Director James Mangold explores a pivotal chapter in Bob Dylan’s early career in A Complete Unknown. Our review:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that music biopics must follow The Formula. Whether they’re about Ray Charles or Elton John or Amy Winehouse or Brit rock outfit Queen, their stories follow a path of pivotal childhood experiences, chance meetings, paths to fame and the scourge of drink and drugs, before everything’s wrapped up with a rousing concert at the end.
The Formula was so well understood by 2007 that Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story fired a silver bullet at the wretched thing – and yet still the template staggered on, showing up largely unscathed in the likes of Bohemian Rhapsody and Back To Black.
Almost 20 years after he made Walk The Line – a film openly lampooned by the above-mentioned Dewey Cox Story – its director, James Mangold is back in similar territory with the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. Tellingly, its story, co-written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, appears to make a concerted effort to break away from that dreaded Formula. Maybe Mangold sat and watched Walk Hard at one point, and took down some notes.
Rather than try to cram an entire lifetime into one feature film, A Complete Unknown explores a relatively brief yet pivotal chapter in Dylan’s life. Beginning in 1961, it introduces him as a 19-year-old, rolling into New York City with nothing but a bag on his back and a guitar in his hand. It then explores how in just four short years he went from obscure singer-songwriter to generational icon.
Timothée Chalamet, his head topped by a veritable crash helmet of curls, takes on the tricky role of Dylan; tricky because, like so many artists and icons, it’s hard to pick out the human being hiding beneath the shades and the nasal drawl and the harmonica and the poetry. The musician remains something of an unknowable presence throughout his own story; like Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, Dylan arrives in the city almost fully-formed, telling tall tales of his early years in Minnesota that may or not be true. (He was taught “all sorts of funny chords” by wandering cowboys while he was performing in a carnival, Dylan claims at one point.)
If we get to know Dylan at all, it’s through his music and his relationships with the other characters in the story. In essence, it’s about how his career was affected by the people he met and played alongside when he first arrived in Manhattan; there’s folk musician Pete Seeger, played by Ed Norton as an affable supply teacher clutching a banjo. Dylan has a complicated relationship (physically and professionally) with singer-songwriter Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), with whom he shares both a manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) and several of his songs. He also has an on-again, off-again affair with Sylvie (Elle Fanning), an artist and activist.
Although Dylan’s deeper motivations remain obscure, Chalamet’s performance is hugely watchable. His nervousness at meeting his hero Woodie Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who’s deathly ill in hospital, is contrasted with his ebullience when he makes his debut on stage a few months later. His flashes of arrogance, which threaten to become off-putting at times, are contrasted by the sensitivity of his lyrics and how alive he is to the culture crackling all around him.
Most movies that stick to The Formula usually have that scene where a musician is suddenly inspired by fate to write what will become a defining song. Occasionally, they’ll helpfully throw in a manager or sound engineer who’ll say, “You’ve just recorded your first hit single” or something to that effect.
A Complete Unknown, to its credit, digs rather deeper. Dylan watches wayward guitarist Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison) play up-tempo folk in an Irish bar, which plants the seed to get a backing band of his own. Dylan jams with a veteran blues guitarist (played by Big Bill Morganfield), which inspires him to experiment with the drop-D tuning he’d later use on It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). Rather than inspiration landing like a lightning bolt, Mangold tries to show creative cause and effect.
Elements of The Formula still remain (let’s face it, some are unavoidable) but Mangold cannily underplays them. In fact, A Complete Unknown as a whole is pleasingly understated; visually, it’s beautifully lit (by Mangold’s regular cinematographer Phedon Papamichael) and packed with subtle detail – the clutter on Dylan’s writing desk, the specs of dirt under his long fingernails. Many of its emotional beats play out not through shouty drama, but through characters standing just off-stage, reacting to a performance with wonderment, sadness, and sometimes fury.
The performances are similarly low-key. Readers more expert in this period of music may grouse at how accurately figures like Baez or Johnny Cash are depicted, but it’s difficult to fault the actors who play them (Barbaro and an almost unrecognisable Boyd Holbrook, respectively). Ed Norton’s turn as Pete Seeger, in particular, is disarmingly sweet and generous, and as Dylan begins to chafe at the constraints of traditional folk, there’s something quietly poignant about the strain it puts on their friendship.
All of which builds to a showdown, of sorts, between Dylan and the American Folklife Center, an organisation determined that folk should be “the sound of a guitar and a man’s voice.” At the start of his career, Dylan’s happy to play folk standards and play the part of a fresh-faced ambassador; by 1965, the whole scene has begun to feel like a straitjacket.
Fittingly, A Complete Unknown is itself about an artist fighting the constraints of a formula.
A Complete Unknown is in UK cinemas from the 16th January 2025.
