Still a Mystery
James Mangold’s Bob Dylan demi-biopic is something Dylan tried to avoid Being: conventional.
A Complete Unknown
Director: James Mangold • Writers: James Mangold, Jay Cocks, based on the book by Elijah Wald
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Scoot McNairy
USA • 2hrs 21mins
Opens Hong Kong Feb 20 • IIA
Grade: B-
How did we get two music biopics in one week? Sure, they’re entirely different types of music – Maria is about an opera singer’s last week and A Complete Unknown is about folk/hippie titan Bob Dylan’s formative years, but they’re both trying to shake off tired biopic tropes through specificity. Based on Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, the story is rooted in the scandal (tee hee) that erupted when heretofore acoustic folk singer Dylan literally plugged in an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and his fans went bananas. Quaint, because given modern scandals involving R. Kelly, Puff Daddy, Ryan Adams and Burning Sun it’s hilarious to think a music scandal was based on, well, music. It also casts Dylan as the OG artist to experience proprietary “fans” rioting and calling him a traitor: Star Wars/Star Trek/LOTR/Marvel/DC fans, you weren’t close to first aggrieved. But even with those more engaging undercurrents, no matter how hard it tries and despite eight Oscar nods, A Complete Unknown is standard biopic stuff, made slightly better (as usual) by a strong turn from Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan within his own unique wheelhouse – that being the self-important manchild poser that has greatness thrust upon him in a way. Thing is, this part of Dylans’s story isn’t that remarkable.
Hilariously, A Complete Unknown posits Bob Dylan as a chick magnet, almost immediately attracting attention from socially conscious professional activist Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) – the woman on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan – and fellow counterculture legend Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, Top Gun: Maverick). Both must, must, must get in his pants after he arrives in New York from Minnesota in 1965, his blazing talent and Nobel-ready lyrics getting them all horned up. Dylan has credited Russo and Baez with being the slap upside the head he needed to better tune into the world and eventually deliver protest anthems like “The Times They Are a-Changin’”. Equally influential on the budding troubadour is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, appropriately earnest), the idealistic folk/protest singer known for shit like “If I Had a Hammer”. Sorry, I find folk music insufferable. They meet in the ailing Woody Guthrie’s (Scoot McNairy) hospital room, Dylan plays a song and the rest is history. He hits the coffee houses and festivals (so many banjoes) to the mid-’60s before turning on the juice and recording the landmark Highway 61 Revisited.
A Complete Unknown is fine but it’s 100% a boomer movie. It’s solidly made, Chalamet’s Oscar-nominated performance is complemented by sparkling work from Oscar-nominated Barbaro, Fanning, Dan Fogler as heavy hitting manager Albert Grossman and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, who mostly just reminds us in a few scenes how much cooler Cash was – and how many of Dylan’s best songs are better by someone else (Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” and Cher’s “All I Really Want to Do” FTW). Unless of course you’re a Dylanist, in which case the palpable texture of the recreation of the mid-’60s music scene is something worth sinking into, and Dylan’s process from folkie to rock star is fascinating, if thin. But, despite my whining about it, the film lacks the High Drama the form both relies on and demands: poverty, abortions, addiction, identity crises, violent marriages etc, etc provide much-needed conflict. Dylan’s big hurdle seems to be he was… from a mining town? This is not writer-director James Mangold’s – yup, and Oscar contender – first biopic rodeo; he directed the more dramatic Walk the Line (which won Reese Witherspoon an Oscar) and Ford v Ferrari, but the character work of Cop Land and Logan are absent. I don’t know any more about the prickly Dylan than I did before it started; I don’t know what turned him from folk flake to enduring icon. Better Man remains the better biopic. I have a decent idea of who Robbie Williams is.