At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

—Bob Dylan, “Gates of Eden”

James Mangold’s new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, opens with Dylan’s arrival on New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s. It is the latest entry in an informal canon of Dylan “biography” on screen and in print, which includes Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home (Mangold’s film picks up the lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone” where the title of the documentary leaves off), and Dylan’s 2017 lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature.  

We can consider these works “canonical” because Dylan had something to do with all of them, either as creator or as participant in their creation. In the case of A Complete Unknown, we know that Dylan was a key participant and contributor in the preparation of the script. Whether through Dylan’s guiding hand, directorial intent, pure serendipity, or a combination of all three, the film reflects a pattern that Dylan has developed over the course of his career, whereby he portrays himself as an actor playing different characters, including well-known literary characters. The version of Dylan in A Complete Unknown emerges as a man held in tension between two icons of the Western literary tradition: Odysseus and Huckleberry Finn. 

The persona of “Bob Dylan” has always been improvised, made up as he goes along; thus Dylan has described himself in theatrical terms from the 1960s until as recently as last month. For example, after he finished performing “Gates of Eden” for the first time at Philharmonic Hall on Halloween in 1964, he said, “Don’t let that scare you. It’s just Halloween. I have my Bob Dylan mask on. I’m masquerading.” And consider Dylan’s own teaser for A Complete Unknown from his Twitter account (emphasis mine):  

There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me

It should not be lost on us that Chalamet’s suitability to be Dylan stems from his being “a brilliant actor”: He can concoct a plausible version of Dylan—just like Dylan himself.  

This idea of acting and changing personae shows up in A Complete Unknown, too. After seeing the 1942 Bette Davis film Now, Voyager, Dylan says to the woman who will soon be his girlfriend that the main character “didn’t find herself, like her ‘self’ was a missing shoe. She just made herself into something different.” 

Did Dylan ever say this? Who knows? Who cares? It’s the kind of thing he would have said—should have said—even if he didn’t. And anyway, the person to whom he says it in the film, Sylvie Russo, never existed. (At least not directly: Russo is based on Suze Rotolo, with whom she shares her initials.)  

The suggestive and unacknowledged link between fact and fiction is something that characterizes the entire informal Dylan “biography” canon. Under Dylan’s influence, each of these works shows a stubborn determination to be something other than a shot-for-shot remake of the past; they are true instances of Arthur Rimbaud’s dictum “je est un autre” (“I is another”). They’re all “completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.”  

When it comes to what characters Dylan might be playing in A Complete Unknown, there is nothing gratuitous in proposing such archetypal figures of the Western canon as Odysseus and Huck Finn: Dylan is self-consciously working within that canon and arguably wants us to read his own mythos in relation to it. Consider, for example, his acceptance speech for the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In it, Dylan describes the three books that set his youthful hair on fire: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Homer’s Odyssey.  

The last of these is, aside from the Bible, the most fundamental work of literature in the West, and Dylan uses it for the finale of his dazzling oration. He calls the Odyssey a “great book whose themes have worked [their] way into [his] songs.” They have worked their way into his Whitmanesque song of himself in A Complete Unknown, as well.  

Let us look a little more closely at Dylan as Odysseus. Odysseus arrives on the island of Scheria as “a complete unknown”; the film opens with Dylan’s arrival in New York City. Reflecting on this event in Chronicles, Dylan writes, “There’s a lot of things I didn’t have, didn’t have too much of a concrete identity either.” In his Nobel lecture, Dylan emphasizes how Odysseus, too, is a man who “changes identities” and “tells his story to strangers.” Odysseus tells the story of his past more than once in the Odyssey: he tells it to the Phaeacians on Scheria; he tells it to the herdsman Eumaeus on Ithaca; and he tells it to his wife, Penelope. The stories do not match up as factual accounts, but even if they do not give a true history of their teller, they nevertheless reveal important truths about him. Likewise, A Complete Unknown portrays Dylan’s efforts to use tall tales to fabricate his past: The Dylan character tells Sylvie that he “used to live on [peanuts] when [he] worked at a carnival.” “You worked at the carnival?” Sylvie asks. Dylan doubles down on his fabricated past. When Sylvie later chastises him for these invented stories, he replies, “People make up their past. Remember what they want, forget the rest.” Like the Phaeacian Queen Arete, Sylvie wants to know who he “really” is. Like Odysseus, the Dylan character demurs.  

