'A Complete Unknown' Review: Bob Dylan's Life Gets the Cliff's Notes Treatment

Less like a rolling stone and more like a pebble growing moss

There’s a double meaning found within director James Mangold’s latest music biopic A Complete Unknown. On the one hand, it wants to show the early life of living legend Bob Dylan and how he started out as a wide-eyed kid and acolyte of fellow folk musician Woody Guthrie to become Bob Dylan. On the other, it’s telling the audience what they’ll walk away learning about Dylan by the movie’s conclusion: that he is completely unknowable.

This leaves the movie formulaic at the best of times and completely frustrating at others because if you’re a Dylan superfan you’re going to feel as if vital pieces of context are missing. If you’re a Dylan newbie you won’t get enough background to understand why certain plot beats are significant. The times were a-changing for Dylan, but it’s hard to understand why you should care.

Before he was Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet), he was young Robert Zimmerman, a New Jersey transplant who arrives in New York to see his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). What follows is Dylan’s transformation from folk musician to musical legend, from his transition to electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, to his relationship with fellow musician Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).

Next year marks the 20th anniversary of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, a film that brought the musical biopic Oscar love for the new millennium and gave director Jake Kasdan fuel for his hilarious send-up of the film, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, just two years later. So when the first trailer for A Complete Unknown dropped it was hard to erase the jokes about Mangold returning to the genre, and the same beats, that Walk Hard had so sharply skewered. While there are moments that could certainly inspire a Walk Hard sequel — a music exec hears Dylan dabbling with electric guitars and says, “Well that’s gonna piss people off” — the movie actually plays like a watered down retread of Walk the Line.

Like that film, Chalamet’s Bob Dylan is a sly-grinned raconteur, who feels less like a fan of Woody Guthrie and more like a succubus leeching off his talent. We know next to nothing about Dylan’s previous life as Robert Zimmerman, short of what his tired girlfriend Sylvie (Elle Fanning) gathers from his mail and a scrapbook. As Bob tells her, he up and joined the circus and never looked back and the script doesn’t seek to contradict that at all. Screenwriter Jay Cocks, who has crafted similar inscrutable characters like Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, seems to say no one can ever know Bob Dylan.

Dylan is too enigmatic, too mysterious, too perfect. However, that makes for an incredibly bland and boring character, who is far too content to stand in the wings of musical performances holding a cigarette and flashing a smirk that seems to say, “I’m Bob Dylan. I’m awesome.” Chalamet certainly captures the Dylan swagger, but there’s zero sense of vulnerability, conflict, or even passion in the performance. Then again it’s probably because the script doesn’t give Dylan much passion for anything. He has obsession, to be sure, spending nights that turn into days with him writing music. Dylan is clearly driven by something, but what that is the audience is apparently too basic to ever understand.

And there’s certainly little passion for the women Dylan has in his life who are simultaneously more interesting than Dylan and yet vastly underwritten. Barbaro’s Joan Baez is the film’s highlight. She conveys Baez’s fiery spirit and deep passion for the folk world. Barbaro’s voice is utterly beautiful. It’s frustrating, though, that even Baez’s agent in the movie doesn’t understand her own popularity. When Dylan first sees her he tells the crowd “she sure sings pretty. Too pretty” which sounds like an insult. At times the movie almost wants Baez to be the villain, with her taking (?) Dylan’s songs and gaining popularity off his music. It’s left hanging whether Dylan gave Baez the songs but, either way, the implication is that Baez had talent, but not Dylan talent.

The movie comes alive when Barbaro is on-screen and Chalamet, also seems more engaged when playing off her in their musical performances. Though said performances owe far too much to Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. Mangold gets too reliant on mimicking their performances from Walk the Line, right down to the camera shooting them from behind and Baez trying to convince Dylan to sing a song he doesn’t want to sing. At one point the two actually sing “It Ain’t Me, Babe” as Sylvie looks at them and discovers their love for each other and the whole thing was just done better in Walk the Line. Fanning tries hard to give Sylvie personality but the character has nothing to do but be adoring and irritated with Dylan depending on the scene.

The rest of the characters follow suit. Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger is little more than a fatherly fuddy duddy who wants to keep folk music pure, butting heads with Dylan as he wants to expand his sound and go electric. Norton’s “aw shucks” routine is nice, but there’s just no depth to his desire to keep folk the way it is short of being boring. This in spite of the movie introducing him while being on trial for performing “This Land is Your Land.” Why he’s on trial you’ll need to Google because the movie literally plops him in a courtroom and that’s all.

The musical performances are lively and a key reason why it’s worth seeing in Dolby Atmos. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael doesn’t do a lot of trickery with the camera during these scenes, content to let the music sell itself. There’s plenty of Dylan hits dropped throughout the movie, though there’s far too much emphasis on watching others watch Dylan with a knowing smile on their face. After about an hour Dylan is famous, far from the complete unknown of the title.

A Complete Unknown is far too dazzled at its subject to dig too deep into what makes him tic. Chalamet sells the performance but coasts on charisma while the rest of the cast tries to stay out of his way. It’s a shiny biopic that’s a shard of glass masquerading as a diamond.

Grade: C