‘A Complete Unknown’ is a surprising triumph
The new Dylan biopic gets the look, the sound, and the casting just right, in telling the story of when Bob went electric.
When A Complete Unknown was first announced, everything about it screamed “conventional music biopic.” It’s directed by James Mangold, who made one of the template-setting films of the genre, Walk the Line, back in 2005. It also promised a much less artsy take on the Bob Dylan legend than Todd Haynes’ 2007 I’m Not There.
But the film, if you can get past that it’s operating on the well-trodden terrain of Canonical Boomer History, is almost entirely a success. Timothee Chalamet nails the young Bob, bringing the voice right both singing and speaking, while Monica Barbaro isn’t far behind as his lover/rival Joan Baez. (The actors, also including Edward Norton’s fine Pete Seeger, did all their own singing and playing, per the credits.)
The production beautifully recreates the Greenwich Village of the 1960s, and it's different enough from both I’m Not There and the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis to escape the shadow of both. The styling of Dylan’s hair is also fairly accurate to the different periods.
It’s also less conventional than it appears at first glance- far from the womb-to-tomb treatment, it focuses on five years in the life of a musician whose career has continued for 60 years after these events.
It also avoids the specific plot beats that Walk Hard – the parody largely inspired by Mangold’s Johnny Cash biopic – was making fun of, and there’s little evidence that Dylan’s camp exerted much pressure on the filmmakers. It even finds new things to do with Johnny Cash himself, now played by Boyd Holbrook as a man who’s an earnest admirer of Dylan’s, between spells of heavy drinking.
And that the Jewish music manager character, this time Dan Fogler’s Albert Grossman, doesn’t turn out to be greedy and evil is another welcome place where the film breaks from music biopic convention.
The film does not attempt to find a Dylan skeleton key or make any grand statements about who Bob Dylan is or what he’s about. It’s localized to exactly what it is about, and that was the right choice.
Adapted from Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, A Complete Unknown covers a specific period: From Dylan’s arrival in the Village in 1961, through the immediate aftermath of Dylan’s controversial electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
I understand: To anyone below, say, age 35, this is going to seem like a weird esoteric beef, between two different factions six decades ago, but to boomers? This stuff was life and death.
The film teaches a lesson that I know well: If you’re from Minnesota and move to New York, people will believe any ridiculous tall tale you tell about yourself. Except for Joan Baez, who appears to have been more worldly and saw through all that.
Chalamet keeps getting these roles — Paul Atreides, Willy Wonka, Bob Dylan, the College Gameday picker — that people dump on when they’re first announced, and he proves the naysayers wrong every time.
A strong supporting cast is led by Scoot McNairy in a nearly wordless performance as Woody Guthrie, and Edward Norton, totally nailing Pete Seeger as a guy who seemed square and old-fogeyish in 1965 and then lived 50 more years. It’s also comforting to know that Bob Dylan and Joan Baez are both still alive and in their 80s- I wonder if they still talk.
If memory serves, when Todd Haynes asked Dylan for permission to make a movie about him, Bob granted use of his songs but didn’t want to be involved; I get the sense something similar happened here. And perhaps we’ll end up with more films, exploring five-year periods of Bob’s life. We all know there are quite a few worthy ones.