More Satisfaction Can be Found in a Bob Dylan Greatest Hits Album than A Complete Unknown

At one point during A Complete Unknown, after the film skips forward to 1965, Bob Dylan (Timotheé Chalamet) bursts through the door of the Greenwich apartment he shares with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and has the tune to “Like a Rolling Stone” already perfectly formed, the lyrics rolling off his tongue. It takes a while for the timeless track to finally come to fruition, in the recording studio and then performed for a crowd of angry folk-lovers who see Dylan as a Judas for moving on to an electric sound. But this contrived cinematic moment of real-life artistic virtuoso harkens back to one from Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back – a scene that seems too good to be true, and yet is. The patched-together footage from the recording of “Let It Be” captures the instant in which Paul McCartney, mindlessly jamming with his bandmates in between takes, conjures from thin air what will soon be the documentary’s title song. It’s a quiet, off-handed scene; completely ordinary. But it’s the revelation of how creativity can strike the creator like lightning from the sky in the midst of total mundanity, with no explanation other than pure kismet and talent. It’s astonishing to have such a vital memory documented on film.

Music biopics often attempt to recreate this very thing; the moment genius strikes for the creator. But as portrayed in The Beatles: Get Back, artistry can be a reality that’s even stranger than fiction. Maybe that’s why when films like A Complete Unknown try to capture that same otherworldly thrill, they tend to fail miserably. Sometimes, this genius really does strike like it did for Paul McCartney, and it likely struck for Dylan, too. Yet in a narrativized story, it rings hollow, the wonder and excitement entirely sapped out of it – just another Hollywood moment in a Hollywood film. That’s what the entire 140 minutes of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown feels like: a greatest hits collection of scenes from Bob Dylan’s life that does little to capture any interiority of the man he was, or the impact that he had aside from playing music in front of people who look on at him with faces that tell us we’re supposed to understand that this moment is really, really important.

As Dylan, Chalamet hops into 1960s New York with nothing but a guitar and a sack full of dreams, emerging from the car he hitched a ride in like the “three bucks, two bags, one me” scene from 30 Rock. But shortly after arriving and crossing over from New Jersey, he’s already heading back to the Garden State to visit his idol, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). At the time, the folk icon was being cared for in the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital as he deteriorated from Huntingdon’s disease. There, Dylan meets not just his weakened hero but Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), longtime folk musician and social activist who takes Dylan under his wing. But the film is paced at such an odd clip that major milestones pass by in Dylan’s life before the previous ones even have a chance to end. Dylan jumps from spending the night at Pete and his wife Toshi’s (Eriko Hatsune) cabin, to being plopped on stage at the Gaslight, performing in front of the suits in charge of “Big Folk,” meeting Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and digging at her “too pretty” voice to kickstart their yearslong, contentious anti-romance. It seems like the immediately following day, Dylan has acquired his manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), now recording his first album and meeting girlfriend Suze Rotolo – renamed Sylvie Russo for the film at Dylan’s request and played by Elle Fanning. At 30 minutes in, events transpire like they’re rapidly being ticked off of a checklist, and Bob Dylan as portrayed by Mangold’s film is little more than a moving museum display.

Ultimately two hours and twenty minutes isn’t enough time to capture the enormity of a career like Bob Dylan’s, even within just the few years the narrative focuses on. The film was originally referred to as Going Electric back in 2020 when it was first announced. Though A Complete Unknown does make a transition around the midway point from Dylan’s still nascent fame pre-1965 to sunglasses at night, ultra-famous “Cool Bob” looking to move on from the folk doldrums, the film doesn’t come across like the stripped-down, Altman-esque look at a “moment in history” that Mangold touted. It’s evident that the film would have been better with a much smaller-scale approach tackling a shorter window in Dylan’s life, allowing less focus on just playing the hits and maybe more on the people who were crucial to making them happen. One of the best scenes is one of the last: Dylan’s performance of his newfangled electric songs at the ’65 Newport Folk Fest. Everything that could be going wrong is. The progressing fervor of the crowd, the apathetic obstinacy of Dylan egged-on by a loaded Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook); Seeger’s anxiety of losing his golden boy and angering Big Folk. The Altman influence on the film is clear here, but only here. It’s most compelling to see the shifting cultural winds reflected in one chaotic performance.

Otherwise, Movie Dylan performs his iconic songs like “The Times They are A-Changing” and “Blowin’ In the Wind” and people around him look on with this intensity on their faces to engineer meaning without there really being any. It’s as if these real-life people from history implicitly understand that they are being watched within a film by viewers 60 years into the future already well-acquainted with the importance of Dylan’s place in American music history. The more interesting themes surrounding Dylan’s own self-mythologizing and repudiation of his past, the burden of fame, of “genius,” and “selling out” are so lightly extrapolated on in favor of instead using Chalamet’s Dylan as something of a receptacle for getting us from one Notable Event to the next. Although it’s refreshing that the film doesn’t take us all the way back to Dylan’s Minnesota roots to analyze his childhood traumas and go full Walk Hard “Dewey, I’m cut in half pretty bad,” there is something at least a little disappointing about the chance discovery of Robert Zimmerman by a partygoer at Dylan’s apartment getting just as side-stepped by the whole film as in the scene.

The moment is overtly in conversation with this idea of self-mythologizing, but as the theme is underexplored, it can’t help but come across as indicative of A Complete Unknown’s unwillingness to fully realize Dylan, or make him enough of a rounded character is his own biography. This is further apparent in Chalamet’s performance, which isn’t “bad” only to say that eventually it goes from being distracting and strange to just something that you’re suddenly used to. Chalamet sounds a bit like Dylan if Dylan spoke mostly through clenched teeth, keeping his lips very close together, recreating Dylan’s distinct, nasally cadence. But his interpretation manages to draw out the adenoidal qualities of Dylan’s voice beyond reality, and the effort to match Chalamet’s vocal recreation to the original owner wades into caricature. An impression of Dylan that’s very much only an impression, it’s difficult to parse whether to sleight the screenplay (co-written between Mangold and Jay Cocks) or the performance – although Dylan’s moments of dickish behavior are probably Chalamet’s strongest (one recalls his turn in Lady Bird). So too are his covers of Dylan’s songs impressive, which he sang live and without being merged with Dylan’s own recordings à la Austin Butler in Elvis.

Still, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to view the superior Bob Dylan film as the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a very loose, embellished biopic of overshadowed folk musician Dave Van Ronk, in which Dylan only cameos briefly and mostly off-screen at the very end. There is something more affecting about a film in which Dylan’s mere spectral presence on another character is more suggestive of his significance and influence on the culture around him than one that centers him completely. It’s an undertaking to make a film about a figure who seems bigger than culture itself; how much or how little do you expose of a person who has evolved into a literal living legend? In the end, A Complete Unknown neither meaningfully conveys Dylan’s mythology nor exposes him as human. There’s more fulfillment to be gained from listening to “The Very Best of Bob Dylan.”

Director: James Mangold
Writer: James Mangold, Jay Cocks
Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz, Scoot McNairy
Release date: Dec. 25, 2024

Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.