Biopics, particularly music biopics, often follow a hollow recipe that, in recent years, has begun to sour, with a slew of derivative, uninspired and just plain bad biopics popping up with no remorse. Bohemian Rhapsody, Back to Black, Nina, All Eyez on Me, Stardust — these are just some of the films that have been released in recent years that have tried to distill complex stories of famous musicians into cookie-cutter cinema. Some are successful, but most thankfully disappear.
Regardless of subject, there is a formula, written in cinematic stone, that these failures rely on: the rise, the fall, the rise again (sometimes), the trials, the tribulations and, of course, the summary that flashes over black right before the credits roll. Unfortunately, James Mangold's Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, wholeheartedly embraces all of these uninspired trappings with gusto.
Starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, the Lower East Side bard who penned some of the most important and influential music of the last hundred years, and whose early career and meteoric rise is depicted in underwhelming biopic. A Complete Unknown attempts to demystify Dylan, but in the process, does a whole lot of nuthin' over its two-plus-hour runtime.
The film begins in 1961 with Dylan's arrival in New York City, and explores the major relationships and moments in the artist's early career, culminating in his controversial — and canonized — electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It forgoes the Minnesota upbringing he desperately tries to bury, focusing instead on some of the biggest, and most mythologized, moments of his life and career: singing for Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) when the latter was in the hospital, releasing his early albums, touring with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), his relationship with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and the Newport Folk Festival.
A Complete Unknown smartly avoids telling a cradle-to-the-old-age story, a fault of many biopics, and chooses to celebrate the smaller, more intimate moments of Dylan's life, those that don't get the same fanfare or exposure. Still, even with this narrowed focus, the film feels like a collection of scenes rather than a coherent piece — a greatest hits collection of Dylan's most important period.
Chalamet must be commended. Taking on the role of one of popular music's most enduring, celebrated and parodied artists is no easy feat. His performances of Dylan's songs, whether in bed or on stage, are wonderful, and for anyone who's ever listened to those early Dylan albums, a goosebump or 10 will undoubtedly rise. When he sings "Song to Woody" for Seeger and Guthrie, it's downright magical, the audience sharing in Seeger's instant fascination and awe. His performance of "The Times They Are a-Changin'" is the best one in the film, a towering, essential composition that Chalamet eases into and makes his own.
For all that Chalamet offers — the gait, the smoking posture and the voice — his performance comes across as fairly flat, his emotional output flipping between too-cool ambivalence and moderately pissed-off annoyance. At times, there's a mischievous intensity to Chalamet's Dylan, bordering on something punky and raw, but overall, it's overwhelmingly sleepy and detached. While Dylan's persona, his aesthetic, his very being is impossible to put on screen without copying his voice and mannerisms, Chalamet's performance is simply competent at best, hammy caricature at worst; after over two hours, it borders on unbearable impersonation.
Conversely, some of the best moments and performances in the film come from the supporting cast, particularly Barbaro, whose turn as Baez is nothing short of inspiring. She embodies without emulating, creating the character of "Joan," as opposed to relying on mimicry. She's also an amazing singer, and the scenes with her and Chalamet performing together are some of the film's highlights.
Fanning also delivers a fantastic turn as Sylvie Russo, a fictionalized version of Dylan's real-life girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo. The looks Russo gives Dylan betray her quiet intensity, and when she watches him perform with Baez, the pain is so real, so intense, we feel for her wholly. These moments rightfully condemn Dylan while humanizing Russo as something more than a girl on an album jacket or a muse. It's a tricky feat, but Fanning pulls it off beautifully.
The performances with Baez are loaded with sexuality and anxiety, but the more intimate scenes, with both her and Sylvie, lack depth or desire. When Sylvie finally leaves him, the moment is too melodramatic and insincere, lacking emotional weight or intensity. Dylan is just too nonchalant throughout for his own good, and a single moment of vulnerability doesn't change that. It's a love-triangle with little off-stage chemistry, and it's a shame these touching, subtle performances are contained within such a mediocre film.
In contrast to Barbaro and Fanning, though, other supporting performances are less than stellar. Boyd Holbrook's depiction of a drunken, bumbling Johnny Cash is downright contemptuous, and considering Mangold also directed Walk the Line, the depiction here is doubly insulting. Additionally, Norton's "gee whiz" Seeger is so earnest that he borders on saccharine. If the real Seeger was anything like this, it's easy to see why Dylan would have wanted to distance himself.
Unfortunately, these are all the shortcomings of a clichéd script, one that doesn't know if it wants to serve as Dylan hagiography, or as a more realistic account that reveals some sort of "truth" that other depictions and documentaries have failed to uncover. In the end, it paints him as a misunderstood, flawed genius who just couldn't figure out how to love (or something like that).
