A Complete Unknown review — It's all new to me, like some mystery

Directed by James Mangold | Written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, from the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald | 142 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Crave

I slouched into the screening room for A Complete Unknown with more than a few reservations about what I was about to see. I’ve gone on the record that I’ve had enough of American Boomer mythologizing. How many stories do we need to tell about the lives of musical icons like Bob Dylan? Back in 2007 Todd Haynes directed I’m Not There, a genuinely unorthodox take on the form of the biopic, having multiple performers portray Bob Dylan at different parts of his life. While impressive, especially the Cate Blanchett segment, implicit in that version is the suggestion that Dylan contains too much genius and mystique to be portrayed by a single actor — which is just so much bullshit.

It turns out we just needed to wait for Hollywood’s biggest young star to take him on — Timothée Chalamet has produced some of his best work for this role. While it might not be as unconventional as Haynes’ film, it impresses on a lot of fronts. It frames the first four years of Dylan’s New York folk career, from 1961 to 1965, by sharing who he was as an artist and as a person, and how in his burgeoning success he connected with and alienated the people around him. As Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) says, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.” She’s not kidding.

The picture starts with Dylan arriving in the back of a truck in New York without a profile or any money. He’s looking for his hero, folk icon Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) but instead finds folk icon Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). Seeger takes him to see Guthrie, living in a New Jersey hospital contending with Huntington’s Disease. Dylan impresses both older men with a rendition of “Song To Woody.” So far so Inside Llewyn Davis, but before long Dylan’s gigging in coffeehouses and shacking up with fan-turned-girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who pays for everything. When Sylvie goes away for a few weeks, Dylan’s inviting Baez to stay over.

Both women know what they’re getting with this guy, but they’re not happy about it. He’s essentially a mystery man — as suggested by the title — building his own legend and refusing to say much about who he is or where he comes from. He just smoulders and complains and smokes and writes songs. And when he gets famous, and makes friends like CBS records’ Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook, terrific), he finds all the attention produces another kind of loneliness and an imposition on his freedom, like the record company’s insistence he release an album of folk covers before he puts out a record of his own material.

The burgeoning cult of the rock ‘n’ roller is well examined here. We get a sense of what it like to know and care about someone this brilliant and self-involved. Would someone like that, with his gift to reach people and write with nuance and poeticism, have any real curiosity about other people? Or would anyone close to him just be an audience for his words and music? How cool would he be to know or would he be frequently unbearable — as both Russo and Baez found to their cost?

Mangold, who also directed Walk The Line, brings an economical but professional style to the film, but isn’t beyond using the occasional camera whip-pan to bring energy to a scene. It works well, and full marks to the production department for the locations, sets, and props urging the era to life. The actors’ faces lit by blue-screened TVs sharing the world’s political upheaval as they try to live their lives brings a welcome interiority to the work.

This is far from a hagiography. The idea that the folk purists who cursed Dylan’s name at events like the Newport Folk Festival for plugging in his guitar may seem hopelessly antediluvian as seen from the wildly popular electric years following, but the film does a good job expressing Seeger and his pals’ side of things, along with Dylan’s simple lack of gratitude for having been given a platform. We hear a lot of the early songs, which is the right thing.

All this collapses if Chalamet isn’t up to the task, but he plays well and actually sings better than Dylan. He’s also not afraid to be ugly, even when he’s dashing. If anything, this picture might help turn a few non-believers onto some of Dylan’s best work, which is the best most musical biopics can hope for.