There are more than just a few moments in “A Complete Unknown” where it seems like the theater stops playing the film and instead begins to scroll through my Spotify playlist for 140 minutes. The music, however, was probably the most enjoyable aspect of the film.
Timothée Chalamet braves an attempt to slip into the skin of the ever-mutable Bob Dylan, but ultimately fails, coming off as far too pedestrian and dare I say –– a bit creepy. Chalamet achieves the snarky condescension that Dylan is often known for but delivers it with an all-too-nasally tone accompanied by a psychopath-esque blank stare.
What sells Dylan as a star and genius is his capacity to command and captivate a room, no matter how many fans critique him or how resistant they are to his folk-turned-rock-and-roll repertoire revolution. The magnificence of Bob Dylan is that he is every man for no man in particular – messiah, minstrel, masochist, Judas.
Chalamet is a talented actor, and I believe he does all that he possibly can to embody the inimitable mythos of Dylan. At first glance, it seems as though Chalamet would be just the right man for the job. He’s an actor who has assumed many personas, from the naive tender feverishness of Elio in “Call Me by Your Name” to the brooding and dark Paul Atreides in “Dune.”
However, there’s something Mangold was unable to calculate — which is the ungraspable ineffable essence that fails to define Bob Dylan.
I watched the film for the first time on Christmas Day at the Angelika Theater in the West Village, the same neighborhood in which Dylan arrives in New York in the film’s opening scene. From its inception, the film is already conniving to be artistic, as bright-eyed Bob is gliding through the boho fairyland of the Greenwich Village, where creatives tinker and dally. The scene is very overtly puppeteered and mechanized to fire the neurons of nostalgia.
The narrative picks up when Bob starts trudging from dive bar to dive bar and makes the city his own. He makes acquaintance with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) a young and wintry fawn-gaited woman of woe that is juxtaposed against the smoldering warmth of Joan Baez (Moncia Barbaro), who is already rolling in her own fame when she meets Dylan.
These two women undulate in and out of Dylan’s sphere, to both of their great dismay. In the film, Baez is depicted as a woman with great spurn toward Dylan, as he seems to grasp at and desire her title. Russo is a stand-in for Dylan’s ex, Suze Rotolo, that’s seen snuggling up close to him on the cover of, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”
The theater was packed and it became very obvious that director, James Mangold, was tasked with not just filming a biopic, but a box office holiday blowout. His direction of the film is chock-full of twee inaccuracies in the historical events that unfold. The film seems to be stilted on a very loose understanding and single run-through of the major preceding Dylan documentaries, notably Scorcese’s “No Direction Home” and Pennebaker’s “Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back.”
Various misrepresentations such as the songs played at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and Joan Baez’s stage presence with him suggest that this film was more concerned with screen tests and audience enjoyment than real-life depiction.
“A Complete Unknown” certainly isn’t going to satiate any Bob Dylan idealists who went to the theater for a perfect hagiography of the great icons and events of Bob Dylan’s life. But as a story of rebellion against grassroots folk, Antonioni-esque parties of suffocating isolation, the film is all in all enjoyable. Those that want to suck Dylan’s soul and reap the fruits of his mind are bad, but they will never surmount the antagonism Bob feels toward Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) and the dogmatic folkies.
Dylan’s genius is unknowable along with his backstory, which Dylan believes is something that people should make up because they can be whoever you want them to be at the moment. This is just hinted at with a nod to Dylan’s surname, Zimmerman. Dylan could be God or nobody, or he could very well be both, the film shows us that sometimes there’s nothing more alluring or attractive than someone we will never truly know.
Mark Cowan-Aston • Feb 5, 2025 at 6:17 pm
You’re allowed to think that. In fact, you’re allowed to think anything. It also doesn’t necessarily make you right.