A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is a deeply frustrating biopic of Bob Dylan. Rather than challenging his misogynistic bullshit, the film replicates it. Director James Mangold (WALK THE LINE) is not interested in interrogating the complexity of Saint Bob. Rather, everything must be packaged neatly in a convenient narrative arc.
That arc is massaged to within an inch of its life. Young Bob - choirboy turned gravelly voiced folk-singer - makes a pilgrimage to New York to meet his chronically ill hero Woody Guthrie. Scoot McNairy (IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) stuns in an entirely wordless performance as Guthrie, struck mute with Hungtington's Disease, but still keen to be surrounded by music. Such is Bob's evident talent that he is taken in by a kindly, paternal Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and his wife Toshi, a couple whose life was devoted to preserving the American folk music tradition.
Bob finds fame and massive music sales with his protest songs against a backdrop of the civil rights movement. But this is the era of the Beatles and The Stones and The Kinks and he feels trapped in amber by the historicity of the folk movement. He hires a blues rock band and records what will be his first electric rock album, Highway 61 Revisited.
The narrative arc poses a big showdown at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Will Bob play nice and play folk? Or will he disappoint everyone around him and play electric rock? We all know the answer. And we all know that what transpired afterwards didn't happen at Newport but in the Manchester Free Trade Hall a year later. But that doesn't fit Mangold's neat and claustrophobically American narrative. Nowhere do we see Bob travel to London and the influence the Swinging Sixties Carnaby Street vibe had on him. He just goes from one scene to the next transformed from shabby folk clothes to extra tight Carnaby Street suits and winkle pickers.
The problem with the way this film is constructed is that most everyone is a single-dimension character, giving the excellent cast very little to do. Pretty much everyone just looks at Bob with an air of disappointment. Elle Fanning (The Great) plays Sylvie Russo - a thinly veiled version of Bob's real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo - and just looks at Bob disappointed and heartbroken. Monica Barbaro plays folk icon Joan Baez and just looks at Bob disappointed and contemptuous. Peter Seege looks disappointed and paternally heartbroken. You get the picture.
And what of Bob himself? Timothee Chalamet (DUNE) plays Bob with pads in his cheeks to give him a boyish round-face, and has admirably mastered his growly deliberately ugly style of singing and playing. It's a great impersonation, but for my money, outclassed by Scoot McNairy in the acting department. You get the ferocity of Bob, his uncompromising attitude toward music. But the film skips so lightly over his way of mooching off women, or his initial passive-aggressive barb that Joan Baez sings too well.... Imagine a film with this cast that really wanted to get into the verbal attack on Joan in Like A Rolling Stone, or his womanising, or his fundamentally dishonest appropriation of a persona.
But no, this is a film for fans that wants us to see (rightly) just how bloody brilliant his early music was. Where the film shines is in giving is so much music so brilliantly rendered. But by including so much music it squeezes out the time that could have been spent on personal relationships. I feel like maybe this was a deliberate choice and a cowardly one too.
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is rated R and has a running time of 141 minutes. It was released in the USA on December 14th and opens in the UK on January 17th 2025.
