A Complete Unknown Misses the Elusive Genius of Bob Dylan

Greil Marcus opened his Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan’s ironically titled 1970 covers album Self-Portrait with a not-so-rhetorical question: “What is this shit?” Marcus was writing not only as a scorned fan but also as a concerned citizen of the music world. His fear was that an inveterate shape-shifter had succumbed to his own penchant for alienation effects. “Self-Portrait is a concept album from the cutting room floor,” he wrote. “It has been constructed so artfully, but as a coverup, not a revelation.”

Of course, cover-up-as-revelation is Dylan’s paradoxical methodology: For all his dalliances with religious themes, he’s fundamentally a worshipper at the church of the uncertainty principle. “All I can do,” he told an interviewer in 1965, “is be me … whoever that is.” Like Pablo Picasso, who also knew a thing or two about being tangled up in blue, Dylan’s myth and music are essentially cubist, demanding multiple angles of approach and observation in order to see the entire picture, or to attempt to deconstruct it. Such tactics should not place him above criticism, but few singers and composers look better than he does in the long view, and he hasn’t run out of road yet. In the 50-plus years since its release, Self-Portrait—and its willful suppression of the things that initially made Dylan so vital: the grit of his vocals, the activist urgency of his lyrics, the slouched defiance of his public posture—has been reevaluated, including by Marcus himself, as a signature work by an artist whose greatest gift is for the mask.

The idea of an ascendant megastar less interested in a-changing with the times than somehow positioning himself behind, ahead, and against them is deeply seductive and at the center of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which casts a resplendently scruffy Timothée Chalamet as the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman in his early, world-beating phase. This is the Dylan of the Gaslight and Folk City, who reluctantly adopted the mantle of overnight sensation from a media trying to harness the messianic vibes of JFK and Camelot; the screenplay, co-written by Mangold with Jay Cocks, is freely adapted from Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, which covered the years from Dylan’s appearance in 1961 as the heir to Woody Guthrie up to his perceived betrayal of the Dust Bowl Troubadour tradition at the 1965 Newport folk festival. There, against the wishes of the organizers, he plugged in a Fender Stratocaster and declared, with no shortage of smirking, don’t-fence-me-in-symbolism, that he no longer wished to work on Maggie’s farm.

Chalamet capably sings “Maggie’s Farm” and several dozen other songs, having spent several years with a guitar teacher and a dialect coach to prepare for his performance; he also dons a prosthetic nose several sizes less conspicuous than the one plastered onto Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein last year in Maestro. Like Maestro, A Complete Unknown has been styled conspicuously as an award-season contender, and it’s teeming with craftsmanship at every level. It’s got a fine cast of talented and entertaining actors; it’s shot in muted, lovely LP-cover tones and swiftly cut. And yet, to paraphrase Marcus, if it’s not quite shit, it’s shlock, a mostly standard-issue biopic designed to promote an official version of Dylan: one that flatters his forward-thinking artistry by scoring easy points off the people around him. It’s a star-is-born fable viewed with 20/20 hindsight and through rose-tinted glasses.

It might be possible, perhaps, to read A Complete Unknown as a poker-faced send-up of its own much-parodied genre, as an attempt to walk hard, as it were, into the maw of cliché and emerge out the other side. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Norton revealed that Dylan had given Mangold marching orders to include at least one wholly fabricated incident in the storyline, which led to a telling exchange between the musician and his Hollywood bard. “When Mangold told Dylan he was worried about viewers’ reactions, as Norton tells it, Bob stared at him: ‘What do you care what other people think?’”

That Mangold was worried in the first place about alienating the audience tells you something about his tendencies to walk the line, stylistically speaking—especially as compared to a filmmaker like Todd Haynes, whose prismatic 2007 film I’m Not There split its focus between a sextet of surrogates, resulting in a genuinely freewheeling approach. The more that Haynes embellished and enmeshed his material, the more he gave the viewer to think about. A Complete Unknown rarely trusts the audience to think for themselves. When Bob writes an inpromptu song in the living room of a family that’s briefly taken him in as a foundling, the film holds nicely on his ardent concentration before stooping to smiling, wide-eyed reaction shots, as if we couldn’t figure out his genius for ourselves. The film’s structure aims for the long, winding lines of a ballad, but the overall effect is more like a series of catchy, finger-picked jingles; we go behind the music without getting inside of it.

