MTMU Reviews: A Complete Unknown

I start this review by saying that I am not a fan of Bob Dylan. His voice is like nails on a
chalkboard to me, and I could never get into his music. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand or
respect what his music meant to his generation and why people still see him as a musical and
cultural icon. I admit I know very little about Dylan’s life, and was hoping this biopic from James
Mangold would give me a better understanding of the man and his music. Unfortunately, “A
Complete Unknown” keeps us at an emotional arm’s length and while it gives us plenty of
opportunities to hear Timothée Chalamet really tackle Dylan’s distinctive sound, we don’t do a
deep dive into who the man was. Maybe it’s because Dylan really was an enigma and was
different things to different people, but it keeps the film from really achieving greatness.

Sometimes in a musical biopic, you can tell the actor is lip synching and not really performing.
Sometimes like in the case of “Bohemian Rhapsody” the actor’s voice is barely used at all. Props
to Mangold and Chalamet for having the guts to tackle a voice as distinctive as Dylan’s.
Chalamet really nails the tone and while you can tell it’s a version and not the real thing, it is
close enough that you accept it. I can honestly say I enjoy Dylan’s words coming out of
Chalamet’s throat more than the original songs.

The film is based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night
That Split the Sixties, by Elijah Wald, it stars the afore mentioned Chalamet as Dylan, Monica
Barbaro as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash and Elle
Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a fictionalized version of Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo. (Her name was
apparently changed at the request of Dylan himself, who consulted on the script.) It starts with
Dylan appearing in the Village in 1961 New York, a dropout with a guitar on his back and a
desire to meet his idol Woody Guthrie. It covers the next four years of his life where he goes
from playing coffee shops and being a complete unknown, to playing on the Washington Mall
before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and becoming the voice of his generation.
The film concludes with Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where he infamously played a
three-song electric set.

We are introduced to people that are important to Dylan like Guthrie and Pete Seeger, his
girlfriend Sylvie Russo, singer Joan Baez, his manager Albert Grossman, Johnny Cash, and more.
I feel that other viewers who are more familiar with Dylan and this time period will get more
out of these side characters, but it removed me from the emotion of the film since they weren’t
all crucial to the central plot. Throughout the film, Dylan remains a cipher, both to the
audience, but others in his life. He comes across as arrogant, rude, dismissive, cruel at times,
and it surprised me that Sylvie and Baez having such deep feelings for him. These two women
do struggle to understand him, and it does reflect what I was experiencing. Baez even sings the
words “You were so good with words/and at keeping things vague” in the songs “Diamonds and
Rust.” Chalamet’s Dylan is charming and cruel, but while the performance is never boring, I
never felt like I got to know the man behind the songs which is a missed opportunity.

The film is gorgeously shot, and Mangold continues to be a master of framing his shots to
visually tell the story. A long shot of Russo/Rotolo standing in the wings off stage watching
Dylan and Baez perfoming “It Ain’t Me Babe” when she truly realizes how captivated Dylan is by another woman is heartbreaking and we watch the entire scene unfold in real time and we
aren’t distracted with cutaways. Another example is the scene late in the film when Dylan looks
over his shoulder at the three individuals wanting him to go back on stage in Newport, the
eager Bob Neuwirth, the “I dare you to go electric” Johnny Cash, and the furious and betrayed
Baez. We see all of the emotion and weight of this moment in four very different faces all at the
same time, and it’s just sublime filmmaking.

The film has beautiful moments of visual storytelling, compelling acting, but we never get
beneath the skin of the main character. We never get inside his soul to learn about his dreams,
his compulsions, what motivates him, how his music influenced the generation, or how the
events of the 60’s changed him. He remains a murky enigma, and it keeps the movie from
becoming as iconic as the subject matter it portrays.

This film is a B for me.