Review: A Complete Unknown (2024)

Somewhere near the middle of Like A Complete Unknown, folk icon Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro), says to Timothèe Chalamet's Bob Dylan: "You're kind of an a**hole, Bob." After a pause, Dylan replies "Yeah...I guess so." 

This was a crucial moment for me, a cinephile who has grown weary of the way Hollywood tells stories about real people. The last decade of biopics has often seen its subjects presented not merely as talented people, but as superheroes who are not unlike Greek Gods: legendary in status, perched atop a pantheon that lies far outside of human reach. In these films, they're not like us. They never were. They were always "other," bred of stardust and mercury. Through twists of fate that sometimes seem cosmic in scope, the modern biopic no longer presents slightly-exaggerated history, packaged for easy consumption; it now turns human stories into manufactured myth of Shakespearean proportions.

That's what makes the Baez line so refreshing. It makes it clear, in one simple exchange, that the Bob Dylan presented in the film is not a man without flaws. He's human, and by showing those rough edges--highlighting them, even--the accomplishments of the real man are amplified, not diminished. When film seeks to exaggerate reality beyond factual feasibility, it robs us of the inspiration that we can find in real people who are not unlike us, and who overcome (or sometimes don't) the kinds of trials that we ourselves face. James Mangold's filmography consists of multiple biopics, such as the 2005 Johnny Cash story Walk The Line and 2019's Ford v Ferrari, that sit uncomfortably on the same shelf as his superhero blockbusters and franchise tentpoles, including Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. This movie really could have gone either way. 

Thankfully, A Complete Unknown does justice to one of rock history's greatest tales. Adapted from the book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald, the film tells the story of young Bob Dylan arriving in New York and taking the folk music scene in Greenwich Village by storm. Within just a few short years, he had become a global sensation: a hero to peaceniks and poets, a cash cow for the record company, and an icon for the folk music scene. But Dylan bristled at these expectations and carved out a new path form himself, culminating with a fully-electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, an act of treason to the acoustic folk establishment. It must have been tempting for Mangold, along with co-writers Wald and Jay Cocks, to exaggerate the events into some sort of full-scale cultural war, with Dylan as both martyr and disciple, or even a Christ-like totem. Thankfully, they resist. Dylan remains a man in the film. A talented, ambitious, acerbic, socially-awkward man. 

That's not to say that the film does not exaggerate. It certainly does, and--according to Mangold in some recent interviews around the promotion and release of the film--the real Bob Dylan was involved in the production, offering not only notes and bits of dialogue, but whole scenes to be added to the movie, some of which were entirely fictional. Dylan has been covering his tracks in the snow since the very beginning, but the movie makes no secret of this. Dylanologists recognize that this comes with the territory. Bob wears masks, and even the documentaries about him (like Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue) contain stories about people and places that never existed. Therefore it's no great surprise that the slightly-fictionalized version of Dylan that we see in this film has been filtered through the real Bob to make sure we don't get too close. 

Nevertheless, Mangold has delivered a film that captures moments in time. From the myriad of different music that drifts out of the open doors of the clubs in Greenwich Village in 1961 to way that folk music paved the way for rock and roll's second chapter in 1965, the film is rooted in context and brings history to life. It didn't all happen: events have been blended, rearranged, and in some cases exaggerated. But the core is remarkably true to the real events and people depicted in the film. From Joan Baez as the literal poster child for folk music a la the cover of Time Magazine to Pete Seeger trying desperately to bring the message of folk to the masses, everyone's personality and raison d'être is more or less spot-on. 

Timothèe Chalamet captures Dylan with astonishing accuracy, from the way he enunciates (or doesn't) to his body language, the way he holds cigarettes, even the way he casts his gaze downward, averting eye contact whenever possible--it's all true to the real Dylan during these years: unsure of himself at times, defiant at others. His voice is close enough too, both when singing and when speaking. He is clearly playing guitar on camera during multiple scenes, which adds a level of realism. The other actors in the film tasked with playing recognizable musicians, such as the aforementioned Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, come close enough without being mimics of the real people that they portray. The only fictional person here is still drawn from a real figure: Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, a stand-in for the real Suze Rotolo, an early Dylan muse who graces the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan himself asked Mangold for the name change. I believe Suze Rotolo is the only real person in the film who Dylan asked to be called by another name, and we're left to wonder why--just as Bob would have it. 

One of the movie's shortcomings is that, even at 140 minutes, it doesn't have time to linger on many of the significant details of Bob's life, or of the musical scene he was a part of. As someone who has a homesickness for the early sixties Greenwich Village folk scene, I was a bit disappointed that the film doesn't really spend much time there before Bob has outgrown it. This year saw the release of the book Talkin' Greenwich Village by David Browne, and I'd have liked to have seen some more of those stories brought to life. We get a couple of teasingly-brief scenes around Cafè Wha? and Gerde's Folk City, with long-gone venues brought back to life decades after they disappeared. What we have is great, but I wanted more. For example, Dave Van Ronk, the so-called Mayor of MacDougal Street and the single most important figure in the Greenwich folk scene of the 1960s and beyond, is relegated to background scenery. There's just too much history here for the movie to spend time on all of it. I find myself hoping for a four-hour director's cut, even though I traditionally find director's cuts to be self-indulgent. To the film's credit, it manages this brisk pace without feeling like an extended montage or a trailer, a filmmaking pitfall that impacted Baz Luhrmann's Elvis and Nolan's Oppenheimer.

The film just gets so much right.  Dylan's obsessive poetry and songwriting habits and rituals are presented not as some magical ability, but something he worked at constantly. We see him struggling with songs, piecing bits of verses together over multiple days. A song he's working on in one scene might not be performed until later in the film. The moment Al Kooper found himself sitting behind the organ during the recording sessions for "Like A Rolling Stone" is recreated here in a way that feels accurate. Even the Pete Seeger axe story, one of the most scintillating pieces of Dylan lore, leaps off the screen in a way that feels true to life. More authenticity in a genre that's become defined by artifice. 

Biopics are, above all else, movies meant to entertain the masses. They aren't documentaries, and they're free to take certain liberties in service of presenting a more commercial, crowd-pleasing product. But I also feel like the people who make biopics have a massive responsibility to their subjects and to the audience; the task of a biopic is to capture the essence of someone's life without falsifying the narrative and thus presenting someone that didn't really exist doing things that never really happened. For those that want the strictly-factual account of the events depicted in A Complete Unknown, you have many options to choose from: Scorsese's No Direction Home captures a lot of it, both from Dylan and those who were around him. D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back follows Bob on his 1965 tour of England, capturing the musician and songwriter at the exact moment when he outgrew the acoustic folk music scene. Entire bookshelves of biographies exist that recount the events leading up to Dylan's fabled 1966 motorcycle crash that paved the way for yet more reinvention. But A Complete Unknown provides something we've never had until now: an expensive ($70 million) Hollywood film devoted to Dylan and his rise from folk novice to international superstar, performed by a singular actor who virtually disappears entirely into the persona. Even Todd Haynes' 2007 experimental film I'm Not There, which employed six different actors to portray Dylan, didn't approach this level of ambition. As a lifelong Dylan fan of nearly 30 years, I find A Complete Unknown to be fair, mostly accurate, and successful at capturing one of the most elusive figures in modern music.