There will always be some amount of trepidation going into any biopic of any musician as legendary as Bob Dylan. In the case of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, my worry was whether or not it could possibly surpass the brilliance of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There or the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, the latter of which isn’t explicitly about Bob Dylan, but feels very spiritually tied to him in many ways. Unknown doesn’t quite reach the standards set by those films, but it is incredibly entertaining and worth seeing, especially for Timothée Chalamet’s unforgettable performance as Dylan.
Now, for where Chalamet’s voice naturally sits, his Dylan voice isn’t that much of a stretch. However, his singing and guitar playing as Dylan (both of which he did himself with no technological alteration) are impeccable. He’s also wisely not attempting a spot-on impression, which allows the film to be more immersive as its own work. When Chalamet’s 19-year-old Bob exited the car he hitchhiked to New York in, I had no idea what was in store, and as the film unfolded and we saw more and more of the layers of Chalamet’s work, I was consistently blown away by his ability to portray the tortured side of this iconoclastic musical genius.
Chalamet is helped here by the fact that Mangold and his co-screenwriter Jay Cocks are mostly interested in the truly unknowable nature of Dylan, both as an artist and a human being. They focus on Dylan’s rise in the folk music scene of the 1960s, and only go so far as the infamous Newport Folk Festival where Dylan went electric. This allows them to explore Dylan’s relative discomfort with the limelight, and his passion for creating new music amid a world that only wanted to hear his early classics ten million times. Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger is thrilled to discover the young man’s musical talents when he visits Woody Guthrie’s (Scoot McNairy) hospital bed out of the blue, purely as an unknown fan (no pun intended). Seeger seeks to make Dylan the undisputed champion of folk music, and although Dylan was that for a time, any great artist follows their heart, even if it leads to conflict. Great art transcends genre classification. Dylan never cared about being anything other than himself, and he was right not to care about pleasing any other musician or businessperson.
One thing Dylan wasn’t right not to care about was the way he treated some of the women in his life. While what we see here is never outright abusive, his behavior toward both Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is insensitive at best. The ways in which all three actors play these scenes are outstanding, both in terms of subtlety and gravitas. However, one of my two qualms about the film arises from this material specifically. The film gradually becomes more and more focused on recreating musical performances at the expense of drama. While Chalamet and Barbaro are fantastic, my general expectation for a two-hour-plus film is that we get more of why films are films. I can listen to any Dylan or Baez album or collaboration anytime I want. For what is set up dramatically here, I expected a little more payoff than for every storytelling beat to be told in song. Though the music as arranged here is truly beautiful, the pacing gets a little tiresome, especially when the performances are so brilliant that I know these actors could chew on more non-sung, dialogue-driven scenes.
The other issue I have is that the cultural shift from folk’s apex to rock’s takeover isn’t threaded well enough throughout the film. We certainly see how different sounds are impacting Dylan’s songwriting, but we don’t get a clear enough picture as to why it mattered so much to so many at the time that Bob branched out. We see the conflict it creates, but I wish we saw a little more groundswell of antipathy towards Dylan’s new direction. As it is, it feels like folk fans went from loving him to hating him simply because he pulled out one electric guitar. Perhaps this was true of some fans, but it gives the movie a strange sense of whiplash.
These are more intellectual problems I have with the film than they are emotional ones. A Complete Unknown is truly captivating for the majority of its runtime, and again, the performances are dynamite. Just prepare for a musical-showcase type of film, and you won’t be disappointed. | George Napper
