In the most memorable scene of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, a band takes the stage at a music show and turns to their guitar cases, only to retrieve a cache of machine guns and open fire on their unsuspecting audience. It’s a metaphor for the 1965 Newport Festival where Bob Dylan, beginning his pivot from homespun folk to electric oomph, infuriated the fans who’d clamored to hear the plaintive, stripped-down ballads that made him famous. A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s new Dylan biopic, recreates that historic moment, though it does so with careful fidelity rather than brash surreality. That’s in keeping with the guiding spirit of the movie, which follows Dylan’s early rise and initial backlash while faithfully abiding by the conventions of the genre. In telling the story of the man who revolutionized an art form, it doesn’t exhibit a rebellious bone in its body.
This doesn’t make it bad. In fact, A Complete Unknown is pretty good. It has good music, good actors, good pacing, and good dialogue. (While you’re considering the source, I happen to think I’m Not There is Haynes’ worst picture, but that’s another story.) What it lacks—what it doesn’t even seem to try to achieve—is a sense of majesty or wonder that might befit its subject. It plays the greatest hits without evincing any aspirations toward true greatness.
To be fair, there is something admirably spartan about Mangold’s approach, which eschews arpeggiated whimsy in favor of a straight scale’s lucid, direct storytelling. (Mangold wrote the script with Jay Cocks, best known for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese; their screenplay is based on a book by Elijah Wald.) The movie opens in 1961, when our Bob (Timothée Chalamet) has travelled from Minnesota to the Big Apple, armed with little more than a guitar, a newsboy cap, and a quiet determination. His dream is to meet Woody Guthrie, and after learning that the folk hero is recovering in a sanitarium, he spends the last of his funds (“That’s all ya got?”) on a cab ride to New Jersey, where he impresses both Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) with a self-composed ditty that showcases his unvarnished charm.
The prior paragraph contains some major names, both in and out of the parentheticals. (In this house, Scoot McNairy is an A-lister.) And when it isn’t crooning classic tunes, A Complete Unknown works best as a study of intimate relationships, performed by actors of consummate skill. Seeger, embodied by Norton as a man of utmost decency, takes the young Bob under his wing, nurturing his talent and then quietly wincing as it surpasses his own; the quavering friendship between them is affecting precisely because it never curdles into enmity, instead just sadly, steadily receding. Bob’s ascent also imperils his romance with Sylvie Rotolo Russo (Elle Fanning), who adores him until she finds his self-absorption intolerable; this trajectory is more predictable and less interesting, but it at least culminates in a lovely sequence where they reenact a scene from Now, Voyager and share a silent, tremulous goodbye communicated via glances and cigarettes.
And then there is Joan Baez (an excellent Monica Barbaro), the one person in Bob’s orbit whose personality is sufficiently forceful to match his own. Their tempestuous affair begins when Joan, panicked in the city streets during the Cuban missile crisis, stumbles into one of Bob’s underground shows and feels as though she’s wandered into a different universe—one that’s socially pointed but also gentle and beautiful. Who the hell is this kid with his pinched voice, his goofy harmonica rig, his poetic lyrics? The answer is blowin’… well, you know the rest.
But despite its crisp period details—the hairstyles, the sunglasses, the motorbike—A Complete Unknown isn’t all that interested in providing an in-depth Dylan portrait. Its narrative scope is gratifyingly narrow (spanning just five years), and it contextualizes its hero’s rising fame within seminal episodes of American history—beyond Kennedy and Khrushchev measuring their dicks, it gestures toward the Red Scare, the civil rights movement, and Vietnam-era unrest—but its trajectory of a gifted artist struggling to shoulder the weight of his own stardom feels largely familiar. The movie’s emotional acuity is most succinctly articulated during a lovers’ spat, when Joan says to Bob, “You’re kind of an asshole,” and he responds, “Yeah, I guess.”
Mangold seems more invested in regaling viewers with the musicians of the period—not only Dylan and Baez, but also Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) and other luminaries. Perhaps he’s just serving enthusiasts who can recognize names and faces—hey, there’s Bob Neuwirth! wait, who was Al Kooper again?—but the many scenes of singing and strumming are undeniably absorbing, allowing us to vicariously experience the creation of great art. Imitating their forebears, the actors performed the songs themselves, and because I prefer Baez’s soaring soprano to Dylan’s nasal baritone, my favorite sequence is the early one in which Joan hypnotizes the crowd with a no-frills rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun,” transforming you into one of those awestruck patrons whose breath catches with every verse.
Barbaro has an angel’s voice, and she imbues Joan with a mixture of fire and intelligence—someone who can tamp down her impulses and play the game. That places her in natural contrast with Bob, whose moody restlessness and thirst for freedom inevitably ruffle feathers in a clenched, label-dominated industry. On the page, that arc is fairly stiff, but Chalamet still makes the man his own. Whether he accurately emulates the singer’s tone and mannerisms is best left to Dylanologists, but he’s an actor of great technical precision, and he inhabits the role fully, incarnating the character’s agitated hunger without flaunting his own talent.
He’s a pleasure to watch, and so is much of the movie. So it’s annoying that in its final act, A Complete Unknown centers on that Newport festival, manufacturing a strained conflict in which Bob’s experimental toying with amplifiers chafes against the gala’s administrators (led by Norbert Leo Butz), who insist on the purity of acoustics. I don’t doubt that Dylan’s real-life performance caused a stir, but there is still something phony about how the film frames a three-song set as a battle for the soul of a nation and an art form.
The obvious irony is that, where A Complete Unknown purports to lionize Bob’s iconoclasm, it’s really on the suits’ side. It is a creature of comfort, safety, and familiarity—all qualities that Dylan’s switch to electric was designed to challenge and escape. The times may be a-changin’, but the biopics stay the same.
Grade: B
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.