The lion’s share of the affection for James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown will come from people who lived through its era, love the music of Bob Dylan, or both. The era is lovingly recreated and the music is staged in an engaging way, with a performance by Timothee Chalamet that captures the folk singer and Nobel winner’s essential quicksilver nature that sometimes rubbed people the wrong way (and continues to do so to this day).
Those seeking any sort of narrative rigour, though, will be left severely disappointed by A Complete Unknown. It is not, perhaps, a prerequisite for a film to have momentum toward a conclusion that itself may be unknown, but whose approach is usually possible to anticipate within the context of the film. But having that does help, and this ideal is utterly impossible to achieve in Mangold’s film, especially if you didn’t know it was adapted from Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! And even if you did, you might wonder if Dylan’s much-reviled electric guitar performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival makes sufficient material for a film, one that relies on conflicts and dramatic arcs as any piece of popular filmmaking must. Even Dylan’s fans might raise gripes about the film’s construction that would undercut their own natural inclination toward the movie.
A Complete Unknown starts off as the standard sort of old-fashioned biopic, where the character is introduced to us in their pre-fame years. The young Robert Zimmerman, already going by his stage name, is deposited in New York after hitchhiking the last stretch in the back of a family’s station wagon. He is, at this point, the complete unknown of the title, though he won’t be for long, due to a move that is just naive enough not to seem calculating.
Dylan shows up at the hospital room of the recently stricken Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who at this moment is being visited only by another legendary folk singer, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). Good fortune does not get more fortuitous than this. Dylan plays an original song for his hero (telling Seeger his albums are great too, in a belated attempt to save face), and both seasoned folk singers are bowled over by Dylan’s ability. (Incidentally, Guthrie was not stricken with a stroke, but with Huntington’s disease, which had recently gotten significantly more debilitating.)
As Dylan rapidly ascends to fame within the folk music world and the world in general, he meets his girlfriend Sylvie Russo, who is based on a real person and is played by Elle Fanning. He almost immediately creates romantic complications in the form of folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who has a combustibility with Dylan based on mutual attraction and a desire to collaborate that is quickly delivered by Dylan’s handlers, including Seeger in the driver’s seat. (Guthrie is still confined to a hospital and will be for the rest of his life.)
The story, as it were, continues on from there, though it frequently repeats its beats as a sign of the difficulty of mining traditional dramatic heft from this period of Dylan’s life. You might play a drinking game with the number of shots of Sylvie watching Dylan achieve wild success on stage, with a single tear rolling down her check because she knows she’s going to lose him. (Considering that she had not yet lost him, this is a case of a filmmaker who benefits from his own knowledge of the future, giving us something that doesn’t make perfect sense in the moment.) There are also at least three too many shots of Dylan riding on his motorcycle looking perturbed, which strikes us as especially strange because it’s not clear how much Dylan actually had to be perturbed about.
The film’s primary conflict, from the main character’s perspective, is that he did not want to be labelled as a folk singer – probably, that he did not want to be labelled as anything. While that sort of pigeonholing can certainly drive an artist to go beyond their perceived limitations, which is what Dylan did when he started to dabble with an electric sound, it hardly seems like the proper central conflict for a film. If we are meant to sympathise with this character at any point – and the way he is drawn up here, that’s debatable – we need to understand what the character is going through and recognise some validity to his outlook. Instead, Dylan comes across as an irascible prick, a person gifted with untold amounts of natural talent who converted that into being an asshole. Good on him.
The staging of the 1965 Newport Film Festival does not do A Complete Unknown any favours. It is with great relief that we see Seeger coming in to direct this meandering film toward some sort of definitive conclusion, as he asks Dylan what his intentions are for the big final performance of the festival – stating in no uncertain terms that electric guitars are anathema to folk music and would function as a betrayal of his audience. (The portrayal of Seeger in this film is a discussion for another time … he’s largely ineffectual and eventually becomes something of a buffoon, despite seeming like a very nice guy.)
When Dylan does, of course, haul out his electric guitar to stick up a middle finger at his audience and the festival organisers, it’s greeted with some of the most hackish extra work you’ve seen in a movie in some time, where members of the audience hurl hilarious catcalls at Dylan and throw tomatoes at the stage. (There are no actual tomatoes, just the symbolic equivalent thereof.) Words of crisis like “How do we get him out of here??” are uttered. For a big climactic scene, it produces guffaws rather than any sort of the catharsis you usually seek from the end of a movie.
Despite all this, some people will love – and some foreign audiences have already loved – A Complete Unknown. The answer to that, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
A Complete Unknown opens in cinemas on Thursday.