Timothée Chalamet stars and sings as Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, the story behind the rise of one of the most iconic singer-songwriters in history.Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures
A Complete Unknown
Directed by James Mangold
Written by James Mangold and Jay Cocks
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton
Classification PG; 141 minutes
Opens in theatres Dec. 25
There is no shortage of films either explicitly or spiritually about Bob Dylan.
Todd Haynes’s experimental biopic I’m Not There (2007) saw six actors embody the American singer-songwriter’s varied public personae; the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) follows a floundering folk singer on the cusp of Dylan’s ascent to fame; D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back (1967) accompanies Dylan on his 1965 U.K. tour; and Martin Scorsese has directed two documentaries on the artist to date. Dylan himself has made and acted in narrative films that press upon his artistry. What need, then, is there for a straight-laced biopic about the man whose legacy is repeatedly inscribed in cinema?
Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, James Mangold’s tedious and aseptic A Complete Unknown is set between the years 1961 and 1965, tracing the musician’s early associations and climb to recognition in New York City. The film builds to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan (in)famously performed with electric instruments to the crowd’s chagrin. (The film’s original title was “Going Electric.”)
Timothée Chalamet stars as Dylan in his early 20s, about to be steadfastly embraced into the folk music movement that would spit him out by the end of the film. In the opening sequence, folk musician Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is hospitalized in New Jersey due to Huntington’s disease, with fellow balladeer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) at his bedside. Dylan strolls into the ward with a guitar in tow, anxious to play a song for Guthrie after hearing of his whereabouts on the radio.
Dylan’s talent is then nursed by Seeger, a stalwart supporter of American folk revival who, alongside Columbia Records, seizes the opportunity to “put a younger face on folk music.”
Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) – a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo, who appears on the 1963 cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – is perceptive to the subtle changes in his behaviour, and made to be the grounding force of a film that wants to see Dylan fly. Another key player of this movement is singer-songwriter Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), with whom Dylan has a three-year affair at his leisure.
Despite the arid direction, Chalamet’s Dylan – described in the film as “a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik” – comes from the heart. After years of preparation, the actor sung live for all the performances, his usual cadence coalescing with Dylan’s nasal, elliptic way of speaking. Fanning is unsurprisingly given little to do but negotiate a love triangle, her character acting as a placeholder in Dylan’s come-up.
In 2005, Mangold directed Walk the Line, a biographical drama about Johnny Cash, who also features in his latest effort. With A Complete Unknown, Mangold rinses and repeats his own musical biopic truisms: a formulaic origin story about a male musician who achieves meteoric success among the counterculture while neglecting his sweet-tempered significant other. (This is also the plot of the 2007 spoof film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which should have marked the dissolution of musical biopics entirely.) Sentimental torch-passing is also a requisite of such films, with Guthrie handing Dylan his harmonica or Cash standing by the Newport stage and extending an acoustic guitar.
Dylan’s eventual flirtation with rock music proved problematic to folk traditionalists who felt their artform being foreclosed upon. Mangold soliloquizes plenty about folk songs as a form of resistance with the implicit backdrop of civil rights activism, Cold War anxieties, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam War. But Dylan’s anti-war sensibilities are softened in this rendition, which bizarrely envisions folk purism as a more prevalent threat to the enlightened masses.
There is a pronounced attention to television screens and news programs as sites for political protest; it is as though we are never in Dylan’s universe, that the world is happening elsewhere and its violence is consigned to the TV set. Whether this speaks to Dylan’s cosseted position or a reluctance to move beyond the oppressively rigid biopic structure is as oblique as the man himself. One might skirt disappointment by instead watching yet another Dylan film: Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary Festival, which includes footage of Newport ‘65 and Dylan’s conviction against the conflicted horde.
