Though Walk Hard buried the musician biopic, director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown provides yet another attempt. To add to the degree of difficulty, his film is about no less than one of the most significant artistic conmen (complimentary) of the 20th century: Bob Dylan. Could Mangold’s film transcend the genre and show us something new about this man? In typical Dylan fashion, the answer is both yes and no.
True to its title, Mangold’s cinematic version of Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) wanders from nowhere into the folk scene of 1960s New York. His talent obvious, A Complete Unknown sets about tracking Dylan’s inevitable rise to the top—surpassing his heroes (like Edward Norton’s reedy Pete Seeger) and lovers (Monica Barbaro’s knockout Joan Baez) alike. To the film’s credit, its first half exudes some magic because of how good Dylan’s classic songs are, and how unlikely they seem coming from him; there’s pleasure in imagining what it would have felt like seeing Dylan play for the first time. In this, Chalamet is believable as the prickly genius (and genius prick), whose reaction to celebrity was not self-destruction but self-reinvention; his Dylan, as with the rest of the film’s musical stand-ins, are all quite good. Mangold’s handling of the film’s romantic subplots, meanwhile, feels less sure, repeating some slim ideas (via a thankless performance from Elle Fanning) in the hopes of gleaning some new insight. While the narrative builds to the now-historic Newport 1965 festival (as per the book by Elijah Wald), the rest of the film doesn’t quite click together.
It’s this tension between man, myth, and mystery that A Complete Unknown cannot resolve—though not for lack of trying. This was always to be the challenge of making a straight-ahead Dylan biopic. As a result, Mangold’s film works best when Dylan appears as a nobody, yet it can’t quite define what exactly made him a somebody. Yes, the music remains a testament, but we hardly needed another film to confirm that.
