Bob Dylan is a chameleonic artist whose many personas and phases have made him difficult to succinctly define, just as his most iconic incarnation—the ’60s-’70s folk-rock hipster and politically engaged poet—remains impossible to imitate.
Instead of leaning into Dylan’s mutability à la Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, James Mangold goes for straightforward veneration with A Complete Unknown, which hits theaters Dec. 25, a narrow drama about the singer-songwriter’s origins as a fledgling sensation. As middle-of-the-road and unadventurous as biopics come (quite like Mangold’s 2005 Walk the Line), it goes heavy on convincing musical performances to make up for the fact that it has nothing astute to say about its subject—in large part because it doesn’t seem to really know him.
Dylan historians will no doubt gripe about some of the liberties Mangold takes with his tale, including with regards to his controversial and groundbreaking set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, during which Mangold dials things up to cartoonish degrees and inserts an exchange (involving a fan calling Dylan “Judas”) that actually took place a year later in Manchester, England.
However emblematic this misstep is of the proceedings’ shallowness, such issues are ultimately secondary to the film’s inability to convey anything meaningful about the legendary musician’s inspirations and motivations. From its early ’60s beginning to its 1965 finish at the conclusion of the Newport brouhaha, Mangold and Jay Cock’s screenplay (based on Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!) opts for attitude and vibes over insight. Consequently, A Complete Unknown lives up to its title, albeit in ways it didn’t intend.
Dropped off in Manhattan, Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) gets wind of where his beloved Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is hospitalized in New Jersey, and promptly visits the luminary, whose Huntington’s disease has left him speechless. There, he meets not only Guthrie but Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), an immensely benevolent man who invites Dylan to stay and play one of his songs.
The original tune he presents is a mind-blower, and proves the first of innumerable times throughout A Complete Unknown when the director splits his focus between extended takes of Chalamet impressively singing and strumming on his guitar, and onlookers gazing at him with overpowering awe, their faces awash in ecstasy, envy, and amazement at his peerless gift.
Seeger looks at Dylan like he’s the Great Folk Hope who’ll bring the genre to the masses and, in doing so, balance the out-of-whack world—a point that, per the film’s obviousness, he eventually articulates outright via a leaden metaphor. Others are no less impressed, from loyal manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) and painter girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) to folk phenom Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).
Mangold can’t stop with the close-ups of these and others gawking in wonder at the miracle of Dylan, thereby turning much of A Complete Unknown into a portrait of how others see the artist. That would be a potentially intriguing avenue of investigation and analysis if what they witnessed was of interest. Alas, they simply stare at him with admiration and resentment—at least, when they’re not disliking him for his considerable personal shortcomings.
The Dylan of A Complete Unknown is a wunderkind whose talents are as prodigious as his ego, selfishness, and rebelliousness. As Baez rightly states, he’s “kind of an asshole,” but there’s no explanation for why he’s such a jerk, just as there’s scant apparent reason for his nonconformity, which peaks in 1965 Newport, when his desire to play his new electrified music rankles the status quo—here embodied by Seeger and festival organizer Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz)—and forever establishes his counterculture bona fides.
Mangold and Cocks are primarily concerned with replication rather than inquiry. For all his surface-level characteristics, their Dylan is an opaque figure, doing things for no discernible rhyme or reason, as if he were merely guided by immature urges, contrarian impulses, and random whims.
In the face of the material’s fundamental thinness, Chalamet does the best impersonation possible, affecting Dylan’s nasally voice, downturned head, and darting eyes without devolving into caricature. Moreover, he radiates the uniquely off-kilter magnetism and stage presence that distinguished the folk singer from his many contemporaries, and his renditions of Dylan classics like “Blowing in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin',” and “Like a Rolling Stone” strike the right authentic chords.
His is a good performance in need of a better film, and that’s also true of Norton, whose Seeger radiates old-school Mr. Rogers earnestness that’s at once agreeable and sadly out of touch, and Barbaro, who imbues Baez with forceful charisma. Still, like Fanning, whose Russo is a bland approximation of Dylan’s real-life paramour Suze Rotolo, these characters are all rendered in two-dimensions, primarily conceived as passive onlookers.
A Complete Unknown follows a well-worn template that was established by legions of genre predecessors and parodied to spot-on effect by Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard (a spoof of Mangold’s Walk the Line). That formula isn’t frustrating because it’s familiar but because it’s reductive, prioritizing cornball melodrama and dutiful recreations over the very complications and messiness that define life.
It’s a pat approach to biographical storytelling, and no matter Mangold’s assured direction—his camera gliding across audiences, pushing into close-ups, and capturing Dylan in silhouette in front of throngs of admiring fans—there’s no making up for its incurious perspective. All it has to offer is a variety of passably engaging scenes in which Dylan writes songs (often late at night or early in the morning while his lovers sleep), wows crowds, smokes cigarettes, and gradually evolves from wearing big floppy scarfs to donning sunglasses at night to match his all-black ensemble.
Given his seven-decade career, no film could capture all the facets of Dylan the artist and man. A Complete Unknown, though, constrains itself to a few short years and yet still can’t impart much more than a hazy, romantic vision of him as an inscrutable and tormented genius. For a superior view of the incomparable troubadour—one that highlights his political convictions, his anger, his wit—moviegoers would be better served seeking out any of the numerous documentaries that, in the end, afford a fuller picture than this standard-issue slush.
