“Walk the Line” was hardly the first Hollywood movie that dared to serve up a facsimile-driven portrait of a singularly original artist, as though lightning-in-a-bottle creative genius could ever hope to be recaptured by studio notes and a three-act structure, but if writer-director James Mangold didn’t invent the standard-issue music biopic, I would argue that he committed the far more reprehensible crime of perfecting it — of so perfectly crystallizing the sub-genre in the public imagination that it had to be destroyed from several different angles at once. Arriving at essentially the same time some two years later, Jake Kasdan’s “Walk Hard” and Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There” both humiliated Mangold’s 2005 Johnny Cash biopic for its formulaic inauthenticity; one was a parody and the other a prism, but each of those (under-performing) cult classics so devastatingly exposed the paint-by-numbers essence of Mangold’s Oscar-winning hit that Hollywood naturally spent the next two decades churning out a few dozen more films just like it.
Mangold embraced Hollywood in return, as the ever-dependable journeyman pivoted to muscular remakes (“3:10 to Yuma”), underrated action vehicles (“Knight and Day”), and superhero movies that somehow didn’t snikt (“Logan”). When he doubled back to biopics with 2019’s “Ford v Ferrari,” he only did so with the kind of film that framed speeding through history as more of a feature than a bug.
All of this is just to say how fraught it feels for Mangold to make a Bob Dylan movie; for him to circle back to the scene of his not-so-original sin after 19 years of “Bohemian Rhapsody”-like hell with the first undisguised, semi-authorized biopic about the most iconically inscrutable — and inscrutably iconic — American musician of the 20th century, a man so resistant to Wikipediaization that Haynes used him as a Mishima-like weapon to dismantle such reductive perspectives on celebrity. “Dylan is like a flame,” is how the “I’m Not There” director once put it. “If you try to hold him in your hand you’ll surely get burned.”
But if Mangold is smart enough to recognize that applying prestige drama mimesis to such a protean figure would have blown up in his face (to say nothing of the “wrong kid died” approach to cause-and-effect he patented in “Walk the Line”), he’s also too much of a straight shooter to conceive of Dylan in a more kaleidoscopic way. And so his admirable yet deeply frustrating “A Complete Unknown” strikes the only compromise it can between the man and his myth: It bends the tension between them into its central subject.
We’ll get to the radiant black hole that is Timothée Chalamet’s lead performance in a minute, but the actor has described Bob Dylan’s artistic ethos as “a myth of self-creation,” and it’s curious to see how that ethos takes shape across this story about a divinely inspired tumbleweed who loves blowin’ in the wind enough to resent anyone who tries to root him down. The most curious thing about it is that “A Complete Unknown” largely frames Dylan’s self-creation — and artistic creation of any kind, really — as a cruel side effect of his desire to destroy any part of himself that’s more tangible than a song.
Individual scenes are galvanized by their own internal logics, but most of the fitful momentum generated by Mangold and Jay Cocks’ asymptotic screenplay — based on Elijah Wald’s “Dylan Goes Electric!” — is created from the friction between Dylan’s growing fame and his practiced anonymity; the closer he gets to being sandbagged with a single identity, the more aggressively he resists the burden of having any identity at all.
“Two hundred people in that room,” he grouses after being trotted through a party like a show horse, “and each of them wants me to be somebody else. They should just shut the fuck up and let me be.” “Be what?,” his future road manager Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison) asks from the corner of the elevator as the scene assumes the shape of a toadying meet-cute. “Whatever it is they don’t want me to be,” Dylan replies with a cool so practiced it often sounds like he’s quoting himself. And that’s about as close as we get to understanding the artist formerly known as Robert Zimmerman — as close as the negative charge of his magnetic energy will allow.
