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.