“Two hundred people in that room and each one wants me to be somebody else.”
— Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown
I’ve literally read over 10 books on Bob Dylan, devoured a handful of documentaries on him, and on top of that, I have spent countless hours poring over his lyrics, attempting to grasp their elusive meanings.
Needless to say, I had been eagerly anticipating the new biopic, A Complete Unknown, which stars Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, ever since it was first announced.
But when I finally got to see it in the cinema last week, I found myself feeling rather underwhelmed. This was one of those experiences that made me realize that reality is much more interesting than fiction.
It wasn’t that the film was bad — the cinematography was striking, the performances were strong, and it certainly attempted to capture the essence of Dylan’s early years (and also how insufferable he was known to be to the people around him).
But something was missing. Or rather, something felt flattened, like everything was condensed into a neat, digestible narrative. The real events, the raw chaos of Dylan’s decision to transition from a folk hero to a rock star, and the intricate web of people, places, and emotions that shaped him — none of that could truly fit into a two-hour film.
For example, take the infamous and well-documented “Judas” incident, where Dylan is heckled by an audience member for going electric during a 1966 performance. In the original recording, you could sense the anger and tension fuming onstage, as Dylan turns his back on the audience, faces his band, and shouts, “Play it fucking loud,” in defiance.
Quite disappointingly, the film only skims over this incident in passing, and tamely, at that. And as most biopics do, it deliberately gets the facts wrong, so that everything could fit into a convenient plot.
The truth is, no matter how well a biopic like A Complete Unknown tries to portray a truly iconoclastic figure like Bob Dylan, it can never fully encompass the complexity of real life.
The chaos, the contradictions, the messiness of the real world — everything is just too vast to fit into a single neat narrative. Films might offer glimpses into reality, but they can never do justice to the full experience.
Sometimes, the real moments are far more profound and interesting than anything that can be reproduced on screen.
Maybe that’s why Dylan still matters so much today — his mysterious and enigmatic real life, the unpredictable choices, the anger, the self-doubt, the triumphs, and the failures — all of it resonates beyond the confines of any single opinion or interpretation.
In the end, A Complete Unknown may offer a version of Dylan, but it isn’t the full picture. It’s a story shaped by someone else’s vision, someone else’s lens.
The real Bob Dylan — the one who turned his back to his audience and reinvented music many times over, the one who wrestled with his identity and his place in society — is far too sublime to be portrayed in a two-hour film.
Maybe, that’s just the way it should be.
Izzat Zailan 