R | 2h 21m | Biopic, Music | Dec. 25, 2024
In the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,“ director James Mangold and star Timothée Chalamet do a sly, clever thing. When I first saw the trailer, I didn’t like Chalamet’s look. “That doesn’t look like Bob at all!” I grew up on the music of Dylan and Joan Baez and therefore consider myself some kind of Dylan-Baez expert. Which is not actually true, but you know what I mean.
However, in the movie’s opening shot of Bob, it’s completely Timothée Chalamet—no trace of Bob in sight. I was slightly confused and strangely relieved. He doesn’t really talk or sing like Bob right away, either.
But over the course of the film, Mangold (who directed the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line”) introduces barely noticeable hair and make-up modifications. Deep into the film, Chalamet’s normally aquiline nose has sleight-of-hand-magically acquired Dylan’s distinct, hooked beak, and he’s slinging the full-on, nasal, talking-between-clenched-teeth Bob-isms. Suddenly you realize you’re witnessing a chameleon-like thespian shapeshifting event nothing short of electrifying. Not to mention the singing, guitar picking-strumming, and harmonica playing. More kudos on Chalamet’s musical chops later.
What It Is
There’s arguably no more influential rock star than Bob Dylan. Maybe Elvis. Maybe the collective Beatles. But Dylan’s folk-based songs, which often carried with them a message of protest or social uprising, channeled the 1960s’ zeitgeist that affected Western music and culture like no other.
Look at how many film directors have taken a crack at attempting to define Dylan: Martin Scorsese made a mockumentary about Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” tour (1975). Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” featured six fictional variations of Dylan (2007). “Inside Llewyn Davis” was the Coen brothers fabricating a Dylan-like musician loosely based on Bob’s contemporary, Dave Van Ronk (2013).
“A Complete Unknown” features Chalamet playing Dylan from his fresh-off-the-bus-from-Hibbing, Minnesota arrival to New York City’s Greenwich Village, in 1961. It moves through his rapid rise to fame, culminating in his notorious, culture-smashing rejection of America’s beloved acoustic folk-inspired music, when he went fully electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
It shows how Dylan helped bring folk music to the world’s attention, and introduces the musicians, girlfriends, and managers who helped him on his meteoric rise. These include Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), Pete Seeger (an excellently understated Edward Norton), Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), and of course Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).
The film more or less follows the standard biopic set-up of famous musicians playing their famous songs for the first time, in Broadway jukebox-musical fashion, muttering snippets of lyrics as they bloom into the artist’s consciousness, and fiddling with chord progressions, leaving audiences thinking, “Oh, wow, so that’s where, when, why, and how he came up with “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Because Dylan is an artist of whom the word “prolific” is the ultimate understatement, this jukebox musical cropping up of songs borders on excessive. But you can understand the director’s dilemma: “So many Dylan gold nuggets, so little time.”
The Help
Joan Baez was already a huge folk star when she met Dylan. Bob cheated, with Joan, on his girlfriend, Sylvie Russo. Sylvie is a fictional take on the real person, Suze Rotolo, who appeared on the album cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” played here with affecting pathos by Elle Fanning. Any suspicions that one might have had that Dylan, as a young man, tended to be a truth-improvising, two-timing philanderer, are immediately confirmed.
It’s most likely that’s the only way someone with his level of talent can function, when constantly and uncontrollably channeling lyrics and melodies. A scene of a bed-tousled Dylan cheerfully and humorously eviscerating Joan’s lyrics (while she’s making him breakfast) is followed by a gob-smacked Baez saying, “Wow Bob, you’re kind of an ——-.”
But as irritated and fed-up with Bob as she eventually becomes, the movie often lingers on her face as she melts with adoration and inwardly genuflects to Bob’s muse, while witnessing the debut of this or that brilliant, so-prescient-it’ll-make-the-hair-on-your-neck-stand-up, song.
As Joan herself said in an improvised scene with Bob in the movie they did together, “Renaldo and Clara” (1974), “I used to see you write like ticker-tape; I used to feed you salad and red wine while you wrote like ticker-tape.” There should have been more about the fact that Dylan was also, er, channeling large quantities of amphetamines at the time. Taking speed tends to produce prolific, ticker-taper writing.
