A Hollywood love letter to Bob Dylan, with all that implies, “A Complete Unknown” works well on its chosen, extremely glossy terms. Its craftsmanship is formidable. Then again, you don’t necessarily need quality to sell one of these things, as “Bohemian Rhapsody” reminded us.
If the average fan goes to a movie about a musical genius they’ve loved a long time; if the visual and aural approximations of the subject sound more or less right; if the movie doesn’t complicate or challenge the average fan’s ideas or feelings about the subject — then the movie has a good shot at sending people out with a “yep, good movie, I enjoyed it.”
I don’t like that last part, about a film’s avoidance (contractual or otherwise) of complicating or challenging the received mythology built around its famous subject. I wish “A Complete Unknown” had as much nerve as it did craftsmanship. Still: Yep, good movie. I enjoyed it.
Director and co-writer James Mangold based “A Complete Unknown” largely on Elijah Wald’s nonfiction account “Dylan Goes Electric.” With co-screenwriter Jay Cocks, he focuses on the years 1961 to 1965 in the emergent celebrity and acoustic-to-electric transition of the Boy from the North Country.
The Duluth-to-Hibbing-to-Minneapolis phase of Dylan’s life, 19 or so years’ worth, stays outside the frame here. We first see Timothée Chalamet as Dylan in the back seat of a crowded car, having hitched a ride to New York City. He’s dropped off on the roadside, with only his guitar and a notion or two about making his mark in the Greenwich Village folk scene.
First, though, he pays a visit to one of his musical North Stars, Woody Guthrie, who by 1961 was struggling with the debilitating brain disorder known as Huntington’s disease. In the film, Dylan shows up unannounced at the forlorn facility. Guthrie is played movingly, wordlessly, by Scoot McNairy. It didn’t happen quite this way, of course — I say “of course” because it’s not a biopic’s job to stick to the factual record, only to distill and dramatize its own ideas of authenticity — but in “A Complete Unknown” Guthrie’s friend and fellow musician, folk champion Pete Seeger, is there, too, in the hospital room, a second witness to nascent greatness.
Dylan offers Guthrie and Seeger his humble testament in “Song to Woody,” and Mangold isn’t about to squander the opportunity. As Edward Norton finesses the role of Seeger, brilliantly, it’s clear he sees this Minnesota kid as heir apparent to the kingdom of folk, which by ‘61 was enjoying a popular renaissance. In the 1962 Dylan song “Talkin’ New York,” one lyric has one club manager sneering: “You sound like a hillbilly. We want folksingers here.” Mangold’s film gives us Dylan on his short climb to the top of the folk mantle, hillbilly twang and all.
By 1965, the worldwide sensation had zero interest in sticking to traditional anything and had dropped that mantle off somewhere along the way. He made his artistic intentions mighty public at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, brandishing an amplified guitar, a very loud set and a fledgling rock god’s defiance.
En route to the festival climax, “A Complete Unknown,” its title pulled from the Dylan lyric in “Like a Rolling Stone,” we follow Chalamet’s troubadour in and out of two beds in particular. One belongs to activist and artist Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a character based on Suze Rotolo. (At Dylan’s request, the movie fictionalized the character, starting with her name.) The other bed belongs to writer-performer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the hottest thing in folk when she met Dylan.
The script’s geometric structure would appear to be a triangle, but there’s a crucial fourth character whose heart is likewise in for a bruising. Seeger is that fourth character, a deeply humane and upbeat spirit, who acts as Dylan’s mentor, sponsor, folk champion and eventually a discarded father figure. Norton is so spectacularly right for this role, the movie’s worth seeing just for him.
Chalamet is nearly as skillful, though the skill’s more on the surface of a pretty slippery specimen. This is a script issue, primarily. “A Complete Unknown” doesn’t risk getting its hands dirty with much of what might’ve driven Dylan towards the fame he both sought and derided. We’re spending time with a charismatic, low-key seeker of experience, and of women, yet there’s no real sense of Dylan instigating any of it. Everything just sort of comes his way because he’s Bob Dylan.
At one point, an hour or so after making love, Baez stirs in the bed Dylan has left for another corner of the room, where he’s scribbling lines on a notepad in the wee hours. What’s this? she asks, angrily. You sleep with me and then “make me watch you write?” Thing is, he’s writing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” so her objection is immediately overruled by history and the laws of the biopic.
With Chalamet and Norton, especially, doing their own singing live on set, the script’s limitations and respectful-bordering-on-timid depiction of Dylan matters not a whole lot. Judging from his talk show appearances, Norton is a first-rate mimic to begin with, and he captures Seeger’s vocal cadence with exceptional ease — and then makes him his own, affecting creation. Chalamet slightly overdoes the Dylan voice when he’s speaking; a quick re-watch of the ageless 1965 D.A. Pennebaker documentary “Don’t Look Back,” following Dylan on his UK tour, reminds us that the real Dylan didn’t generally talk like the comedians and imitators made him sound. In the movie’s musical performance scenes, though — and there are a lot of them — all is well. Chalamet lets go of all the research and preparation, and in these scenes he’s more himself, which makes his Dylan more easeful.
So it’s engaging, yes, and no, it’s not a documentary. Visually it’s too pretty, probably, for a scruffy unknown’s origin story, made with a budget estimated at close to $100 million, and an eye toward not making the Oracle of Hibbing too much of a cad or a narcissist. Just a little of both here. Which is maybe not enough? In “Don’t Look Back” we meet a different Dylan: callow, funny, a very young man feeling his way into the persona he’s cultivating while reading an awful lot of his own press clippings aloud (after putting with some astonishingly snotty English interviewers). At the end of Pennebaker’s documentary Dylan is in a taxi at night, done with his blur of a UK tour, speculating on whether he’s just had some kind of epiphany, or something. “A Complete Unknown” leaves the wondering to the audience, which few will mind, probably. The movie’s more a story of those around him, trying to get ahold of his affection or attention.
The actors, by and large, are first-rate. And the songs don’t hurt.
“A Complete Unknown” — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for language)
Running time: 2:20
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Dec. 24
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
