Film Review: A Complete Unknown

Early on in A Complete Unknown, a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) attend a screening of Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager. Seeing something of a kindred spirit in Bette Davis’s Charlotte, Dylan objects to Russo’s characterisation of the film as a story of a woman who “finds herself”’: “She didn’t find herself like herself was a missing shoe or something. She just made herself into something different”. “Something better,” Russo says; “something different,” Dylan insists. 

Their exchange reveals the central tenets of James Mangold’s new biopic: namely, that it is better to be different. Indeed much of the film centres on Dylan’s ceaseless pursuit of change and transformation—often at the expense of everything else. Based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, it chronicles the singer’s meteoric rise from folk legend to internationally recognised star. 

Accompanying Dylan on this journey is an eclectic cast of characters, including musicians Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), and the formidable Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). One figure who looms particularly large here is Dylan’s hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). Despite having been rendered voiceless by a debilitating case of Huntington’s Disease, Guthrie emerges as a messianic figure, one who continues to affect a prodigious degree of influence over his disciples. Just as the shadows of influence cast by Guthrie stretch far beyond the limits of his diminished frame, so do Dylan’s ballads carry a spiritual weight beyond that of his small stature.

In an attempt to shed some light on Dylan’s mythic status, the film draws on a rich cinematic lineage dating back to D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967). In the years following Pennebarker’s documentary, numerous directors, from Todd Haynes to Martin Scorsese, have tried capturing Dylan’s enigmatic presence on film; in doing so, they have often sought to offer fictionalised accounts of his mystifying public persona. Rather than delving into Dylan’s psyche, Mangold similarly explores the cultural perception of Dylan as an artist, vagabond, and folk legend. 

As a result of this, Chalamet’s Dylan can often feel superficial; a character without depth. But therein lies a telling facet of Dylan’s reputation. He is a keen assembler of identities and ideas. In the words of Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender, his writing offers “[a] deliberate cultural jumble”, a collage of experience that feels prescient yet vague. The film dramatises this to interesting effect. We often see Dylan bearing witness to key historical events, either in person or on TV; while he feigns disinterest at the time, these very moments reemerge as the basis of some of his most profound lyrics. The impression is thus one of Dylan as a man who sees, hears, and feels more than he lets on. 

While Chalamet dramatises this bratty stoicism to wonderful effect, the film’s representation of Dylan as a one-man cultural phenomenon does have its limits. This is perhaps most apparent in the fawning admiration and awe-stricken reactions of Dylan’s contemporaries, artists in their own right, who were themselves a part of this scene, and not simply witness to it. This is particularly true of the film’s women, and of Baez in particular. Yet the film is not unaware of Dylan-centric approach. In one scene, Russo jokingly asks Dylan if he’s god: “How many times do I have to say this?—yes”, he quips. 

That the title of the film Dylan and Russo attend early on is taken from a poem by the great American prophet, Walt Whitman, is telling, for it reveals the itinerant tradition from which Dylan once emerged and to which he now belongs.  And yet at the same time, it also bespeaks the inherent unknowability that motivates our culture’s fascination with Dylan, the artist, poet, and man: “The untold want by life and land ne'er granted, / Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”

A Complete Unknown is still showing at Broadway Cinema.