a-complete-unknown-movie

A Complete Unknown

This isn’t the first film about Bob Dylan but it’s probably the biggest. In documentaries like DA Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back or Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, we get the illusion of candor, glimpses of real life, images of rock star petulance. Movies like Inside Llewyn Davis by the Coen Brothers or Masked & Anonymous (which is co-written and stars Dylan) offer a fictional backroad into the inner life of the enigmatic artist. Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There in 2007 is a wide-ranging art film that uses seven actors to portray various eras of the singer-songwriter’s vast career. A Complete Unknown is the first direct approach at filming a straightforward biography. It’s not something that’s ever felt possible. How do you make a biopic – the most conventional film genre – about an artist whose mission statement was all about defying convention?

This is the basis of a lot of these kinds of movies, especially musicians, but Dylan’s maddening persistence in shrouding his image and his history in mythology proves a particularly difficult approach for a studio movie going for literalism. The film is directed by James Mangold. He directed Walk The Line in 2005, a Johnny Cash biopic that made good money and won Reese Witherspoon an Oscar. His reputation as an utmost professional – a man who can produce adult-minded drama with both broad appeal and an intelligent story – means that he’s beloved by critics and studio heads alike. Mangold’s middle-of-the-road sensibility often leave his films in creative purgatory, grown-up narrative with no edge. A Complete Unknown is one of his few films that’s actually good, and not “good for what it is”.

Playing Bob Dylan? Timothée Chalamet. A choice that seems, at first, like the movie is more interested in box office than capturing the soul of Dylan. One of the smartest parts of A Complete Unknown is that the script (by Mangold and Jay Cocks) decides early on that Dylan’s soul cannot be captured, and while Chalamet’s performance comes equipped with Dylan’s Midwestern hillbilly drawl, the young actor appropriately avoids interpretation. His impression is less about mimicry and more about attitude. One of the few things we actually know about Dylan is that attitude is everything, and would be for the entirety of his career. Perhaps not at the start, in 1961, when he exits a cab in Greenwich Village with a guitar and a hat looking for Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). He ends up at a hospital in New Jersey, where the bedridden Guthrie sits with folk music icon Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).

Woody can barely speak, but Bob plays him “Song to Woody”, and he’s immediately smitten with this young musician. Pete takes him to his home, where he hears Bob play a verse from “The Girl From the North Country”. These two original compositions are remarkably good, and Pete decides to fold him into the burgeoning NYC folk scene. Folk music is more than just acoustic-based, melodic songs. It’s a political way of life, tied to environmental protection and civil rights. The stripped down nature of the music is meant to connect its audience to the substance of the lyrics. So even while proving that he can write his own music, his first record is mostly covers of folk music standards. It isn’t long before Bob is bristling against Pete and the gatekeepers of folk music’s purity. It’s when he meets two different women that he begins to build the courage to record his own songs.

The first woman is Silvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a young student and folk music enthusiast. She’s the first person in New York charmed by his elliptical turns of phrase and his refusal to be defined. She’s also the first person to directly encourage him to record his originals. In return, she ends up with him on the cover of his second album. The second woman is Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the most famous country singer in America – at this point. When she hears him play “Masters of War” at the Gaslight in the heat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, she ends up in his bed. She also likes his original songs, but she records them herself and plays them on the radio before he gets a chance to. Bob keeps both women at arm’s length, but while Silvie often finds herself heartbroken by Bob’s inability to commit, Joan often fights back against his maddening aloofness.

Once the world hears Bob’s songs, he’s an instant success. The rush of fame is disorienting, and not complimentary to his erratic, anxious personality. With each sold out concert, Pete begins to see the formation of his dream: bringing folk music to the masses. For Bob, music is about more than a message and a movement, and the confinement of folk – no electric instruments, no backing band – begins to feel to restrictive. It all comes to a head at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where traditionalists like Pete and Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) continuously warn Bob against playing his new stuff, ie the electric stuff. That concert is the stuff of legend, and is as obvious a place as any for this film to have its crescendo, but even with all the familiarity, Mangold still manages to make the sequence radiate with energy and wonder. The quality of the songs sure help.

This film has the rubber stamp approval of Dylan himself, which means that there’s complete access to his iconic songs. Like Walk the Line, Mangold asks his leading man to perform all the vocals himself. This is probably where the limitations of Chalamet’s approach are most apparent, but there’s still a benefit to his performance. Mangold believes that it’s better to hear the performer sing themselves, even if it misses exactitude; it’s all preferable to lip-syncing. He’s right, and watching this in the afterglow of films like Bohemian Rhapsody or even this year’s Maria, you really appreciate the effort that Mangold and Chalamet bring to the film. After all, it’s the songs that connect everything. This is less a precise historical document than it is an exploration of how the songs themselves define Bob Dylan better than he can ever do himself.

For those looking for a puncture into the mad mystery of the most mercurial artist of his generation, A Complete Unknown may not be satisfactory. It’s not as artful as Haynes’s I’m Not There, which is even less biography-based, but aggressively analytical. Haynes is ten times the director that Mangold is, but I’m Not There is as inscrutable as it is exhilarating. It’s something of a miracle that Mangold managed to fit Dylan’s liminal personality into such a mainstream movie. It pulls off commercial appeal without selling out the substance of the songs. Perhaps it falls short of documenting the “real” Bob Dylan, but Dylan is an artist that eludes being documented with skillful alacrity. So perhaps its fitting that Dylan endorses the film. One doesn’t learn much about him they didn’t know already. But your appreciation for these incredible songs will grow, and that’s always been his ultimate goal.

 

Directed by James Mangold