Director James Mangold does not make bad movies. He makes good movies (The Wolverine; Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) and great movies (Ford V. Ferrari; Copland; Logan). He’s a class-act craftsman but he’s no revolutionary, and neither is his portrait of one in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. It’s one of his good ones.
“People make up their past, Sylvie; they remember what they want, they forget the rest.
Mangolds’s vision of Dylan is a stranger tumbling into town. He hitchhiked in a family’s station wagon, sitting in the trunk seat. The eyes looking backward belong to Timothée Chalamet (Dune; Little Women) whose own life as the heralded next generation of leading man actors does more to evoke the prodigious Bob Dylan than his fake nose or curled hair. His Dylan is searching for a new history to claim, that of revolutionary folk musician Woodie Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). When he finds him, he in turn is claimed by Guthrie’s right-hand banjo man, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).
Edward Norton in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
Norton (Motherless Brooklyn; Fight Club) plays against type as history’s chillest man of principle. The performance is uncanny, moving, and maybe award-winning. When we meet his Seeger, he’s in court for defying Senator McCarthy’s horrific House Un-American Activities Committee and its blacklist of left-wing artists. When he hears Dylan play, he immediately sees him as the new generation of folk music, a label Dylan immediately rebels against while Seeger tries to gauge his protege’s loyalty to the cause. Bob Dylan is a man who has refused to be defined, and yet, A Complete Unknown and Chalamet try to define him as such.
In the scene where Dylan meets his first love affair partner, the painter Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), he slides down a cathedral pew during a concert. As he passes through the shadows, for a brief moment, you’d swear Bob Dylan is sitting on that pew. This magic trick is the greatest boon of the film as even the concert sequences compel you to applaud at the end of the sets as if they were real.
When his slide terminates behind Elle Fanning (The Great; Maleficent), Chalmette is back, possessed by Dylan. He’s flexing the same emotional muscle that he employs in Dune: Part Two (2024) to show that Paul Atreides is haunted by his visions of the future. Under Dylan’s iconic heavy eyelids, Chalamet’s eyes are haunted by expectations. But if you look at old footage of Dylan performing, this haunted gaze looks more like the kabuki-anger of the Rolling Thunder Review than the over-it civil rights singer.
L-R: Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
Dylan’s role in the civil rights movement comes not just from folk music, but from his two early loves. Sylvia Russo was a marcher, and fellow folk singer Joan Baez was a staple of the movement. In this film, she is played by Monica Barbaro. Audiences may remember her from the new crew in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), and cinephiles may have wondered how she didn’t catch Mr. Movie’s tailwinds. Wonder no more, because, in this film, Monica Barbaro is a revelation. One of the film’s weaknesses is that it breaks from her even more than Dylan did then. These women drew him into the civil rights movement, and Joan Baez sang with Dylan on the Lincoln Memorial steps in footage that many will remember unless their introduction to Dylan is this film. Instead, A Complete Unknown breezes past their participation with one of the worst VFX shots of the year, briefly comping only Timothée Chalamet onto a TV broadcast of the march. This occurs during a sequence about his love triangle with these two women, but Baez’s presence is erased. Why? Because James Mangold and screenwriter Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York; Silence) decided that this film could be about the enigma of Bob Dylan without being about his songs.
This is not the first feature film about Bob Dylan. I’m Not There (2007) approached Dylan’s many iconic eras by casting actors like Christian Bale (The Dark Knight; The Prestige) and Cate Blanchett (Tár; Carol) among the many versions of Dylan. Mangold and his crew have approached the unknowability of Dylan by distancing themselves from him. The longer the film goes on, the more we see Dylan as a force on others, while also being asked to feel for him. Dylan as a force of nature is a great conceit, but by bringing us closer to him when the film needs our sympathy, it must find its distance somewhere else, and it finds it in his motivations for songwriting. The Civil Rights movement might as well not have been in the film, and the conditions that it protested are not seen in any meaningful way. Even Elvis (2023) managed that much.
Dylan has objected throughout the years that he was not and is not a protest writer. And yet he has continued to cry out for causes. It is the disconnect at the heart of his enigma, and the film forces it as a climax without satisfactory foreplay. By refusing to engage with why his songs are about civil rights, Mangold missed a key element of what he was gunning for. This is a film about Dylan’s rebellious nature, and yet, in its pursuit of this “contrarian,” it fails to contradict him.
Timothée Chalamet in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. Photo by James Mangold, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
A Complete Unknown is great in the way that Hamilton is great. The music is fantastic, the drama is iconic, and the characters are titanic. But it’s also cowardly in the exact way that Hamilton is cowardly. A compromiser’s consolation to themselves is that if they’re painting a portrait of a man, then the politics and reality of the situation that man operated in are not necessary, because that is not what the audience is there for. And if you ask audiences, they’ll sell you that line, too. But when you remove a man from the context in which his actions are consequential, he ceases to be.
And so the film struggles to identify anything about why folk music mattered in the first place. Seger speaks throughout the film about how folk music is a man and a guitar and words that can bring about justice and peace in the world. When he and Dylan come into conflict about Dylan’s shift towards Rock and Roll, it should be clear that Seager and critics of Dylan at the time mistook the aesthetics of folk for its ethos, and Dylan didn’t. That’s why Highway 61 Revisited stands the test of time, electric guitar and all. But because the meaning of Dylan’s songs is absent, the film agrees more with Seager than it does with itself, muddling what could have been a more powerful final hour.
Music bio-pics like this are built to entertain, and this one is very, very fun. They’re as important as theater and novel adaptions for shaping the future of our culture. They also revitalize interest in artists, but when made with compromise, they aren’t good for understanding why a musician’s work is important to people. Why a song matters to you can only be determined by you, but when enough people express that same feeling, there is certainly no dearth of meaning to mine when making a film for mass audiences. Smaller films like Dogfight (1991) have explored the meaning of Dylan’s work for ages, and they’ve done it better than A Complete Unknown does.
This is a big-budget movie about Bob Dylan the man, but it is not at all about his music. The movie not only makes that clear but makes it clear in such a way that it doth protest too much. James Mangold seems to love Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet loves being Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan seems to love no one and everyone at the same time, and I like but do not love this movie.
In theaters December 25th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Searchlight Pictures A Complete Unknown webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
Share this:
Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
Leave a Reply