The most interesting idea in A Complete Unknown has to do with the tension between inhabiting and extending a folk tradition and the challenges of rewriting it (a theme the Coen brothers already limned to perfection in Inside Llewyn Davis, which re-created Greenwich Village more vividly on a smaller budget and featured a climactic cameo from you-know-who). When Bobby rolls up on his motorcycle in the film’s opening sequence to visit the bedridden Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital, there’s a nicely ambiguous tone to their interaction: the upstart and the elder, measuring each other out of mutual respect. The implication is that the wizened, stroke-afflicted Guthrie—embodied with silent, stoic fragility by Scoot McNairy—sees the kid for what he really is: a raw, unpolished inheritor who’s going to have to learn to go his own way. By contrast, everyone else who comes into Dylan’s orbit sees him as a potential project, whether it’s Edward Norton’s aggressively avuncular Pete Seeger, who generously offers his “fellow traveler” a place to stay in the hopes he can help galvanize a left-leaning constituency; Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo, a painter and social justice activist modeled on Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo; or Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), a fellow emerging guitar slinger in search of a collaborator, a kindred spirit, and a lover, if not necessarily in that order.

Dylan’s shortcomings as domestic partner are as legendary as his wordplay, and he wrote plenty of songs about them; both Sylvie and Joan have late nights where they’re roused from slumber by his furious scribblings and noodlings. During one postcoital idyll with Joan, Bob spontaneously road-tests “Blowing in the Wind,” like a scrawny, drawling Mozart tossing off operas in a hipster Amadeus. Fanning and Barbaro are both fine actresses—and the latter does a striking vocal impersonation of Baez’s warm, trilling songbird singing voice—but they’re mostly reduced to looking sad-eyed and hypnotized by Chalamet’s Dylan, who’s too busy acting out Behind-the-Music vignettes to consider their feelings, and whose charisma ultimately never quite proves worthy of their—or our—sustained gaze.

Playing a man who’s great at playing himself is a potentially thankless task—unless one considers an inevitable Oscar nomination sufficient compensation for such self-effacement. When Dylan magnanimously took to social media to call his eager interpreter a “brilliant actor,” it was a vote of confidence that was light on specifics (“I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me,” Bob tweeted). When he’s good, as he was in his dual breakthroughs in Call Me by Your Name and Ladybird, and as the reluctant messiah of the Dune films, Chalamet is able to leverage callowness against gravitas in ways that recall several generations of teen idols before him. But the common denominator in those performances is that the characters are all, to some degree, posturing pseuds, and that try-hard quality—which surely manifests in the actor’s impressively note-perfect cadences and body language—simply isn’t right for Bob Dylan, who made agitation and inspiration seem effortless. The impression is of a talented movie star playing dress-up rather than the staggering, transformative effect authored by an androgenized Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There or even the lived-in pathos of Oscar Isaac’s Dave Van Ronk manqué in Inside Llewyn Davis, whose ambivalence about the music industry and his place in it was as sharp and acute as a kick to the ribs.

There are moments in A Complete Unknown that work just fine, and they’re mostly musical ones: the raucous studio recording of “Highway 61,” which starts with Bob lasciviously puckering his lips around a slide whistle; a special guest-star stage performance of “Folsom Prison Blues” from a soused but electrifying Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook); the aforementioned squalling, feedback-drenched assault of “Maggie’s Farm.” Mangold’s feel for the way a well-turned song can stop and elasticize time is real, and it’s clear something is at stake in the staging: the spontaneous outdoor group sing-along to “The Times They Are a Changin’” achieves its intended catharsis.

The majority of the dialogue scenes, meanwhile, are a slog, including and especially the ones built around Norton’s comically gormless interpretation of Seeger, reduced to a goody-goody characterization so hapless you’re expecting Tim Meadows and some groupies to pop up and offer Pete a snort of coke. For the movie’s jerry-rigged Dylan to work, the filmmakers have to turn the people around him into props as well, and Norton’s acting suffers in the process, as does Norbert Leo Butz’s buffoonish field-recording-guru Alan Lomax, who gets caricatured as a quintessential straight man—a staunch traditionalist covering his ears while history turns the volume up to 11.

As anybody who’s seen D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal 1967 one-man-band-on-the-run documentary Don’t Look Back can attest, Dylan was a master of the deadpan comeback, as when he informs the journalist trying to bait him with tales of his own grumpiness, “I’m not angry … I’m delightful.” There’s a difference, though, between getting the last word in edgewise and trying to have it for posterity, and A Complete Unknown struggles to realize it. In light of its subject’s reluctance to be used as an avatar of any particular movement, the film seems too eager to enshrine Dylan as an icon, and on terms that seem borrowed from some incompatible cinematic traditions. In what is supposed to be a portentous and yet wide-open ending, an exhausted but energized Dylan picks through the wreckage of his Judas moment, stops in for one final audience with Woody and rides off down the road, bound for glory (and, as we are all too aware, an impending and near-fatal motorcycle accident). A more adventurous movie might have taken the opportunity to take the road less traveled here—to hit us with an unexpected jump in time and space or deploy some sort of shocking Tarantino-style revisionism. Instead, the shot suggests hagiography, and proves oddly out of step with its subject; the last thing Bob Dylan should be asked to do is drive down the middle of the road.