In an era where the musical biopic has devolved into a paint-by-numbers exercise in Hollywood mythmaking, James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown arrives like a cover band playing at a funeral – technically proficient but entirely missing the point. Here’s a film that takes one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic cultural figures and renders him as digestible as a Wikipedia entry read aloud by your most earnest high school history teacher.
The irony is that Bob Dylan himself spent a lifetime shape-shifting precisely to avoid this kind of reductive biographical treatment. Todd Haynes understood this in his masterwork I’m Not There, where six different actors embodied Dylan’s mercurial persona. Mangold, however, seems determined to stuff Dylan back into the same tired biopic box he used for Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, apparently having learned nothing from the savage (and spot-on) parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
Chalamet emerges as the film’s greatest strength, bringing a nervy authenticity to Dylan that stands at odds with everything around him. While the supporting cast delivers their lines like they’re reading historical plaques at the Newport Folk Festival, his Dylan scratches his neck and mumbles his way through scenes with the kind of awkward charisma that actually captures something true about the artist. It’s a performance that seems to exist in a better, more thoughtful film than the one we got.
The film’s treatment of Dylan’s evolution from folk hero to electric pariah demonstrates all the nuance of a sledgehammer to the temple. Edward Norton‘s Pete Seeger functions as both mentor and eventual foil, grounding the early portions of the film in some genuine tension between protest musicians and an antagonistic government. But that promising setup quickly fades, replaced by the kind of reductive “young rebel versus old guard” narrative we’ve seen in literally every music biopic. The film reduces the folk scene’s complicated relationship with Dylan to a series of increasingly tired confrontations about going electric.
The romantic subplots fare even worse. Elle Fanning‘s Sylvie Russo (a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo) exists in a dramatic no-man’s land, simultaneously positioned as both Dylan’s moral compass and a jealous obstacle to his artistic growth. Her character’s internal contradictions aren’t compelling complexity so much as evidence of a screenplay that can’t decide what story it’s telling. Meanwhile, Monica Barbaro‘s Joan Baez is reduced to a plot point in Dylan’s inexorable march toward destiny.
The film only truly crackles to life during Boyd Holbrook‘s scenes as Johnny Cash. Bluntly, it’s no surprise that Mangold seems most comfortable in Cash’s orbit. These sequences hint at a more interesting movie about artistic friendship and mutual recognition, but they’re mere grace notes at best.
What’s most frustrating about A Complete Unknown is how it manages to make one of music’s most fascinating figures feel utterly pedestrian. The film methodically checks off the events of Dylan’s early career like it’s completing a historical scavenger hunt, never quite grasping what made this period so culturally explosive. Even Dylan’s music feels oddly neutered here, with Chalamet (while a capable singer) smoothing out Dylan’s more eccentric vocal qualities that have made him somewhat of a challenging listen for less adventurous ears.
My partner’s observation after the screening cuts right to the heart of it: “I came in knowing nothing about Dylan, and having seen it, I still don’t.” There’s no better indictment of what’s wrong here. The film seems terrified of Dylan’s complexities, constantly reaching for the most obvious interpretation of every moment. Instead of exploring how a Jewish kid from Minnesota transformed himself into the voice of a generation or examining what that transformation cost him and those around him, we get a Greatest Hits collection of biopic clichés. Mangold has somehow managed to make a film that’s simultaneously too literal about the facts and completely missing the point about why any of them matter. It’s the kind of movie that thinks showing Dylan staring at a Woody Guthrie album cover is the same thing as understanding why Guthrie’s music changed his life.
The times may be a-changin’, but the musical biopic formula remains stubbornly static. Haynes was right – this well-trod territory didn’t need another visitor. Sometimes, the best way to tell a story is to admit that some stories resist conventional telling. Dylan knew that. Shame about the movie.