In a revealing anecdote after the first screening of his latest biopic A Complete Unknown, James Mangold relayed the question posed to him by Bob Dylan: “So what is this movie about?” It’s a fair inquiry, especially for a legendary figure whose profound resonance has been felt in cinema just as it has in music. In documentary form, his presence has been the focus of D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal direct-cinema film Dont Look Back, no fewer than two Martin Scorsese documentaries (No Direction Home and Rolling Thunder Revue), and his own Eat the Document. His fictional representations are also considerable: the highlight is likely Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There––which forms a definitive statement precisely because its mélange of faces and styles refuses to settle on one interpretation of the musician––though Dylan also put forth offbeat and personal efforts like Renaldo and Clara and Masked & Anonymous.
A Complete Unknown often seems lost in its efforts to live up to this motley pedigree. It follows Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) from the moment he hitchhiked into New York City in early 1961 to his landmark, legendarily divisive performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where his decision to bring electric rock music to the institution that had deified him was seen as a betrayal of his solo acoustic roots. This stretch of time, which ends before the now-83-year-old had even turned 25, is not coincidentally the extent of the vast majority of the popular consciousness’ knowledge of Dylan. There are later highlights that many can readily point to: the twin successes of Blood on the Tracks and Desire in the mid-70s, his long-awaited Grammy win for Time Out of Mind; the only one of these specifically mentioned in the requisite final title cards is his shocking win of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is almost laughed-off in text form.
Admittedly, biopics are not usually the domain of daring imagination. Their formulas are hidebound to the extent that Mangold’s previous effort in this genre, his decades-spanning Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (there played by Joaquin Phoenix, here by Boyd Holbrook), was relentlessly parodied by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story two years later. But there’s something profoundly limited about A Complete Unknown‘s outlook, summed up by Mangold’s response to Dylan (which was accepted with a smile) that it is the story of a young man suffocating in the Midwest, successfully reinventing himself and becoming popular in New York, then suffocating again.
The central structure bisects this era into, as the title cards lay out, 1961––which actually covers a three-period period from Dylan’s entrance to the seemingly fictitious, rousing premiere of the immortal “The Times They Are A-Changin’” at a previous Newport Festival––and 1965, which confines its focus to a few months in the middle of the year, sometime after the filming of Dont Look Back and right before the release of his landmark album Highway 61 Revisited. Accordingly, A Complete Unknown is essentially framed by two of the many encounters that Dylan has with his idol, ailing folk singer Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). In the former he pops in unannounced on Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Guthrie, eventually mustering the courage to sing “Song to Woody,” one of his earliest compositions; in the latter, the man who would die a few years later wordlessly gives his blessing to his protege’s new direction.
Within these (often awkwardly paced) halves, Dylan forms bonds at the mercy of his whims and sincere yet standoffish affect. Besides Seeger, who acts as an early supporter of Dylan’s, there is Sylvie (Elle Fanning), a fictionalized version of Dylan’s first serious girlfriend Suze Rotolo, and fellow folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, the film’s fiery highlight), whose radiance is gradually overshadowed by his rising star even as they begin an on-and-off affair and artistic partnership. These interpersonal tensions are posited none too subtly as the primary motivating factor for Dylan’s growing introspection and desire to escape, which is abruptly communicated in the break between halves. Immediately after the first Newport performance, the film suddenly jumps forward three albums (The Times They Are A-Changin’ to Bringing It All Back Home) and Dylan is immediately shown dressed in black and wearing his Ray-Ban Wayfarers; in an especially blunt touch, everyone immediately begins cursing up a storm, as if the folk scene suddenly soured in the span of a few years. From here, A Complete Unknown devolves into a series of petty arguments and pleadings, everyone around Dylan falling out-of-touch while the man himself becomes more and more unreadable. To his detriment, Mangold applied the title to his subject without providing a sufficiently compelling sense of the scene that prompted that retreat.
It’s easy to poke and prod at A Complete Unknown for its various inaccuracies. For every well-judged moment––e.g. Dylan absentmindedly singing one of his greatest deep cuts, “I’ll Keep It With Mine” while taking a bath––there’s a confusing, unproductive mix-up in chronology: at several points in the 1965 half, Dylan seems to be writing and recording songs from his first electric album Bringing It All Back Home, even though it is mentioned as having already come out. But its greatest problem lies its eagerness to sensationalize and overplay each little moment in Dylan’s life. It isn’t enough to present the ever-searing “Masters of War”: Dylan must premiere it at a club during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis while Sylvie is away, captivating Baez so much that they immediately fuck. Most gallingly, the bracing Newport performance must be punctuated by a reference to the infamous “Judas” accusation levied at Dylan during a Manchester concert the following year; confusingly, Dylan’s exhortation to play loud is bowdlerized here.
Whatever the tepidly constructed dramatic scenes and shallow character motivations, A Complete Unknown does provide the opportunity to hear a number of the greatest songs of the 20th century performed loud and, yes, competently. Chalamet’s voice is clearly forced and never makes it all the way there––he gets the nasal quality but not the odd aura of Dylan’s voice, which cuts like glass and sounds like a message echoing across time––but even as he proves less-suited for the electric material, the many songs provide a fairly accurate portrait of a man in constant artistic evolution. Regrettably, the film as a narrative does not achieve such goals, its meager attempts at inventing details only highlighting the gap between insights into a single, fascinating figure and his own ability to conjure an entire world.
A Complete Unknown opens on December 25.