A COMPLETE UNKNOWN Review

As with Johnny Cash prior to James Mangold's 2005 film, Walk the Line, I had no close affiliation with or personal connection to Bob Dylan prior to seeing Mangold's latest musical biopic, A Complete Unknown. After seeing Walk the Line I wanted to not only consume as much of Cash's music as I could but learn as much about he and June Carter's life and the time around which the movie was based as well as what happened after. All of this to say, the question of whether A Complete Unknown would be successful or not was then going to naturally rest upon how invested I became in the life and music of Dylan post-screening. Maybe it’s because I had more time on my hands as an eighteen-year-old in 2005, but while I certainly enjoyed Mangold’s adaptation of Elijah Wald’s “Dylan Goes Electric!” book - admire it even for many of its choices - I don’t know that I feel as compelled to go down the long and winding road that is both Dylan’s biography and discography. Or maybe it is simply that Cash had a more charismatic personality and was therefore easier to be drawn to as is exemplified by a scene-stealing Boyd Holbrook in this film. Dylan is of course a more enigmatic figure, and Mangold seems to have understood this and that his approach to the respective films made about each of these men would need to be as wildly different as the men themselves.

It is notable in this genre that A Complete Unknown features neither of Dylan’s parents in any capacity - roles typically utilized in the first act to not only propel our aspiring protagonist out of their comfort zone, but who continue to serve as motivation to remain as disconnected from the life they knew as a child and on becoming as famous as they need to be in order to have earned themselves their own biopic. There is no such device in A Complete Unknown, the first sign Mangold is breaking from a tradition he helped instate and the first indicator he is catering his storytelling to his subject even as his filmmaking remains the handsome, sturdy, and reliable type that looks to modestly enlighten and wholly entertain while offending only those who've already claimed I'm Not There as the only necessary Dylan feature. It is the understanding of this objective that helps define Mangold's successes (and some of his shortcomings) here, as his job is not to necessarily demystify but capture the essence of this mysterious and often difficult individual so that a new generation might come to understand why Dylan became so important to the young, noisy activists of the sixties as well as to remind that same generation that "there was a time when the old songs were new."

Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) plays with Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) in writer/director James Mangold's A Complete Unknown.
Photo by Macall Polay
© 2024 SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

Beginning in 1961 as a twenty year-old Robert Zimmerman AKA Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) hitches a ride to New York in an effort to find Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) who is suffering from Huntington's disease in a New Jersey hospital, we are simultaneously introduced to Pete Seeger (Ed Norton), a passionate champion of folk music, who sees something in the young singer/songwriter and welcomes him into the fold. The early conversations between these two about the music they like and how Seeger's belief that "a good song can get the job done without the frills" of such things as drums and electrified instruments is key in many ways. This clash with Dylan's more eclectic tastes and affinity for the likes of Little Richard and Buddy Holly lays the foundation for the main conflict of the film, but never paints Norton's interpretation of Seeger as the one-dimensional antagonist of the piece. There is also plenty of life documented prior to these differences bubbling over, events that continue to mold these two singing and strumming men into the different pillars of musical history they will come to represent prior to the event this film uses as its climax. There is, naturally, the introduction of a handful of key players in the Dylan story and how they each lend themselves to different facets of Dylan's personality, facets we don't always know if the man is making up for the purposes of his own myth or if he is innocently seeking to not actually be defined by one thing or another. In what is maybe the third scene of the film, we are introduced to Joan Baez (Melissa Barbaro), whom Dylan seems to find disagreeable for her strenuous songwriting skills but is taken with due to her pretty face and even prettier voice (maybe too pretty). In a moment of uncertainty and in a sequence that documents the final night of the Cuban Missile Crisis the two share a passionate night together while Dylan's then girlfriend, Sophie Russo (Elle Fanning), is out of town. Russo being a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, the girl on Dylan's arm on the cover of his first studio album of originals, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

