‘A Complete Unknown’: Dull as Dishwater Bob Dylan Flick
A review of ‘A Complete Unknown,’ directed by James Mangold; Searchlight Pictures, 2024.
To be frank, I think how much you like A Complete Unknown will rest on how much you like Bob Dylan and, more important, his music. I get that he ‘defied convention’ and so on; and he absolutely does have a good song or two. I like ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ just because it opens Watchmen. But I am not wild about his stuff. So read this review with that little disclaimer in mind, if you wish.
A young Bobby Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), with messy hair, scruffy clothes, dirty backpack and guitar, arrives in New York City. He goes to see Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), his idol, who is in hospital. There he meets Guthrie, but also Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). Dylan plays them a song, and Seeger takes him under his wing. Seeger gives Dylan opportunities to play in the Greenwich Village folk scene. Dylan wows. At an event, he plays after Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and impresses her manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). Dylan gets signed.
Dylan plays them a song, and Seeger takes him under his wing.
Things happen quickly. Dylan records some songs and acquires a girlfriend called Sylvie (Elle Fanning). His first album, made up of covers, sells poorly; but soon he makes use of the surrounding unrest to write and play socially conscious music. Fame follows. He finds it bewildering. But fame is not what Dylan wants. What he wants is freedom. People create themselves, he insists: we are not the products of our upbringing. He resists his girlfriend’s bids to find out more about his life. He seeks freedom, personal and artistic.
This is the central theme of A Complete Unknown. Like the character in Martin Scorsese’s iconic Chanel Bleu advert, he doesn’t want to be what people expect him to be. Like Bukowski, he believes you can—or should—‘invent yourself and then reinvent yourself’. This neurosis of his gets dull quite early on. He has an angry exchange with Sylvia, his girlfriend, during which he refuses to tell her about his childhood. Later, in a lift, he tells Dave Van Ronk he wants to be whatever ‘they don’t want me to be’. There is an exchange later on with Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook; the best thing about the film, by the way) that goes like this:
Bob Dylan: I don’t think they want to hear what I want to play.
Johnny Cash: Who’s they?
Bob Dylan: You know, the people who decide what folk music is or isn’t.
Johnny Cash: Fuck them, I wanna hear you. Go track some mud on somebody’s carpet. Make some noise, B.D.
Like Bukowski, he believes you can — or should — ‘invent yourself and then reinvent yourself’.
You catch my drift. The backdrop to all this is the turbulence of the 1960s, with the Vietnam War raging, the threat of nuclear war looming, and social upheaval at home in the U.S.A.. Dylan becomes something of a figurehead for the young people who wanted to do away with the mores of the past and live different kinds of lives. This backdrop is much more interesting than Dylan’s rise to fame.
I quite like Timothée Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name, Dune) but he isn’t great in this flick. His rendering of Dylan borders on parody. He sounds as though he is talking with his mouth taped shut, and his little outbursts about his desire to be someone he isn’t sound so childish that you have to laugh. It is a good job that he spends much of the film behind those dark glasses.
He sounds as though he is talking with his mouth taped shut.
In contrast, Norton plays his part beautifully, conveying in quite a moving way the disappointment of one who has mentored and guided yet received no gratitude for it. (Bob Dylan, the film suggests, is quite a self-absorbed and ungrateful guy.) Monica Barbaro, Elle Fanning and Dan Fogler are great, even if they exist chiefly to be boringly decent people, so casting light on what a maverick and renegade the film wants Bob Dylan to be. He mainly lets people down. He sabotages a gig with Joan Baez by refusing to play the songs the audience wants. He cheats on Sylvie. He would let Grossman down, and does a few times, till Grossman more or less lets Dylan do what he wants to do and contents himself with taking the cash. I suppose we are meant to take this as proof of his individuality, but, as in Maestro, it comes off as humdrum self-obsession merely sold as the incomprehensible frustrations of the genius creative.
Anyway. Mangold’s direction is unshowy. He lets the story unfold without unneeded embellishment. But the film could do with a haircut. It is at least half an hour too long. Phedon Papamichael’s cinematography is similarly unpretentious, and he captures beautifully the aesthetic of the age, as well as the gritty charm of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse, the intimacy of the bar, the distinctive, rather quaint atmosphere of the Newport Folk Festival. But on the whole there is nothing here to shout about. It is very possible, as I have suggested, that you will love this film. If you love Bob Dylan, you might. But for long stretches, I was bored to tears.
