Joni Mitchell once said “everything about (Bob Dylan) is a deception.” Decades after Dylan ascended from wandering musician to cultural prophet, much of his life remains a mystery. James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown,” the highly-anticipated biopic depicting Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) rise, explores this ambiguity.
The film challenges and grapples with Dylan’s concealed persona through the eyes of those adjacent to him. “A Complete Unknown” — a triumph for its actors and a career highlight for Mangold — celebrates a prolific figure in popular culture. But it does little more than reaffirm that Dylan is simply unknowable.
Based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric!,” the film chronicles the early years of Dylan’s career, beginning with his 1961 emergence into the Greenwich Village folk scene and concluding with his controversial transition to electric instrumentation at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Dylan’s rise to prominence draws in an orbit of supporting characters, both real and fictionalized, with whom the artist interacts throughout his career.
For much of the film, “A Complete Unknown” tries to bring folk music to everyone — and occasionally, it delivers. But moments of understanding Dylan’s character are few and far between. In an early scene, Dylan is shown hesitantly visiting one of his “heroes,” a hospitalized Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). As Dylan performs an ode at Guthrie’s bedside, viewers catch a glimpse of vulnerability. At one point in the film, Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) reads the musician’s letters and says he feels like he can “see (Dylan’s) brain.”
If only viewers had that luxury.
The film’s narrative dwindles at times, despite its rich historical context. The Cold War, the Red Scare and the unrest of the Civil Rights movement briefly appear in montages or are conversationally alluded to in the film, but they are never quite fleshed out, and there is no discussion of Dylan’s inclination to become involved in these movements. The film wants to paint Dylan as a revolutionary, but he appears more as a popular figure passively placed on platforms, too indifferent to stand upright or step down.
The characterization of women in “A Complete Unknown” also leaves something to be desired. When met with the blunt edge of Dylan’s aloofness, a brief romantic interest of his asks: “Am I just more weight?” His lack of a response is an answer in and of itself. The women are functionally footnotes, additives to a story that would otherwise lack narrative tension. They only overlap when competing for Dylan’s recognition and scrutiny. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), one love interest, is a generational talent in her own right — yet Mangold portrays her as little more than a paramour, bitter that Dylan’s success is overtaking her own. Dylan’s primary relationship is with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a fictional woman with an intelligent and radiant presence in early portions of the film. But her character devolves into a casualty of Dylan’s obsession with his artistry.
Despite the film’s shortcomings, among them the surface-level portrayal of Dylan, Chalamet manages to not only get under the musician’s skin, but truly inhabit it. Biopic actors’ attempts to try on the body and adopt the mannerisms of another person often run the risk of caricature and imitation, but Chalamet’s transformation is seamless. The performance is a career standout for Chalamet, who has honed his craft over almost 30 movies.
Dylan’s talent resides in his songwriting — his ability to siphon poetry from an immense reservoir of ideas. His power to electrify came from the truths he sings about, not the instruments he played. This may be obvious to those already fluent in Dylan’s discography, but those new to his work will likely struggle to grasp his influence during the initial watch. For these viewers, his decision to switch out an acoustic guitar for an electric one doesn’t possess enough gravity to sustain the momentum of a film over two hours long.
The film’s muddled storytelling raises the question of whether a devotion to Dylan is a prerequisite for enjoyment, though it succeeds in capturing the grandeur of Dylan’s influence, depicting his stature as more myth than man.
Is there novelty in a biopic affirming that its subject remains unknowable? Perhaps if the film provided insight into his motivations — aside from a vague current of restlessness — the answer would be yes.