But instead of getting hung up on the factual truth of the carnival story, we should ask why Dylan is represented as choosing to tell that particular tale and to play that particular character. A Complete Unknown gets this exactly right: The claim reveals Dylan’s true perspective about performance, namely, that one must have something remarkable about oneself to attract an audience’s gaze, just as the carnival’s sideshow freaks do: “The whole thing made me think about people on stage. About how everyone who gets on a stage, everyone who’s gonna hold your attention, they have to kinda be a freak.” 

In sum, Odysseus and Dylan are both shifty, unreliable narrators. In this, they are like the Muses who inspire poetry. Recall that when they are first manifested in literature, they tell the poet Hesiod,  

We know how to say many falsehoods that sound like truths, 
And we know how, when we feel like it, to sing what is real. (Theogony 27–28)  

But for both Odysseus and Dylan, truth emerges even from the factually unreliable stories they tell. Odysseus remains nameless among the Phaeacians until he hears the bard Demodocus sing of his exploits at Troy; only then does he reveal his name. The artist-persona of Dylan is likewise created by the Muse, a product of performance.  

In A Complete Unknown, then, Dylan is an American Odysseus.  

Except that he isn’t, because it could never be that simple. For the Odyssey is nothing if not a story of homecoming. But the story of the character represented by the Bob Dylan mask in A Complete Unknown is an anti-homecoming. As noted above, both the movie and Dylan’s memoir begin with the main character arriving in New York. Of his native Minnesota, on the other hand, Dylan says in the Nobel Lecture, “I hadn’t left home yet, but I couldn’t wait to.” And as he puts it in Chronicles, “I wasn’t planning on going back.” He is a man with “no direction home.” The film reinforces Dylan’s restless impulse to go forward, literally and figuratively. And so we see Dylan always on the move in A Complete Unknown—the film opens with him in a car and ends with him on a motorcycle. 

This makes him more Huckleberry Finn than Odysseus. (Dylan doesn’t discuss The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his Nobel Lecture, but its influence is clear elsewhere in his work: He alludes to the novel in “Lonesome Day Blues,” for example.) Put another way, Huck, the American Odysseus, is the inversion of his Greek predecessor: one who strikes out for new territories and new experiences, leaving home and its familiarity behind. If the symbol of Odysseus is the seashore or the harbor, the symbol of Huckleberry Finn is the river—the Mississippi, to be exact. A Complete Unknown leads up to the release of Highway 61 Revisited, named for the “Great River Road” that winds along the Mississippi, beginning just 130 miles west of Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, traversing the Mississippi Delta, and ending in New Orleans. For Dylan, Highway 61 is the mythical and musical river he rode from his home, through the land of the Delta Blues, and into a new form of songwriting. “We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all,” Huck declares after he and Jim have escaped down the river. Or, as Dylan sings in A Complete Unknown, “I was young when I left home.” Dylan might share that desire with Huck, but not with Homer’s Odysseus. 

The power of the movie, and of the myth of the masked Dylan in general, resides in the ambiguity at the heart of the story of an Odysseus who is also not Odysseus. That ambiguity is beautifully encapsulated right before the film begins. As the bumper plays for Searchlight Pictures, the film’s distributor, we see a man shooting an arrow through a series of axe heads. That man is Odysseus; the episode occurs at the end of Odyssey 21, when the hero is about to retake possession of his home. At the same time as we see this image, we hear echoes of Huck in Woody Guthrie’s “Dusty Old Dust”:  

So long, it’s been good to know yuh; 
So long, it’s been good to know yuh; 
So long, it’s been good to know yuh. 
This dusty old dust is a-gettin’ my home, 
And I got to be driftin’ along. 

It’s all right there, before the movie has even started.  

Where does this ambiguity leave us? Where does it leave Dylan? In a sense, A Complete Unknown leaves Dylan as unknown as he’s ever been: a hybrid of Odysseus and Huckleberry Finn; of ancient Greece and America. There is something quintessentially American in that unresolved tension. For the American experience, of life and of art, is in many ways the experience of trying to keep our balance as we are pulled between the past and the future.  

But that balancing act is carried out here and now; in the present is the performance. 

America has produced no purer personification—no more eloquent representation—of this tension than Bob Dylan, in both his songs and his story. On this score, A Complete Unknown hits all the right notes. 

Oh, and there is some pretty great music in it, too.