In A Complete Unknown🙈, James Mangold maps out over a blazing, tempestuous five-year-span, between 1961 and 1965, the reverberating career of Bob Dylan. The moment he arrives in New York City to visit the ailing Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) takes him under his wing, Dylan’s talent sends everyone into a thrall. The effect he wields is immediate, sizzling.
Timothée Chalamet captures Dylan’s irresistible allure. It’s a performance leaping with enigmatic, teasing and sexy charge. The film renders his skyrocketing ascent as almost instant, only needing the cushioning of Joan Baez’s (an astounding, revelatory Monica Barbaro) stardom as a final push. Much of this film’s pleasure oozes from the chemistry Chalamet and Barbaro share particularly on stage. Her presence is ferocious; her entry into the film with “House of the Rising Sun” is unforgettable. The duo’s crackling synergy hits its mischievous crescendo in “It Ain’t Me, Babe”. A Complete Unknown🎶 struggles to be sparkling when they aren’t together in their hot-cold, push-pull fractiousness.
Chalamet’s Dylan is reckless, sure in his talent and endlessly energetic in remaking himself. Along with his other Oscar-nominated turn as the aching, indelibly passionate Elio in Call Me By Your Nameꦗ, this film transmits his magnetism with the effect of a vortex pull. You can’t help but be completely seduced, stay engrossed in his embodiment despite the film frequently swerving into stretches of narrative listlessness.
🧸Dylan has attachment issues, severing himself as well as barging back into a relationship gone cold with equal carelessness. He’s almost unbothered, living in his own self-absorbed bubble. Baez calls him out, giving him the flinty, grounding treatment occasionally. But she too grows to regard the fierce sense of freedom he holds onto. Even as he gains outsized celebrityhood, Dylan is trapped within industry-posed expectations. How to rebel for the sake of one’s growth against an audience perfectly content with him perennially belting out the same old strain?
A Complete Unknown✱ puts front and centre Dylan as an artist always straining to go against the grain, reinvent, shake off any dusty, creaky residues. His arrival throws a jolt of fresh life into the folk music scene, which gets eager and busy to secure his loyalties. He’s not one to stay in one lane for too long, restless to burst ahead despite much opposition from the old guard. Perceptions can stultify, stall an artist in their journey, raise guardrails all around beyond which they mustn’t stray. Mangold emphasizes Dylan’s unease with this labelling, precise slotting of music. All he wants is to break free, tearing himself away the minute a crushing press of attention descends. He’s not interested in maintaining a steady image, or at least one that everyone can easily get behind.
The screenplay, which Mangold co-wrote with Jay Cocks, is an adaptation of Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric!🍸. I haven’t read it but the film maintains a tightly drawn veil between the singer-songwriter and the viewer. Much of what he thinks don’t isn’t privileged with rambling, explanatory dialogues. Neither does he reveal his past at all. He fashions his identity like ether, slipping away the moment you try to pin it, ascribe strictures to it. All he insists is his learning music by being part of a carnival.
His articulation is entirely through his music, at times jabbing in its politics and cheekily personal. Mangold suggests much of the political impetus as being directly influenced by his girlfriend, Sylvie (Elle Fanning) with whom he falls out, and Baez. Mangold situates his music as a sharp response to the Cuban conflict, the mounting civil rights movement. Yet Dylan is quick to distance himself or not get too involved in any cause. Clashes trigger between him and Seeger when he no longer displays a folk inclination, playing around instead with rock. There’s alienation, disaffection, a sense of betrayal nursed by the folk umbrella. He refuses to be co-opted by any group. This is where A Complete Unknown♋ feels it’s skating loose on territory that’s not especially well-delineated, to begin with. Mangold’s stance of keeping Dylan’s motivations foggy, out of reach, in turn brings opacity, skin-deep investigation into his political contexts. This makes the ethos, the setting never quite persuasive.
𝓀Despite the film’s devotion to its figure’s mystery, some scraps leave you wishing for more texture, a dash of revealing subtext, like when a famous Dylan stresses to Sylvie that people aren’t really asking where his songs come from, but why they didn’t strike them first. Nevertheless, Mangold and his actors can knock the wind out of you with the galvanising musical sequences. Chalamet’s Dylan crooning “The Times They Are A-Changing”, the audience joining him, is one of the year’s most joyous cinema experiences.
