By Jake Wilson
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN ★★★★
(M) 141 minutes
The finest cinematic tribute to Bob Dylan remains the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis in 2013, precisely because Dylan has no place in the story. The Coens, who respect almost no one, respect Dylan so much they decline to show his face – yet everything hinges on the moment he takes the stage at a Greenwich Village coffee house and history is changed.
Elle Fanning and Timothee Chalamet in A Complete Unknown.
As director and co-writer of A Complete Unknown, James Mangold has fewer qualms. Still, he picks up almost exactly where the Coens left off, with the young and hungry Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) huddling in his overcoat in what looks like the same mythologised version of wintry early-1960s New York.
This Dylan is capable of a fair amount of mythologising, spinning tall tales to his girlfriend (Elle Fanning) about his formative years in a carnival. Indeed, nearly everything about him is borrowed or invented, including his name, which was Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota.
That doesn’t make him a fraud, however. In the film’s eyes he has all the qualities needed for artistic success, including talent, ambition, discipline, and what the writer Vladimir Nabokov called “splendid insincerity” – the last of these marking his distance from the sturdy decency of folk music elder Pete Seeger, played with the faintest edge of caricature by Edward Norton.
Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan, with Edward Norton (left) as Pete Seeger.
Like Mangold’s Walk the Line 20 years ago about Johnny Cash and June Carter, A Complete Unknown is outwardly traditional and sometimes corny, yet also a bold reimagining of the conventions of the Hollywood music biopic – usually among the dullest of genres. Rather than plodding through Dylan’s big moments, Mangold has a specific thesis about his subject and is willing to pose some tough questions about what we gain from artist biographies in general.
As for Chalamet, this must be his most impressive performance to date: not merely an imitation of the young Dylan, but an interpretation of his body of work through to the mid-1960s and where it might have sprung from – in this respect, it’s crucial he sings the songs himself.
What stands out, compared to many of his earlier roles, is the absence of cuteness. The film’s Dylan has a bag of tricks to get what he wants from the other characters, but neither Chalamet nor Mangold assume his charms will work similarly on the viewer.
Instead, A Complete Unknown verges on being a kind of monster movie – a description that fits many of Mangold’s films across various genres, including Walk the Line, where Joaquin Phoenix’s Cash played and sang as if baffled by whatever evil spirit had possessed him.
Here we meet a different, more relaxed version of Cash, played by Boyd Holbrook, who serves as the grinning demon on Dylan’s shoulder to Seeger’s angel. Chalamet’s Dylan is another kind of monster again – or rather he’s Frankenstein and the monster at once, assembling his legend piece by piece.
By the time we reach the bombastic climax, it might appear the film has lost track of any distinction between Dylan the man and Dylan the persona. But I think Mangold knows what he’s doing, abandoning the pretence of realism the way Dylan abandoned the small pond of folk music, thus letting us see the film as a parable.
After all, many of Dylan’s songs are parables, too; typically ambiguous ones, as is A Complete Unknown. There’s no doubt the film is on its hero’s side, but if we imagine his choices somehow opened the door to the world we live in now, it’s not clear he did us a favour.
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