Those looking for some insight into Dylan, or hoping to see another side of him, are out of luck. His performances for sharecroppers, his inflammatory speech at the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, his verbal scraps with reporters — all of these are missing, even though they are all essential parts of his history and oeuvre. In trying to tell Dylan's story, Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks gloss over all the parts that made him an interesting and divisive figure. Sure, he's an asshole, but that's been well-documented. Dylan is a personality, something this film wholly lacks.
Most egregiously, the major social and political movements of the day, including the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement and the assassination of JFK are treated by the film as little more than TV broadcasts — blips and timestamps that inspire Dylan. They feel like placeholders, moments he walks through that seem to happen around him, for him.
The Bay of Pigs is the impetus for his affair with Joan Baez, which is presented as an act of necessity (war is coming!). And when we see him playing at the 1963 March on Washington, it takes up about five seconds of screen time. No commentary, no criticism, nada. The effect of inserting Chalamet into this recording is also so poorly done, it should have just been removed altogether.
Although Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks want to tell their version of Dylan's story, anyone new to Dylan's world will be hard pressed to see why this wiry troubadour with a nasally voice made any impression at all, let alone why he deserves some of the hyperbolic markers that have been bestowed upon him. The film gleefully rewrites history while promoting itself as a nuanced retelling of his early years, and there is a sense of vulgarity in amalgamating Dylan's Newport performance with his concert at Manchester's Free Trade Hall, where an audience member screamed "JUDAS!" at Dylan for his electric turn. Dramatizing an already dramatic event seems entirely unnecessary, callous even, especially when Dylan himself was so intensely affected by this insult.
With Dylan, filmmakers should never give the audience what they want. That's the only given. But if the truth is going to be fudged — which is totally fine, all biopics do this — then go all the way. Make it wild, make it audacious, make it interesting (I'm Not There, anyone?). Rock 'n' roll is supposed to have attitude. It's supposed to be weird and freak people out. It's supposed to scare the establishment, the status quo, the politicians and gatekeepers and fans and whoever else is around. A Complete Unknown does none of this.
When the film does run loose, it strikes a chord. A standout scene features Dylan jamming on Seeger's TV show, Rainbow Quest, with blues artist Jesse Moffette. They play riffs and drink schnapps and it feels real and lived in. Funny thing is, this event never happened in real life. It's completely fictionalized. But who cares! It's probably the best scene in the film, showing the inherent link between blues, folk and rock, between electric and acoustic, between soul, sound and noise. No one should deride Mangold and Cocks for including scenes like this, because it's when the film feels most alive. There is power in myth when wielded properly.
The film seems determined to show Dylan's cynicism and self-imposed disenfranchisement as his most prevalent attributes. His humour, which was so essential to who he was, is almost entirely missing from the film, which instead portrays him as a lackadaisical young man who postured and performed attitude and venom. At one point, Dylan says to Sylvie, "Am I God? How many times I gotta tell you: yes!" Now that's funny, and that's Dylan; there should be a lot more of it.
Dylan was never going to be the infallible godhead spokesperson so many people wanted him to be. The convictions of Seeger, Baez and the overzealous folk movement are thus ever-present, and responsible for the crushing weight of expectation that Dylan experiences. Unfortunately, the constant "will-they/won't-they" between Dylan and Baez begins to grow thin by the end, as does Dylan's brooding.
The film makes it seem like people simply didn't "get" Dylan, that he was trying to do something they couldn't comprehend, but in reality, there's nothing heroic about his turn from the folk movement. He did it because he wanted to do it, because he wanted to blow it all up.
A Complete Unknown is biopic paint-by-numbers, a sanitized postcard of a life, which, for an artist who always strove to stick out, subvert and challenge, feels like a major letdown. It's mediocre, flat and dull and thoroughly disappointing. It's a slog of a film, mining Dylan's freewheelin' vigour and swagger while unapologetically diluting both.
In the end, it begs the question: who is this even for? Dylan newcomers will feel underserved and perplexed (why was this guy so special?), while Dylan fans and fanatics will feel underwhelmed by the film's generic, bloodless plot and its historical inaccuracies. Chalamet will undoubtedly bring some younger fans into the theatre, but in the end, the film decontextualizes Dylan's music from the politics of the day and presents him as little more than an aggrandized brat, impossible to deal with and flippant in his relationships with loves, friends and fans.
A Complete Unknown mistakenly believes in its own self-importance, when really, it's not a particularly interesting or compelling watch. It's karaoke. How does it feel?