“A Complete Unknown” isn’t just a title. It’s also an excuse. James Mangold’s biopic about Bob Dylan’s early career treats the Pulitzer Prize-winning musician like a riddle wrapped in an enigma, a mystery nobody can unlock. But if we didn’t want to learn about Bob Dylan we could have stayed home. All Mangold’s film offers is a superficial illustration of the artist’s allure, interspersed with endless, increasingly comical shots of people watching him perform and smiling beatifically.
I get it, because that’s how we probably look watching Timotheé Chalamet knock this one out of heaven’s door. Chalamet continues his streak of uncanny performances, with a bravura versatility that might be annoying if it wasn’t so impressive. He’s not pantomiming Dylan’s posture, he’s not mimicking his reedy drawl, he’s sitting in Dylan’s skin and telling musical stories from within. Between the songs he’s living in a series of album covers, a world handsomely photographed by cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. While he’s singing he’s the living embodiment of folk — at least until he went electric.
But while he’s singing, James Mangold — whose Oscar-winning Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line” helped codify many of the clichés we now take for granted about the musical biopic subgenre — can’t seem to help it. We don’t just watch Bob Dylan perform, we have to watch everyone else watching Bob Dylan perform, and to a one they all stare off-camera in awestruck wonder at his impossible genius, even if they hated him seconds before. Then they smile, because we’re also supposed to smile, and we wouldn’t want to mess with “A Complete Unknown’s” vibe by not following orders.
If you took a drink every time “A Complete Unknown” cuts to a grinning cutaway like the “River of Jordan” scene from “Airplane!”, you’d have to be wheeled out of the theater on a gurney. So I wouldn’t recommend it. If you also took a drink every time “A Complete Unknown” took a cheap shot at Joan Baez, played here by Monica Barbaro (“Top Gun: Maverick”), you wouldn’t even make it to the gurney. In her first scene, Baez’s own agent can’t fathom his own client’s popularity. He accuses her of just looking at her feet. The first time Bob Dylan follows Baez on-stage he tells his whole audience her voice was “too pretty.” Dylan spends most of the rest of the film giving her crap for how many covers she performs, and when she (rightly) points out that she does also write her own songs, he dismisses her work as “an oil painting at the dentist’s office.”
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan had a tumultuous relationship, that’s common knowledge, but nothing in “A Complete Unknown” justifies the chip this movie has on its shoulder about her. The film’s criticisms about Baez are simply assumed to be correct, just like its deification of Dylan is taken for granted from the first moment he whips out his guitar. To hear Mangold’s film tell it, Bob Dylan never had to learn anything and never had anywhere to grow, at least as an artist. He was always right about music, and it justified his behavior in every conceivable situation, even if the audience can tell he’s actually being a dick. The disconnect between the movie’s tone and its content ranges from distracting to annoying. It’s a gamut few films would willingly run, for obvious reasons.
The arc of “A Complete Unknown” follows Dylan’s first meeting with folk icon Pete Seeger, played with drowsy PBS kids show host paterfamiliarity by Edward Norton. It’s Pete Seeger who claims that good music doesn’t need electrified instruments, but he doesn’t know that eventually Bob Dylan will play electrical instruments. The shift in Dylan’s sound was historically significant but transforming it into cinema is tricky. The only way “A Complete Unknown” can seem to sell the plot point is by nearly driving Pete Seeger into madness. There’s a moment when Seeger desperately stares at an ax and it’s not entirely clear if he’s thinking about hacking at the wires to Dylan’s amp or taking a whack at Dylan himself.
It’s tempting to read “A Complete Unknown” as a 20th century myth, because that’s probably what it’s going for. James Mangold treats most of the early folk and rock legends as divine members of a musical pantheon. Even their flaws are amazing — unless they’re Joan Baez for some reason. They descended upon this world like the gods of Mount Olympus, and we were lucky to be in their aura. But while it’s likely that most younger audiences don’t fully appreciate how important these geniuses were, “A Complete Unknown” doesn’t seem to either.
This film is so committed to capturing Dylan’s mystique, filtered through the 21st century allure of an idol like Chalamet, that it never successfully engages with him as a person or — if they absolutely had to leave Dylan a mystery — the intricacies of his music and lyrics. To hear Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) tell it, what’s important isn’t so much what Dylan wrote, but that he wrote his own songs at all. Folk music was so reliant on covers that original tunes were a risky novelty. It’s a point that could have been made quickly before segueing into the depths of Dylan’s genius, but instead the point gets dragged out for nearly 2.5 hours, and it’s just not profound enough on its own to warrant that much canvas.
If one new person becomes an impassioned Bob Dylan fan, this movie will have done its job. If two people do, I’ll be surprised. It’s a film that caters more to the folks who were already there, who remember the days and who don’t need any more information than they already have in their hippocampi. Everyone else will be treated to a superficial, corny overview, elevated by Chalamet’s commanding performance and an impeccable period recreation, but undone by the decision to please the film’s semi-fictional audience more than its real one.
“A Complete Unknown” opens exclusively in theaters on Dec. 25.
