibe of taking a weary stroll downtown, and in doing so comes up with something that does justice to the man who wrote it. In short, it doesn’t come across as a third-place entry on Stars In Their Eyes, but as a 2am torch-song that makes you pour a glass of Burgundy at the beginning, and then reach for the ‘harder stuff’ as it fades out. That’s how you do Dylan.