Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
**/**** starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro screenplay by James Mangold and Jay Cocks, based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald directed by James Mangold
by Angelo Muredda “I like everything, Pete,” a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) confesses to his soon-to-be-mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) early in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which traces for what feels like the hundredth time the chameleonic artist’s quick rise through the New York City folk scene in the early 1960s en route to his reinvention as a rock star circa 1965. (The film leaves him just as he goes electric.) Driving in Seeger’s car after Dylan’s famous pilgrimage to meet–and, in his words, “catch a spark” off–his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), by whose hospital bed Seeger has been keeping vigil, the oath-keeper to folk’s aesthetic and progressive causes and the scene’s as-yet unknown generational star and future turncoat talk past each other. Hearing the rambunctious rock of Little Richard on the radio and sensing his passenger’s divided artistic loyalties, the older man tries to put out the fire, espousing the values of traditionalism and the political utility of protest music while his protege, sounding like the puckish, curatorially adventurous future host of Theme Time Radio Hour he would turn out to be, sheepishly admits that sometimes electric instruments sound good.
Contrary to the ambiguous shapeshifter ethos that would come to define his public persona–already famously depicted in nonfiction films like Don’t Look Back and No Direction Home as well as I’m Not There, which all cover this same period–and that later becomes the prepackaged final word on the subject in Mangold’s film, the Dylan we meet here is not an impenetrable genius but a freakishly talented aesthete with insatiable appetites: a guy who lives and breathes pop music and has real potential to change how it sounds. He likes what Seeger likes and more, and if that difference in taste ultimately makes Seeger little more than an avuncular stepping stone in his life, the kind you’d only find depicted in a project about an artist’s back pages, can you really blame Dylan for moving on? It’s too bad that’s just about the only interesting idea in A Complete Unknown. As fresh as it starts, not merely with that scene-setting debate but with Chalamet’s prior arresting performance of “Song to Woody,” delivered in alternating close-ups of Dylan and Guthrie’s faces that evocatively suggest a seduction attempt on Dylan’s part (which Seeger gets to awkwardly observe as a third wheel), the film, before long, becomes yet another bit of pat Dylanography, praising the artist’s capacity for change and sighing at the spurned loved ones and collaborators he left behind in order to become himself. Mangold’s workmanlike efficiency at sketching periods and places and his commitment, well-demonstrated by the more confident Walk the Line, to anchoring bland musical biopic tropes in strong performances of complete songs are not enough to cut through such a banal depiction of Dylan, where even the title feels selected because the previous line in the song it’s from was already taken by a better movie.
Bookended by images of Dylan travelling–first by the humbler means of public transit and taxis and later by the portentously photographed motorcycle he would crash just outside of the chosen timeline–the film is structured as a kind of sojourn within a road movie whose opening and closing destinations we don’t see. It tracks Dylan’s well-trodden early-1960s pit stop in Greenwich Village, including some dutifully depicted current events like the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s assassination, and climaxes at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Dylan’s creative output and personal growth in that period are mainly viewed through two frames: the songs he writes, records, and performs live, for which the narrative frequently stops to allow Chalamet to showcase his rather impressive imitation of not just Dylan’s voice and mannerisms but also his nervous, restless energy; and the relationships he forges and burns on the scene, chiefly with Seeger, who Norton beautifully understates, with the initially more famous Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), and with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), an anemic stand-in for Dylan’s onetime partner Suze Rotolo, who introduced him to Rimbaud and the Civil Rights movement.
What the film is saying about these relationships never becomes clear beyond the hazy insinuation of the title: that Dylan is an unknowable person and artist, and that those who try to grasp him are fated to let him slip through their fingers. Seeger is right to wonder about what sort of musician he’s taking in and touting as a next-generation emissary for folk music, as Dylan never has much to say here about his interest in traditional music–maybe because he’s already said plenty about it in his liner notes for World Gone Wrong, among other places. At most, folk music rates as a fad, important to other careerist hacks and do-gooders like Seeger and Baez, maybe, but not so much to Dylan. Its cultural significance is articulated insomuch as we get numerous clunky scenes of executives telling him to hold off on recording his own music, because rearrangements of traditionals are in, or Sylvie telling him to record his originals, lest he never really get to know himself.
The women in Dylan’s orbit don’t fare much better than the genre, such that it’s probably for the best that Mangold altogether omits Dylan’s wife, Sara Lownds, who he met well within the range of the timeline. As signalled by her vaguely familiar made-up name, apparently the result of Dylan feeling the real Rotolo should be spared a proper depiction as the one non-famous civilian in the ensemble, the paint-by-numbers Sylvie is no substitute for the vibrant person she’s representing. Through no fault of Fanning, who tries to make Sylvie peppery and spirited, she’s a wet blanket waiting by the phone, at one point inscrutably watching the TV as the largely apolitical boyfriend she’s been taking to civil rights rallies performs with Baez at the March on Washington, her jealousy of Baez the only thing registering despite the real Rotolo’s politics; you wonder what she’s doing at home in the first place. Barbaro successfully channels some of the prickly chemistry of the June-and-Johnny dynamic from Walk the Line in Baez and Dylan’s later on-stage duets, but there’s not much to the film’s depiction of Baez as either an activist or a musician. That only serves to make movie-Dylan’s assessments that her music is too pretty, the type of chintzy art you’d find on hotel walls, feel like it’s supposed to be a true statement on her work rather than something a jealous musician might say to his more popular girlfriend before his career takes off.
It’s impressive that Chalamet comes away mostly unscathed through all of this thin portraiture. He relishes the musical performances and captures a real sense of Dylan’s wiliness and knack for keeping things vague, as Baez once sang about him. If the more freewheeling depiction of Dylan conveyed by that opening conversation with Seeger feels let down by the more familiar position statement Mangold and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks land on–where he’s speaking of himself when he offers Sylvie some film criticism on Bette Davis’s character in Now, Voyager, proclaiming she “made herself into something different” because she wanted to in that moment–then he keeps it alive in his wolfish reaction shots throughout the film as he hungrily takes in others doing their sets, from Seeger to Baez to Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook, making an impression in his few scenes as a sleazier Cash than Joaquin Phoenix’s in Walk the Line). Even at his snidest, as in his quips to Baez or when he instinctively scoffs at Seeger’s dorky performance of “Wimoweh” for an even dorkier live audience before smiling in recognition at his expert crowd work, Chalamet’s Dylan is a fan first, an artist second, and someone for whom the two are hopelessly intertwined: he likes everything. Even the stuff he’s outgrown.
