Yet another music biopic that feels about as deep as a children’s picture book, A Complete Unknown is based on Elijah Wald’s history Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties. The movie takes in the period from 1961, when Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) first arrives in New York, to 1965, when he plays his electric set at the Newport Folk Festival. Through it all, director James Mangold punctuates the passage of time with news clips about the Cuban Missile Crisis and John F. Kennedy’s assassination. All that’s missing is Jenna Fischer saying, “The ’60s are an important and exciting time.”
Okay, so the movie is aware enough to know that Dylan’s whole stage persona — the hair, the sunglasses, the nasal singing, the patches of gibberish in his lyrics — was a carefully constructed act to remain masked and anonymous. (So was the movie by that title that Dylan directed.) Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There knew the same thing and was more interesting on the subject of Dylan’s essential inscrutability. Dylan’s relationship with Suze Rotolo, whose name here is changed to Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), isn’t even tissue-thin, and at least when he cheats on her with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), we can see it’s because of Joan’s musical talent. While I’m on the subject, the movie has an opportunity here to make Joan something other than the long-suffering girlfriend archetype you find in these films, because Joan has her own busy career to work on, but that comes to little.
As was the case with Mangold’s Walk the Line, the movie has terrific musical performances from its actors, with Chalamet doing a worthy impression of the man, especially in “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” (Although if Wonka hadn’t come out last year, his singing ability would be more of a surprise.) Edward Norton portrays Pete Seeger and captures something of the older folk singer’s florid optimism, and Barbaro (who made quite a different impression portraying a Navy fighter pilot in Top Gun: Maverick) sings with a Baez-like radiant purity on “Silver Dagger.” This still feels like some jukebox musical the way the film runs through these songs without regard for dramatic context. The only time the music and the drama enhance each other is during Bob and Joan’s acrimonious breakup, when they duet on “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and the audience and Sylvie can both pick up on the tension between them.
The atmosphere of Dylan’s performance at Newport, with the folkie purists throwing garbage on the stage, is well re-created, but the movie still can’t convince us in 2024 that the controversy over him playing electric instruments was something other than a teacup-sized tempest. A Mighty Wind and Inside Llewyn Davis were both better at puncturing the pretensions of the folk crowd, and Walk the Line at least situated its subject within a larger musical landscape. Beyond the Dylan songs themselves, A Complete Unknown gives us little idea about what made the music star into such a great American artist. You might as well buy a greatest-hits album, or the movie’s soundtrack.
A Complete Unknown
Starring Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning. Directed by James Mangold. Written by James Mangold and Jay Cocks, based on Elijah Wald’s history. Rated R.
