“Born great”: The myth of the solitary genius of Bob Dylan and William Shakespeare

As much as I enjoyed the biopic A Complete Unknown, the Oscar-nominated film about young Bob Dylan, one scene in particular made me wish writer-director James Mangold had made it more like Shakespeare In Love, the 1998 romantic comedy that also depicts a young genius on the rise.

Just past the halfway point in A Complete Unknown, there’s a scene where Dylan (embodied by the Oscar-nominated Timothée Chalamet) jams with a fictional blues guitarist (played by genuine blues guitarist Big Bill Morganfield), and the energy of the movie shifts as we finally see Dylan make music with and be inspired by another artist. It’s a moment of pure collaborative joy in a film that mostly traffics in the cliches of the isolated artist burdened by society’s attempt to define him, but whose unique brilliance is instantly recognized and accepted as given by everyone he meets. As critic Bilge Ebiri notes, “A Complete Unknown [is] — by design — [about] the effect Dylan’s genius had on the people around him,” almost all of whom gaze at him in varying degrees of awe, hunger, jealousy, or teary-eyed longing.

Shakespeare In Love, on the other hand, takes a more irreverent approach. Its Oscar-winning screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard depicts young Will in love with Viola de Lesseps, a wealthy merchant’s daughter, in an atmosphere of creative chaos where only she recognizes his talent, exploiting the comic disconnect between our knowledge of Shakespeare’s glorious legacy and how little he’s regarded by the London theater community in 1593.

Shakespeare In Love also brilliantly dramatizes what Shakespeare’s plays suggest and the historical record confirms: that he was a complete man of the theater involved in every aspect of play-making both onstage and backstage. Yes, Shakespeare was a poet and, in the coinage of one character, a “wordwright” (while yet another character describes him as “an insolent penny-a-page rogue”), but we also watch him scrambling for funding, attending royal command performances, conducting auditions, supervising staging, directing actors on how to say their lines (while also massaging their egos), and even acting onstage. In her biography Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee calls Shakespeare in Love “a loving, comic tribute to the theater,” and cites the film’s director John Madden calling it “a satire on the beginning of show business.” But one of the other marvels of Shakespeare in Love is how it so plausibly depicts the degree to which Shakespeare transformed the raw materials of his life into his plays while also satisfying the rom-com expectations of the audience.

The great irony of the performing arts is that while writing is frequently a solitary act, the making of both theater and music is highly collaborative, something Shakespeare in Love beautifully showcases and A Complete Unknown largely ignores. Stoppard’s biographer Lee argues that Stoppard filled his screenplay with aspects of his “own life story, and his work,” and Mangold does the same in his screenplay (co-written with Jay Cocks). Mangold’s work is hard to pigeonhole, having directed movies in such varied genres as westerns (3:10 to Yuma), psychological dramas (Girl, Interrupted), crowd-pleasing adventures (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), superhero movies (The Wolverine, Logan), and even biopics of other musicians (Walk the Line, about Johnny Cash) so Ebiri is correct when he describes A Complete Unknown as “about an artist who refused to be boxed in, made by an artist who refuses to be boxed in.”

But as beautifully as the film evokes the early 1960s, and as brilliantly as Chalamet, Edward Norton, and Monica Barbaro channel Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez, Mangold still goes the Great Man as Lonely Genius route, depicting Dylan as an isolated loner, a choice made almost certainly because Dylan himself “had full approval of what became the film’s final script”. This aura of mystery is something Dylan has spent his whole life maintaining but it makes him an unreliable narrator and shortchanges the movie, missing the opportunity to dramatize the musician’s growth as an artist and leaving the character unchanged from the beginning of the movie to the end.

The few scenes of Dylan talking about the music he likes (“everything” from Woody Guthrie to Little Richard) and collaborating with other musicians in a recording studio hint at the film Mangold might have made. In his extraordinary podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey dedicates an episode to Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and discusses the contribution of producer Tom Wilson, who, though he appears only briefly in the film (played by Eric Berryman), contributed much more to Dylan’s records than the movie suggests. Celebrating Dylan’s collaborative moments would have raised him in my estimation, not diminished him.

As I’ve written on this blog, irreverence is its own kind of reverence, and while Mangold has made rom-coms before — including his time-travel romance Kate & Leopold, a particular favorite — part of me is simply disappointed he didn’t treat Bob Dylan more impertinently, perhaps in the manner of Todd Haynes’s 2007 film I’m Not There, which used six actors to play six different aspects of Dylan’s personality. Mangold needn’t have been so beholden to history (or the actual Dylan’s approval).

Nonetheless, A Complete Unknown manages a happy ending, but only as footnotes in the final credits, where we learn that Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the album he’s glimpsed recording in the film, is “considered one of the most influential albums of all time,” and that he won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, the only songwriter ever to have done so. Shakespeare in Love’s happy ending, on the other hand, lands more emotionally, given the romance we’ve been watching, and with greater surprise. Viola’s last line to Will is her admonition to “Write me well,” and the implication is she’ll be the model for all of Shakespeare’s future brilliant and adventurous heroines. Though the couple may not live happily ever after, Shakespeare’s plays thankfully do.