Everyone was warned. In my recap of 2024 ("How Does It Feel?"), I contemplated the idea of going to see "A Complete Unknown," the biopic covering Bob Dylan's fertile period between his arrival of New York City around 1961 and his plugged-in spectacle at the Newport Folk Festival in summer 1965.
I made it through an hour of the movie at a sold-out matinee at the Guild Cinema before I walked out. The main problem with the film is that it barely qualifies as a movie; it's a wafer-thin narrative stitched together with extensive song performances -- meticulous reproductions earnestly rendered by Timothee Chalamet, who might have needed sinus surgery after his faithful parroting of Dylan's signature Midwest nasal twang. It's not much more than a karaoke festival, as Monica Barbaro jumps in to portray Joan Baez and also does her own singing. But while anyone can mimic Dylan, no one should ever try to re-create Baez's ethereal voice (or suffer comparison to her luminescent presence). I felt bad for Barbaro, who sings perfectly well, just not in another dimension; there's nothing special about her.
Elsewhere, "A Complete Unknown" suffers from the same limitations that drive me away from Hollywood biopics, particularly movies about artists I've admired as their careers unfold in real time along with mine. I'm no Dylanologist, but I dove deeply into his music for about 25 years at the end of the last century, and this movie had nothing to offer me after the magic of early-'60s Greenwich Village (derivative of a "Mad Men" episode) quickly wore off.
Chalamet's performance of early Dylan songs was fun at first, but it eventually got stale. Plus, the love triangle -- Dylan falls for Suze Rotolo (here named Sylvie) and then beds Baez while Sylvie is studying art in Italy -- was building toward a histrionic showdown in which two smart, beautiful women put up with and perhaps fight over an immature jerk. (It's inadvertently comical when Baez drifts into a club at the sound of Dylan's voice, watches rapturously as he performs "Masters of War" at the height of U.S.-Soviet nuclear panic, and instantly drops her panties for him.)
Once Dylan received a royalty check for $10,000 from his second album and struck up a fanboy pen-pal relationship with Johnny Cash (the women behind me swooned as Cash's voiceover praised Dylan), I headed to the exit. All that lay ahead, I feared, were more movie-star impressions. A bland Edward Norton tries way too hard to capture Pete Seeger's earthy goodness; and I cowered at the prospect of someone named Boyd Holbrook -- surely named with this silver-screen moment in mind -- pretending to be a bad-ass Cash (who probably at the time was interested in Dylan's stash of amphetamines more than anything).
In fact, most of the performances are remarkably flat -- perhaps the result of deciding to cast actors based on historical resemblence (manager Albert Grossman, for example) -- including the talented Elle Fanning, who brings very little to the role of Sylvie beyond being a plot device as the woman who made Dylan woke in the era of civil rights and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It all felt like a clear-out for Chalamet, with the cast bowing to his transformation into a Boomer icon. If Chalamet's performance were anything more than passable -- and if the dialogue (some of which he swallows) had any snap to it -- that might have been acceptable. (Also, perhaps most mystifying of all, Chalamet is somehow not as pretty as the 21-year-old Dylan.) Director James Mangold, penning the screenplay with Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald, gives us repeated ham-handed winks to Dylan's penchant for fabricating his biography at the time but does nothing to dig deeper below the surface of that. (The movie suggests it's a mystery; but is there more to it than Robert Zimmerman was bored or embarrassed by his suburban upbringing and would do anything to be a rock star?)
Finally, I feared the coming melodramatic, too-faithful re-enactment of the (in)famous day in July 1965 when Dylan set the old folkies' hair on fire when he went electric, shredding "Maggie's Farm" with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, days after the release of his single "Like a Rolling Stone," which would alter the landscape of American popular rock 'n' roll. This is by-the-numbers storytelling; Boomer culture porn.
A month ago I noted that Dylan himself "is the ultimate work of fiction" and wondered if there is a point in "fictionalizing fiction -- or worse, trying to faithfully replicate it." I asked before if there was "a need to see America's puppy do a karaoke imitation" of Dylan. I have my answers: There is no point, and I don't need to watch it. If you want to know what the man was like back then, go watch "Don't Look Back" instead, or go deep into this exhaustive, fascinating fact-check of the movie from Variety.
BONUS TRACKS
A moment in time that we shouldn't try to recapture or re-create -- "Like a Rolling Stone" at Newport (a version of which I presume runs over the closing credits):
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