Perhaps no figure in 20th century pop culture has been as intensely scrutinised, misunderstood and mythologised as Bob Dylan, the boy born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941. Twenty years later he arrived on the folk scene of New York’s Greenwich Village and within four years became its leading light and the messianic prophet of 1960s social protest and youthful idealism. By 1965, when he plugged in his guitar and left his purist folk base in a haze of outraged electric-fuzz-blasted dust, Dylan was well on to his way to carving out one of the most singular, polarising and constantly reinventive creative careers in history that now includes 40 studio albums and has earned him every imaginable accolade from Grammy to Oscar, Pulitzer Prize to the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As the Dylan carnival has swept across the popular consciousness of six decades, it's also created whole subgenres of criticism and academic analysis in its wake so that the books, articles, essays, films and podcasts devoted to unpacking the meaning of Dylan exceed their subject’s output by some margin. Yet, besides director Todd Haynes’ whip-smart and imaginative 2007 experimental biographic film, I’m Not There, the “voice of his generation” has avoided the sticky pitfalls of falling victim to the screen biopic treatment.
Enter the perfectly capable director James Mangold (Walk the Line) and accomplished screenwriter Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence) to finally attempt the impossible task of sifting fact from fiction in a life that no-one has done more to muddy the waters and mythologise than Dylan himself. Using Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric as the basis for their story, Mangold and Cocks focus the action of their film A Complete Unknown on the period from 1961 when the fresh-faced, paper-boy-cap wearing, wannabe-troubadour arrives in New York, to 1965, when the shade-wearing, frizzy-haired, unwilling folk hero turns his back on the scene that made him by embracing electric-guitar fuelled “devil’s music”.
For Dylan obsessives this story is well-trodden territory with facts and details that were already covered in Martin Scorsese’s definitive 2005 documentary No Direction Home, D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal 1967 behind-the-scenes film Don’t Look Back and minutely examined in a slew of books by critics like Greil Marcus and biographers like Clinton Heylin. For them there’s little here that will offer any surprises. For non-Dylan acolytes, the film offers a safe and cliched biopic telling of a talented young man’s rise to stardom and fall from grace in the eyes of the members of the scene that he conquered.
What both Dylan devotees and non-obsessives are left mutually interested in is what kind of a job star Timothée Chalamet does at looking and sounding like Bob Dylan. It soon becomes clear that the Gen-Z idol does a solid impersonation of the young Dylan in physicality, voice and performance. That isn’t enough to carry a just-over-two-hour film about Dylan beyond the realms of an extended karaoke show, with very little space given to the exploration of his impact, his process, his thinking or the world that made him. Mangold and Cocks exhaustingly rely on Chalamet’s mimicry to plaster over the narrative and character failings of their script and the result is a highlights package of well-recreated, uninspired performances of songs from the singer’s formative catalogue that never allows the audience anywhere near the inner life of its subject.
Chalamet’s brooding Dylan arrives in New York, hitchhikes out to New Jersey to visit his hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and sing him a song he’s written that impresses Guthrie and his old pal and nice-guy folk champion Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), so much so that they recognise the folk torch is about to be passed on to a new generation. As he rises through the coffee shops of the Greenwich Village scene, Dylan meets artist and folk devotee Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) — a perplexingly thinly disguised fictional version of the singer’s real-life lover Suzie Rotolo — and seems happy enough with her until he sees better opportunities in a relationship with folk superstar Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Though she recognises him to be something of a self-serving, overly ambitious “asshole,” Baez is so in awe of his talent that she keeps close to him for as long as she can before she’s inevitably scorched.
By the time Chalamet’s Dylan-lookalike-contest-winner becomes a proto-punk electric guitar-wielding Satan, spitting in the faces of Seeger and the folkies who anointed him, there’s been so little care on the part of the filmmakers to pause for a moment and try and look behind the shades for some sort of explanation of his Judas turn that the solid enough reenactment of Newport ’65 offers very little in the way of satisfying dramatic answers to that, or any other real questions. Everything may look and sound right, but there’s not much to offer us an idea of how it might have felt to be Dylan, or indeed anyone else, at the time.
There's still a character singing and performing and messing with the heads of his sometimes religiously fanatical fans called Bob Dylan, out there in the real world, but if you’re interested in exploring why he’s been the source of so much fascination, mythologisation and meaning to so many people across the world and across generations, you'd best look elsewhere.
A Complete Unknown can’t tell you anything you didn’t know, show you anything you haven’t seen or answer any real questions you might have. It is at best, a better than average talent show performance captured on film. At worst it’s a massively wasted opportunity and a masterclass in how not to make a biopic, allowing competent impersonation to override any dramatic or human considerations.
- *A Complete Unknown is on circuit.
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