“I didn’t want to turn Bob Dylan into a simple character with a simple thing to unlock that then makes epiphany—a plot-point Freudian history of their life,” says James Mangold, director of the much-anticipated and recently critically acclaimed A Complete Unknown. Here, he points to his attempt to avoid a common issue in biopics: the false mythologisation of real figures. The ability to pick and choose from events and people to construct a narrative deemed profitable for the film makes the genre unavoidably problematic; filmmakers have the power to strategically remove and insert events to shape a desired story.
The film is loosely based on Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties, following Dylan’s career trajectory, his personal struggles with fame, his entwinement with social activism, and his romantic relationships—most significantly with Suze Rotolo (whose name is changed to Sylvie Russo in the film) and fellow artist Joan Baez. The film’s depiction of Dylan himself has been largely praised—the rare criticisms tend to avoid Chalamet’s characterisation of him. The film resists idolisation, presenting him as a genius who is indifferent to his public image; he is unlikeable and often unpleasant but nevertheless talented. In essence, he is afforded complexity in the way these semi-fictionalised male protagonists always are—while the women around them are not.
The trope of the male protagonist as a complex, deeply explored figure—a genius, often morally ambiguous, whose brilliance and flaws are examined in tandem, loved and hated in equal measure—is a familiar and seemingly inescapable one.
In her article Justice for Joan Baez, Kate Hayes points out that the portrayal of the women in A Complete Unknown is not necessarily bad; the problem is that the women tend to be far more fictionalised than their male counterparts. The interaction between Baez and Dylan, in which she kisses him passionately after hearing him sing during the announcement of the Cuban Missile Crisis and calls him an arsehole the morning after, for example, is entirely fabricated. Narrative invention has always been a feature of the biopic genre, and in the film, Baez’s role is crucial to Dylan’s rise to fame and a complication in his relationship with Suze Rotolo—all of which are true. Yet Baez, dubbed “Queen of Folk” before Dylan even emerged on the scene, functions primarily as the centre of a narrative love triangle. This would be fine—it is, after all, a film about Bob Dylan—but the role of existing primarily as a narrative plot point is one overwhelmingly given to women.
Baez’s function in the film as a dramatic device holds far more weight than it does for Edward Norton’s Seeger or even Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash, because the manipulation of women’s narratives—particularly within a historical context where female characters are both flat and lacklustre yet exist as essential narrative tools and love interests for male protagonists—carries a gendered imbalance. Women are often written not as figures in their own right but as mechanisms to advance a man’s story.
Susan Bordo writes that “Suze Rotolo’s experience and insights—not just her name—were erased.” In her essay A Complete Fiction, she articulates the core issue: the book Rotolo wrote about her relationship with Dylan presents an entirely different image of their relationship than the one in the film. The larger problem, when it comes to Baez, Rotolo, or any woman in a male-centred biopic, is that the mythologisation of real figures disproportionately affects women. Women are often reduced to one-dimensional roles and, as a result, used as fantasies—while male protagonists are granted depth and complexity. This becomes even more troubling when the man in question, as is often the case in biopics, is a cultural icon, making his portrayal in the film all the more susceptible to romanticised revisionism.
The film does better than some, resisting the complete reduction of these women to mere love interests. However, Mangold’s initial claim that he aimed to avoid a one-dimensional and awkwardly fictionalised portrayal of Dylan may ring true for the protagonist—but it raises the question of why the women are not afforded the same privilege. Once again, it underscores how the responsibility of doing justice to the truth of real women’s lives goes hand in hand with doing justice to women in general.
“Joan Baez Hamburg 1973 2811730005.cropped” by Heinrich Klaffs is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