This Dylan is constantly running away from everything and everyone who tells him who they want him to be, and he’s already so good at that by the start of the movie — when he drifts into Manhattan as a 19-year-old kid with nothing but a guitar to his fake name — that he can only disappoint people for the rest of its runtime. Eager to defy the kind of beat-by-beat explainer that “Walk the Line” might have led people to expect from him, but also fundamentally not the sort of filmmaker who shares Dylan’s instinct for coloring outside the lines (or his contrarianism), Mangold struggles to portray Dylan as an enigma without reducing him to an empty shell — a hollow vessel for his own genius. The musician spends most of the movie fumbling his way from one moment of divine inspiration to the next, seemingly as unsure as we are about what his songs mean or where they might come from.
“A Complete Unknown” presents one of the most forcefully idiosyncratic figures of our lifetimes as a creature so inextricable from the culture he shaped that it all but deprives him of any agency of his own, a feeling exemplified by the film’s unwillingness to engage with its political context (an especially bizarre choice for a movie that’s bookended with appearances by Woody Guthrie). Mangold so clumsily interpolates the March on Washington, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other marquee ’60s signifiers into his subject’s rise to fame that Dylan almost comes to have a Forrest Gump-like quality about him, as if his place in history were an accidental byproduct of his efforts to just do his own thing.
And perhaps to an extent it was. One of several things that “A Complete Unknown” illustrates rather beautifully is how Dylan bent the moment to his will, which the film is able to do in large part because of how beautifully it renders the moments themselves. Not just the moments, but also the abrasion of one moment giving way to the next.
Evocatively (if unconvincingly) played by Jersey City, the downtown New York scene that Dylan first discovers in January of 1961 is a Llewyn Davis fever dream of days gone by. Production designer François Audouy didn’t waste a cent of Disney’s money in recreating a world in search of a new voice — one that could speak truth to power during the Vietnam War as clearly as Woody Guthrie had strummed against it during several different wars before that. There was a folk club on every corner of the Village, and the musicians who frequented them were as mythic as the gunslingers of the Wild West: determined not to die, but always wary of outliving their time (cue the sounds of Guthrie’s “Dusty Old Dust”). Mangold has a history of describing his films as secret Westerns, and the opening moments of this one certainly give him permission to do so again if he wants.
Dylan arrives on the scene with the false modesty of predestination, touched by God but desperate for a place to sleep for the night. Chalamet has never seemed younger than he does here. Mumbling through the “Bobby” years under a Dutch boy cap that makes him look like a live-action Fievel Mousekewitz, his performance might give off the feeling of a high school play if not for how convincingly the actor offsets the posture of a child with the vision of a prophet. When Dylan waltzes into Guthrie’s New Jersey hospital room and plays his ailing hero (Scoot McNairy) the song he wrote for him, there’s a visceral sense of history unfolding before our eyes. Mangold spends too much of this movie on awed reaction shots of people grocking Dylan’s talent for the first time, as if the director doesn’t trust his leading man to sell us on the revelatory power of the person he’s playing, but it’s undeniable from the first notes of Chalamet’s “Song to Woody.”
Pete Seeger — played by a heartbreaking Edward Norton, who seldom allows himself to be this sweet and vulnerable unless he’s being directed by Wes Anderson — picks up on it too. Sitting next to Guthrie at the same time Bobby Dylan pays a visit, the soft-voiced folk legend doesn’t waste any time swooping the kid under his wing. Seeger’s looking for a weapon powerful enough to bring folk music to the masses, but he’s such a fervent soldier for peace that he fails to conceive of the collateral damage that Dylan might cause. “A Complete Unknown” is never better than when it drills into the doomed relationship between Norton’s Capra-esque peacenik and the young protege who will eventually make him feel obsolete, and it’s a major strength of Cocks and Mangold’s screenplay that neither character notices what’s happening until the times are a-changin’ with a mind of their own.
The other relationships from this part of Dylan’s life aren’t written with the same degree of nuance. That’s especially true of his formative romance with the fresh-faced artist and freedom fighter Sylvie Russo (a thankless Elle Fanning). Openly based on Suze Rotolo, the character’s name has been changed at Dylan’s insistence, as he supposedly wanted to protect the memory of his “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” cover girl from the perils of dramatization.