Monica Barbaro’s job in portraying an extremely well-known figure, also possessed of a broke-the-mold, one-of-a-kind voice, is just as challenging as Chalamet’s. She nails Baez’s angelic vocal clarity, which Dylan called a “heart-stopping soprano.” Following her recent high-profile turn as a fighter pilot in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Barbaro has probably landed herself on Hollywood’s A-list for good with this performance.
Baez was possibly the only woman in Bob’s life strong enough to call him out on his posturing—laughing at his ridiculous claims that he traveled with a carnival and learned guitar chords from a cowboy named “Wiggle-foot.” Dylan had a predilection for telling journalists wild lies throughout his career. Chalamet and Barbaro have great chemistry together.
More Help
Pete Seeger immediately recognized the hypnotic power of Dylan’s words. Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook, having great fun with Cash’s hairstyle and drinking) loved Dylan’s virulently iconoclastic tendencies, and, like a proud uncle, egged Bob on to continue flying in the face of the hidebound folk community. Via the supporting cast, we experience Dylan as a flawed human grappling with a genius-level talent.
Bob is so mercurial that Todd Haynes’s approach in “I’m Not There,” of using a different actor to play Bob at different times of his life, seems the best way to go. Playing a significant chunk of Dylan’s life that incorporates a few personality shifts, all at once, is a black-belt challenge. Chalamet mostly portrays the young Dylan as a youth on fire with a social-reform mission, a Dylan fully cognizant of his storytelling’s power to cause tidal waves of change.
The film makes you appreciate the scope of both Dylan’s and Chalamet’s talent. Chalamet gives us the puckish, underfed, Minnesotan naif that women couldn’t resist mothering, but doesn’t duck the fact that Dylan was often an egotistical brat who routinely refused to play songs people wanted to hear because the thought of being labeled gave him the hives.
Parallels
Timothée Chalamet’s got a fair amount in common with Bob Dylan, paralleling the singer by rapidly accumulating an impressive list of incredible works for a person still under age 30. Chalamet, at age 22, earned early recognition with a best actor Oscar nomination for “Call Me by Your Name,” a film that showcased his piano chops.
In “A Complete Unknown,“ he makes guitar, harmonica, and singing like Dylan look easy. Mangold’s choice to bypass dubbing and let the performers do their own vocals allowed for a more raw, natural sound. The high point of “A Complete Unknown” is Chalamet’s dead-on performance of a sizeable portion of Dylan’s major hits. He transcends vocal mimicry to capture the essence of Dylan’s prickly but towering talent. It’s a channeling performance.
Speaking of channeling, there are those who believe higher beings and deities can use humans as conduits for healing art that fosters moral elevation. George Frideric Handel composed the magnificent “Messiah” in one lightning-bolt shot of 24 days, from Aug. 22 to Sept. 14, 1741. As he later said, “Whether I was in the body or out of the body when I wrote it, I know not.”
Early Bob Dylan, with his sheer torrent of haunting, phantasmagorical, epiphanic, galvanizing, sometimes sarcastic, and often hilarious lyrics, was definitely channeling something. The film captures this via great audience reactions. Whether his body of work was morally uplifting is up for debate. The folk music of the time was a bit of a conduit for communism, what with Dylan’s heroes, like Pete Seeger, being a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) from 1942 to 1949, and a founding member of The Weavers, a folk group that performed at political events and workers strikes. Dylan’s ultimate hero Woody Guthrie’s work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism.
Staying up for days on end, high on uppers, was about as far from Handel as you could get; however, Bob Dylan clearly saw and called out the state of our fallen world:
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
He’s not wrong. Dylan blew the whistle loud and clear that the emperor was wearing no clothes. Modern society had become devoid of morality.
“A Complete Unknown“ has been nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture—Drama, Ed Norton for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture, and Timothée Chalamet for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama.
“A Complete Unknown” releases in cinemas on Dec. 25, 2024, in the U.S.
‘A Complete Unknown’
Director: James Mangold
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Monica Barbaro, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Boyd Holbrook
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hours, 21 minutes
Release Date: Dec. 25, 2024
Rating: 5 stars out of 5
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Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Timothée Chalamet’s name in one instance. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
