A Complete Unknown gives a transcendent musician an inert biopic feature

My personal favorite Bob Dylan song is "All I Really Want to Do." This tune first hit my eardrums during Honey Boy's closing scene and immediately stood out to me as something special. Dylan's aching vocals perfectly pair with lyrics deeply conscious of all the ways friendships or relations go south. "I ain’t lookin to…beat or cheat or mistreat you,” Dylan reassures another person in this song, “simplify you, classify you/Deny, defy or crucify you”. So many relationships in this world are self-serving and destructive. The little chuckle and quasi-yodeling Dylan incorporates into his vocals quietly rebuke against this grim status quo.

Despite recognizing that inescapable truth, “All I Really Want to Do” still exhibits a profound commitment to being “friends with” someone. There’s a pragmatism captivatingly blended with optimism in this auditory yearning for human connection. It was neat to hear the song briefly performed in director James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. The film’s iteration of Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) performs this ditty at an eventually doomed concert performance with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). However, tapping my toes and fingers to a familiar beloved tune couldn’t suddenly make this scene captivating. Nor could the other iconic Dylan tunes performed in A Complete Unknown salvage this movie.

Mangold’s return to the music biopic genre after Walk the Line nearly two decades ago seriously lacks verve. To put it bluntly, A Complete Unknown is the subpar Olympus has Fallen to Better Man’s infinitely more inspired White House Down.

Right away, A Complete Unknown gets off on a deeply wrong foot as 19-year-old Dylan arrives in Greenwich Village for the first time. Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael try accentuating Dylan arriving into a wintery bustle of chaos woefully unprepared. However, the duo’s camerawork is much too crisp and pristine looking. This vision of Greenwich Village lacks exciting, jagged imperfections. Every prop and backdrop seems like it’s been washed spotless before the camera landed on it. The screenplay from Mangold and Jay Cocks wants to immediately establish Dylan as an underdog in unfamiliar messy surroundings. Instead, this musician’s new confines look thoroughly run-of-the-mill. The imagery doesn’t even properly exude the chilly weather Dylan’s navigating!

Cocks and Mangold proceed to chronicle Dylan’s life from 1961 to 1965 super traditionally. The plot is mostly guided by the threadbare narrative grinding to a halt to allow Chalamet to perform recognizable Dylan ditties. At times, A Complete Unknown begins to evoke a limply realized concert film! This folk singer broke all the rules 60 years ago. In contrast, A Complete Unknown stridently follows the hallmarks of mainstream music biopics right down to its linear storytelling approach and frustratingly apolitical overtones. Occasionally, this is unintentionally amusing. When Chalamet first walks out on-screen as a “moody” version of Bob Dylan, my brain immediately leaped to “this is a dark period!”

Mostly, A Complete Unknown is utterly tedious. The routine hagiographic approach to Bob Dylan is largely responsible for that. Every time he gets up on stage, Dylan makes history. Every tune coming out of his lips instantly becomes a chart-topper. Even the climactic introduction of him performing electric guitar at a folk music festival elicits as many cheers from the audience as boos. There’s little variety in his behavior nor minimal growth to make him a compelling standalone figure. Any deeper interrogations of Dylan or fresh perspectives on his art are left “blowin’ in the wind.” To do so would prove too challenging for A Complete Unknown’s aesthetic.

That aesthetic often evokes subpar fan-service-oriented blockbuster cinema even more than, say, Straight Outta Compton or Bob Marley: One Love. The same creative instincts fueling the inexplicable “superhero landing” callback in The Adam Project inform A Complete Unknown’s approach to Dylan’s life. Characters talk about song titles or eventually famous musicians while practically winking at the audience. Recognizable supporting characters like Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) emerge on-screen as moving wax figures, not believable human beings. Mangold knows the events and names that defined Dylan’s earliest years as a musician. However, he doesn’t have much to add beyond regurgitating the existence of these events and names.