“A Complete Unknown” honors that request to a fault, as it flattens Suze into a human doormat whose only function in the movie is to offer Dylan the world and get denied the time of day in return. It’s hard to tell if she doesn’t get what he’s doing, or if he just decides to do something else in order to make her feel that way; regardless, Dylan has sex with Joan Baez in Suze’s bed the minute she leaves town for a few weeks.
He’s a monster to her as well, but at least Baez puts up a fight. Dylan says he’s looking for a spark, and Monica Barbaro’s incendiary performance as the vanguard icon ensures that he finds one. Barbaro plays Baez with a wry and knowing dream girl mystique that makes Dylan’s cruelty towards her all the more pointed. Most teenage boys would probably go out of their way to be nice to a stunningly beautiful songstress who has sex with them on what threatens to be the last night before nuclear armageddon (and gawks at him like he’s Prometheus when he plays her “Blowin’ in the Wind”), but Dylan sees that as all the more reason to liken Baez’s music to the oil paintings you’d find hanging in a dentist’s office. He’s always on the run from anyone who threatens to know him, and the people who come the closest naturally pay the highest price.
That process accelerates when the film skips forward to 1965, and Dylan — now a full-blown supernova — has armored himself behind a moppy Jewfro and a pair of seemingly permanent black sunglasses. Chalamet’s performance is more settled during this half of the movie, or at least more comfortably performative, as the iconography of Dylan’s pre-“Highway 61 Revisited” era gives him the cover he needs to embrace the artifice of this entire exercise.
Sure, it’s the only Chalamet performance that could lead someone to think “Cate Blanchett did it better,” but Mangold invites the actor to unburden himself from imitation, and the actor takes him up on that offer. Matching the singer’s reedy mumble as best he can while still clinging to some palpable vestige of his own star persona, Chalamet communes with Dylan’s spirit so effectively that — paradoxical as this might sound — his embodiment can’t help but expose the futility of trying to do so, and the rare moments where he comes off as “fake” only serve to underscore how difficult it is for everyone else to keep pace with his character.
Perhaps that’s why Chalamet shines brightest whenever the film stops time to let him sing, which it does so often that “A Complete Unknown” turns into a kind of backdoor musical. Chalamet plays the hits to soulful perfection, but he can’t hide as much of himself in a song as he can in a piece of dialogue, and the bits where he performs “Girl from the North Country” or whatever are so entrancing precisely because of the fertile distance they open between the actor and the part he’s playing — a distance that allows us to see them both more clearly for how they reflect back at one another.
It’s also a distance that allows the film to focus on something more than its callous rush to the future, which Mangold increasingly frames as “The Social Network” of its day as Dylan threatens to go electric; his relationship with Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash is an all too perfect analogue for Mark Zuckerberg’s starry-eyed view of Sean Parker, much as the real Cash may not deserve to be mentioned in those terms. “You’re pushing candles and he’s selling light bulbs,” Dylan’s manager barks at Seeger on the eve of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (Albert Grossman is played by a hammy-as-hell Dan Fogler whose performance is airdropped in from the exact kind of biopic that Mangold is ostensibly trying to avoid), but the Dylan this movie gives us seems less interested in being a disruptor than he does in being an asshole. Or in trying so hard to be an asshole, at least. In that light, the climactic set doesn’t play like a paradigm shift in the history of folk rock so much as it does a personal betrayal of an Eduardo Saverin-coded Pete Seeger, only for it to be followed by a series of hagiographic title cards that leave you feeling like “A Complete Unknown” doesn’t know itself well enough to make anything of the fact that it doesn’t know Dylan either.
Like “I’m Not There” before it, “A Complete Unknown” would rather celebrate Dylan’s mystery than attempt to explain it (each of their titles emphasizes his elusiveness as a defining factor), but where Haynes’ solution was to make Dylan infinite, Mangold’s is to make him as small as possible. It’s the difference between a house of mirrors and a matte screen cover that refuses to reflect any light whatsoever. One movie sees Dylan as everyone, the other essentially sees Dylan as no one. Both are wonderful to listen to, but I’ll give you one guess as to which is more interesting to watch.
Grade: C+
Searchlight Pictures will release “A Complete Unknown” in theaters on December 25.
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