We speak a lot about how artists define themselves, but the story of Bob Dylan is largely one of an artist trying to escape such labels and categorizations and instead simply do what he feels pulled toward - whether that be a certain style of music or a particular kind of woman. As suggested in the previous paragraph, literally all of the drama in Mangold's film derives from Dylan chasing what he wants with little regard for those he hurts or leaves in his wake – Norton’s performance as Seeger being maybe the most heartbreaking of these disappointments. It is in these dynamics that Mangold finds his tension as opposed to trying to shape turmoil from outcomes we know already do or do not come to fruition. Not that we don't necessarily know how things turn out for Dylan musically or romantically, but we find more authenticity within this intentionally mysterious subject in the more nuanced, personal moments thus allowing for that authenticity to then be relayed into what might typically be the more contrived moments in a music biopic. More specifically, there tends to always be an attempt to extract some tension around whether these individuals are going to make the best choices for themselves when it comes to launching successful careers. Such tension inherently creates two different experiences for those who are familiar with the artist and those who are getting their first insights into an individual’s backstory. This is present in A Complete Unknown from the early Folk City scene in which I, a Dylan novice, half-expected him to fumble his big opportunity but was somewhat surprised by how effortlessly he sees it through. It is not until the next scene in which Dylan is late for a meeting with agent extraordinaire Al Grossman (Dan Fogler) and Columbia Records Exec. John Hammond that Dylan shows his greener tendencies when he isn't as accustomed to the etiquette of a professional recording studio. Dylan is meant to record covers so Columbia can place a "younger face on folk music" and while he might experience growing pains through each of these, otherwise exceptionally rare, steps he is never met with outright resistance nor do any complications arise that actually seem to threaten the viability of Dylan's overarching quest to prosper as an artist. 

Chalamet's Dylan duets with frequen collaborator Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) in A Complete Unknown.
Photo by Macall Polay
© 2024 SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

Now, I highly doubt Dylan's ascent through the folk ranks in New York and Greenwich Village in the early sixties was as easy or as quick as the film makes it seem, but in order to give the impression of Dylan's aura and songwriting skill being as monumental as it has become memorialized to be, said talent is immediately recognized as such by anyone he plays for. It doesn't hurt Mangold has assembled a cast that not only kind of effortlessly inhabits the characters and the period, but the essence of these people at this point in time which is obviously why the film as a whole carries this same spirit. Chalamet is of course the heart and soul of the film and for as easily as these performances can slip into parody these days, the actor doing all his own singing and strumming accumulates that aforementioned authenticity all the more. Further, Chalamet is playing Dylan at what is arguably the most transformative time in his life. Chronicling only about four years from '61 through to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, A Complete Unknown not only sees Dylan find a platform on which to stand but also the choices he makes once he takes command of this platform. We see how hungry, as Chalamet portrays him, Dylan is for the stage and any opportunity to perform but also for the spotlight and the fame that comes along with it despite his initial instinct to recoil once he achieves such. One can only imagine how hard it might be to get inside the head of a figure so difficult to pin down, but Chalamet is able to embody both the uncertain kid from Minneapolis as well as the defiant poet who goes electric in convincing fashion.

Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks layer in the introduction of Fanning's Sophie, the relationship she and Dylan spark, and how this moves in tandem with the developing feelings and partnership between Dylan and Barbaro's Baez in order to craft a narrative (as well as said tensions) from an otherwise fabled origin story that help pace the film and Dylan's arc within the parameters of his career with a consistently engaging and propulsive tone; one that, despite the audience's varied familiarity with the music, makes each recording and writing session or live performance feel as (pardon the pun) electric as it likely did to experience these words set to song for the first time - the framing of "The Times They Are A-Changin'" as something of a break-up letter is elevating in an indescribable way, especially as the cheering audience joins in as if it's a planned sing-a-long. Barbaro and Fanning are both excellent in the ways their roles call for them to be, Baez as the seasoned professional who calls Dylan on his shit and relishes the improvisational style of their relationship while Sylvie only questions his counters politely and serves as more of a mother figure, taking care of him and educating him on the ways of the world during these transformative, fundamental years in his life. It should also be said that Joaquin Phoenix does not make an appearance as Johnny Cash here in order to signal the continuation of the Mangold Cinematic Musicverse, but that Holbrook's interpretation of the Man in Black will make you yearn for another Johnny Cash film in which he's the star. Make of that conclusion what you will given the first sentences of this review, but for as perplexing and seemingly impenetrable as Dylan's true nature is, A Complete Unknown uncovers something meaningful even if it didn't necessarily make me want to listen to every record or dig up everything I could about Bob Dylan afterward.