How do you tell a story that doesn’t want to be told? The better question, perhaps, is why even try?
James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown” monumentalizes the United States’s most elusive anti-celebrity celebrity — a man who dedicated an entire chapter of his career to hermiting with his family and escaping star status — on screen. Based on Elijah Wald’s best-selling book “Dylan Goes Electric,” the film fictionalizes the four years during which Robert Zimmerman, a homeless cover artist from Duluth, Minn., transforms into the “Bob Dylan” we listen to and cherish today. Unlike other cultural icons who have grounded Hollywood biopics, Dylan resents the fiction of fame, leaving Mangold with the impossible task of casting and scripting a man who refused to be pigeonholed into a cultural emblem.
Departing from standard biopic fashion, Mangold focuses on a specific moment of Dylan’s career: the 1965 Newport Folk Festival controversy, in which Dylan “goes electric” — switches out his acoustic guitar for an electric one — to the dismay of the folk status quo. The film’s magnified time frame is a good start to humanizing Dylan and resisting metanarratives. Unfortunately, that’s where Mangold’s tasteful production decisions end.
Fresh off the set of Paul King’s “Wonka,” Timothée Chalamet plays a multiplicity of candy-coated Dylans: Dylan the earnest poet, stubborn celebrity, doughy lover and lousy womanizer. Some versions are better than others. At his best, Chalamet plays the charming but fickle artist, mumbling witty one-liners and chain-smoking cigarettes with clumsy ease.
Chalamet’s performance, a five-year-long project complete with his own singing and accompanying instrumentals, including multiple live performances, generates moments of greatness in the film — like when he belts “Like a Rolling Stone” to a disgruntled festival audience expecting old folk classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But his performance falls short of the sort of actor-character synthesis needed for success. By nature of Chalamet’s star status, his presence in the film forces the spectator into watching Chalamet play Dylan, and not Dylan himself. On top of this exists the irony of Mangold casting Hollywood’s now Kardashian-clad sweetheart as “a complete(ly) unknown” midwestern boy. Symbolically, I could have reconciled the tension between real-life Chalamet’s recognizability and pre-fame Zimmerman’s anonymity if it didn't manifest as a major distraction throughout the diegesis of the film. Somehow, a biopic documenting Bob Dylan ended up being more about Timothée Chalamet’s performance of the artist than the man and his music itself — heightened by the fact that Chalamet sang all the songs.
While initially jarring, I acclimated to Chalamet’s musical covers and even allowed myself to enjoy them. Chalamet expertly toggles the line between mimicry and caricature, never reducing Dylan to a trope. The same cannot be said for Woody Guthrie, played by Scoot McNairy, and Johnny Cash, played by Boyd Holbrook, whose portrayals I found cartoonish and cringeworthy. Guthrie, a character who the real Dylan only ever visited once or twice in his life, is shown on his deathbed multiple times throughout the film, looking like a docile and dejected zombie. In a similar vein, New York’s notoriously gritty East Village of the 1960s looks like a cardboard theater set. Mangold constructs a bright and jarring Baz Luhrmann-esque world without the flavor or bite, leaving the viewer with a sanitized and theatrical aesthetic antithetical to Dylan’s signature, real-life style.
“A Complete Unknown”’s star-studded cast, on-the-nose dialogue, 70-million-dollar budget and theatrical set epitomize the exact sort of symbolization and commercialization Dylan overtly laments in his memoir, “Chronicles, Volume One.” Where Dylan took many risks throughout his career — as exemplified by his decision to play the electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, a scene which grounds the entire film — the film itself failed to formally subvert or narratively excite. “A Complete Unknown” is shot conventionally and adheres to a linear plot that off-centers a love triangle between Dylan, Joan Baez — played by Monica Barbaro — and Sylvie Russo, an embellished version of Dylan’s ex-girlfriend, played by Elle Fanning. The performances of Barbaro and Fanning are solid, but not solid enough to save their tedious and overplayed love plotline. Russo’s character arc — a kitschy, then devastating love story beginning with a church meet cute and ending with a dramatized boat send-off — gives the impression that mass marketability, rather than humanization, motivated the film’s character profiles.
Ultimately, we go to the movies to be entertained, and Mangold orchestrated an entertaining, if overly commercialized, performance. “A Complete Unknown” privileges telling a good story over an accurate one, and while the film resists reducing Dylan to a complete caricature, it lacks the necessary earnestness to encapsulate its subject’s spirit. Maybe after Marilyn Monroe’s botched depiction in “Blonde,” avoiding offense is good enough for a biopic to be deemed successful. But I’d like to believe the bar is not that low. For those of us who are protective over the preexisting version of Dylan that exists in our heads, this film is not for you. And while you can’t blame Mangold for trying to bring some commercial Hollywood zest to the ever-so-mystifying Dylan, you can blame him for falling short. I love the real Bob Dylan, whoever he may be, for the same reason this film, with its existing cast and budget, could never work: Dylan’s story and sentiment are too real to be scripted for mass appeal.
Rating: ★★★
