“You can be beautiful or you can be ugly, but you can’t be plain,” says Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) to tentative sweetheart Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) as they drift toward a movie theater in Greenwich Village circa 1963. This “tossed-off” mission statement — already mined mercilessly by its trailers — appears 30 minutes into James Mangold’s biopic A Complete Unknown, a movie so unabashedly and unshakably plain that even its posturing throughline of “rejecting tradition” feels like a kowtow to the mainstream. Unsurprisingly, Mangold’s mangled hagiography of music history’s most iconoclastic icon makes no real effort to interrogate Dylan’s public persona — one that cinema has arguably picked clean in the six decades since the 20-year-old shook the folk scene to its core. But then again, that’s probably asking too much from the director of Walk the Line (2005).
Partnered with Hollywood’s perennial White Boy of the Month, Mangold has his work cut out for him; Chalamet looks the part (even the real Dylan sometimes dressed like an extra from Newsies), and nails every windswept, stray-cat smolder. Then he opens his mouth. A great deal of time, care, and resources have gone into Chalamet’s performance, and the effort shows. If nothing else, the results serve as a testament to Dylan’s long (and unjustly) contested vocal dexterity, and a constant reminder that imitation isn’t always the highest form of flattery.
Whether this committed illusion succeeds or convinces is beside the point; mimeographing Dylan’s mannerisms does little to reveal the man below the surface, and actors like Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett — who each occupy a performative vertex in Todd Haynes’s prismatic cine-essay I’m Not There (2007) — understood as much. The former refracts his take on Dylan through his own actorly presence, while the latter plays a more traditional imitation game (characteristically distinctive yet eerily dead-on) that’s rendered translucent by its placement within a sextet of divergent approaches to the artist’s enigma. Chalamet’s opaque Dylan, on the other hand, is caught between a story that hinges upon the man’s human side and a filmmaker who wants him to remain a myth. He isn’t just up river without a paddle (and without an author’s vision to keep him afloat); he’s been sent down an impassable route.
Though Chalamet-as-Dylan is A Complete Unknown’s raison d’être, the performance is the least of the film’s problems. Tacky mimicries abound as the screenplay galumphs through the four most-covered years in the artist’s life, starting with Dylan’s arrival to New York City in 1961 and climaxing with his infamous, electrified performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which whipped the crowd into an outraged frenzy. Based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, the film’s bog-standard biopic moves are haphazardly arranged around this aesthetic conflict between folk traditions and emerging rock trends.
Its stance on the matter is revealed relatively early, when a young Bob engages in a brief discourse with Pete Seeger (Edward Norton); they listen as a rock song comes on the radio, and the mentor figure claims that a really good song can get the job done without all those frills — the film that follows is an extended rebuttal to this statement. Seeger is written with a strange mixture of reverence and condescension, freighted with all of the old school platitudes that Dylan is tasked with disproving (which, of course, he does). A particularly spiteful edit later on comically juxtaposes Dylan’s experiments in sound with Seeger’s feel-good network show, pulling the rug out from under the old guard of American folk who — as the film posits — were too short-sighted to see that the times were, in fact, a-changin’.
Enter Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) to put a fresher face on the music Dylan is supposedly rejecting (Barbaro also injects some life in Mangold’s wax museum, effortlessly upstaging her costar at every available opportunity). Baez is reduced to an intellectual fling, saddled with the only position that might challenge Dylan but doomed to be “left behind” by history like the rest of her cohort. A Complete Unknown tries to have it both ways in this regard, making gestures of homage to figures like Baez and Woodie Guthrie (who spends the film wasting away in a hospital bed, a symbol of the genre’s slow and quiet death), but Mangold’s respect for these figures is contingent on Dylan’s changing sympathies.
Though it takes pot-shots at several folk legends, much of the film’s contempt for folk is reserved for Black artists on the periphery; Bob and Sylvie’s first interaction takes place in a church, where the two talk over the live music of an unnamed Black singer. Mangold may see folk as quaint and outmoded but, like his fictional projection of Dylan, he knows that he has to pay his respects to the people who set the course. In this sense, his film is reflective of whose folk music has been deemed worthy of that respect, and whose has not.
“I don’t even need to say his name, do I?” says the exasperated emcee at the Newport Festival as the crowd roars prior to Dylan’s set. A Complete Unknown is aware of the god-like qualities we confer on the artists we love — in an exchange with Sylvie, Dylan coyly admits to seeing himself in a similar way — but it’s a film that finds this process exciting instead of sobering. The climactic performance is shot like a brute-force intoxication, with the crowd converted from jeering to jumping by the band’s pounding chords (that Highway 61 is one of the best — and most influential — albums of all time does little to assuage this impression). A Complete Unknown‘s final scene is tantamount to euthanasia of an entire aesthetic tradition; Dylan visits a dying Guthrie and returns the harmonica he once gave him, while the latter’s Dusty Old Dust plays on the radio. In I’m Not There, Ledger’s Dylan almost crashes a motorcycle that his girlfriend rides with ease; A Complete Unknown preserves his motor skills to the bitter end. “I’ve got to be drifting along,” Guthrie sings as Dylan drives toward the horizon on his motorcycle, perfectly manicured for his close-up, a legend printed in Comic Sans.
DIRECTOR: James Mangold; CAST: Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Edward Norton, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook; DISTRIBUTOR: Searchlight Pictures; IN THEATERS: December 25; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 21 min.
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