Stepping into “A Complete Unknown,” my love and appreciation for the artist it is based upon made me approach it with a rather unorthodoxly predetermined notion. I was consciously settled into getting swayed by the filmmaking conventions that have lately enveloped the subgenre of musical biopics. After all, it was coming from a director whose aesthetics have constantly been switching over the years, at least until he crystallized the sub-genre in the public imagination with the 2005 outing “Walk the Line”. From that point on, he seemed to embrace the industry turning his very chameleon-like tropes behind the camera into successful remakes and biopics. That was, of course, till last year’s disastrously received Indiana Jones sequel.
“A Complete Unknown” is a film that’s been in the making for Mangold for roughly the past eight years now, one could say it’s potentially his most ambitious project yet. Considered one of America’s best songwriters ever, Dylan’s a figure who’s so resistant to the Wikipediaization of his stature, that most filmmakers have only tried to tackle him obliquely through their stories. Mangold, who has consistently been vocal about preserving the storytelling framework in the age of bombastic IP cinema, spends the film tracing only through the first four years of the artist’s young life. While that could’ve allowed his prowess to channel through the themes and issues that shaped the man, the film’s biggest takeaway is in how much of a middle-of-the-road affair it seems, despite the expectations I had laid upon it going in.
When we first meet young Bobby, (Timothée Chalamet in one his best roles yet), he’s just arrived in early 60s New York. On his very first night, he travels to see his musical idol Woody Guthrie, who’s confined to an institution. There, Pete Seeger, the reigning king of folk music, (Edward Norton) picks upon his unbridled talent, as the former plays in front of his longtime idol. The scene, which remains one of the best directed and placed sequences in the whole movie, instantly registers the kind of themes the story would tackle.
Through Dylan, we observe Seeger sing “Wimoweh” to a delighted auditorium audience, and later a few more in a variety of places. While he’s still finding his own voice, Seeger is seemingly transfixed by the live presentations of the young fellow as he sees him as someone who could finally make folk music contemporary again.
While just starting his upward trajectory of bristling fame, Dylan meets Sylvie (Elle Fanning), whose character is clearly based on Suze Rotolo, a fellow Greenwich Village bohemian, as we see the two start dating. We’re also introduced to Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), an already reigning folk singer with plenty of successful albums under her belt. Amidst the glee of youthful freedom, the film underscores the voice of an emerging artist against the backdrop of deeply troubling sociopolitical times the country was going through at the time.
The film’s biggest shortcoming lies in its passive approach to exploring Dylan’s dilemma: whether to remain a folk singer aligned with Seeger’s traditionalist camp or to evolve by pioneering the rock and roll landscape. The catch, then, isn’t in making songs such as “The Times They Are A-Changin” look extraordinary on screen (which they anyway do). But in recognizing how the man who penned it continued to feel like being stuck in one place at the time.
“People make up their stories”, Chalamet’s lead says at a point in the film. Despite how redundant describing popular cultural icons as an “enigma” has become at this point, for a film that centers itself so heavily on the enduring nature of the creative bubble, watching “A Complete Unknown” certainly makes one wonder whether it’s being insular by design. “Open your ears,” another character exclaims at Seeger while he desperately tries to steer the momentum when Dylan plays at the (partially) infamous Newport Folk Festival event. That moment, for everything the film had been building toward, should’ve felt like an exclamation point in the idea of constant creation against the challenges of audience capture. Instead, it comes across as being airdropped from the exact kind of biopic that Mangold is so ostensibly trying to avoid.
It frames the footnotes of the political events around Dylan as if his place in textbooks and on the walls were a chance byproduct of the inherent effort (or arrogance?) to just do his own thing. The need to churn out maximum mileage out of people’s awed reaction shots to Dylan’s talent, again, makes you wonder why wouldn’t the film let its theme allow for the unbridled revelatory power of the person to explain itself. But then again, you remind yourself it isn’t a conventional trace-through-the-life musical biopic you’re watching. I could have very well taken that, for all it’s worth.
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