This incredibly broad approach soaks into other aspects of Unknown, such as groan-worthy dialogue like manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) remarking to musician Seeger "This is your dream...folk music resonating with everybody!" as they both watch Dylan captivate a crowd. Even more befuddling is a strange bit of “comedy” stemming from an inebriated Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) trying to move his car blocking Dylan’s motorcycle. The editing from Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris, not to mention lines like Cash’s “Do you want a Bugle” inquiry to Dylan, clearly hope to elicit laughs from audiences. Instead, it just comes off as a derivative approach to depicting alcoholism on-screen. What are these gags out of a subpar 1980s comedy doing in a major 2024 movie?

A Complete Unknown’s tepid storytelling sensibilities are especially apparent with its various women characters. Particularly breaking my heart is Toshi Seeger (Eriko Hatsune), Pete's loyal wife. She has maybe five lines in the whole movie, but she's constantly lurking in the background, always supporting Pete without a discernible personality to her name. Any time the camera cut back to her, I yearned to know anything about her story. The best movies (like the works of Greta Gerwig, Abbas Kiarostami, or Agnes Varda) make every character, no matter their screen time, feel like they have a rich history extending far beyond the frame. Seeger never registers like that despite Hatsune clearly having the talent to handle more weighty material.

More prominent ladies don’t have much more to do in A Complete Unknown. Principal love interest Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) largely just stares silently, tears bubbling in her eyes, watching Dylan perform. Fanning is a gifted enough performer to make these displays of vulnerability moving. However, she can’t make Cocks and Mangold's poor writing work. Inevitably, she’s forced to spout the same generic inspirational dialogue every love interest of an eccentric male historical figure must deliver in these biopics. Like Joan Baez, Monica Barbaro shows a gift for carrying a tune and some fantastic physical acting. Like Fanning, though, she has nothing to do with the screenplay.

99% of moviegoers showing up for A Complete Unknown won’t care about any of that, though. Everyone is talking about Unknown because Paul Muad'Dib Atreides is playing Bob Dylan. Timothee Chalamet does a great Dylan impression without question. His continued gift for communicating so much with just his pupils (like in Call Me by Your Name’s final scene) also works perfectly for an angst-ridden musician. Still, Chalamet’s work on-screen fails to really resonate as special. It’s a great echo of the past, but the best biopic leading man turns are more than that.

Denzel Washington in Malcolm X, Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network, Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs, and David Oyelowo in Selma, these performances all not only captured real-life men but added to them. There were extra dimensions of vulnerability, humanity, and other traits that ensured these performances could carve out their own artistic legacy. A Complete Unknown’s lackluster script fails to give Chalamet a chance to do that. He’s got the voice and mannerisms down, but nothing else about Chalamet's on-screen work stuck with me as profoundly as his Little Women or Bones and All turns. Also, A Complete Unknown’s flat, straightforward shooting style means it takes forever to buy Chalamet’s take on Dylan’s famously idiosyncratic vocals. This is why Todd Haynes embraced a stylized varied visual aesthetic for his Dylan movie, I’m Not There. An outsized musician needs a feature at least partially divorced from reality.

My favorite musicians often sound like they’re singing directly to me. Even a pop singer like Taylor Swift's greatest tunes like “Tim McGraw” and “Betty” sound like they're being performed in my living room. The same is true for Bob Dylan’s deeply intimate tracks. Despite how many countless people his tunes have resonated with, it sounds like he carved out those lyrics for me. That just makes it extra disappointing that A Complete Unknown chronicles five years of the man’s life in such a generic fashion. This is a movie desperate to not alienate anyone. In the process, it wastes the precious time of deeply committed actors and craftspeople (the costumes especially look great), not to mention paying moviegoers. To paraphrase my favorite Dylan song, “All I really want to doooooo….is watch Inside Llewyn Daivs to wash A Complete Unknown’s taste out of my mouth.”