As a genre, the musical biographical picture sucks. Tied down by a reverence for the artist they intend to depict, these movies on the whole are dull, formulaic and find their only joy in the rote repetition of music mythology as historical fact. For the most part, you’d be better off binging old music videos. This history of failure is why it’s so surprising that “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold (“Ford v Ferrari”), is somewhat OK.
The first ingredient is the surprisingly well-acted performances. Timothée Chalamet (“Dune: Part Two”) isn’t so much a carbon-copy imitation as an impressive evocation of Bob Dylan’s odd movements, near-unintelligible speech and gravelly voice. It’s subtle, which is especially remarkable considering how easy it is to take Dylan’s quirks and raise them over the top. Chalamet’s singing is similarly effective; while no Dylan fan would ever confuse the performances of the two, the musical scenes are pleasant and evoke — without replicating — what makes a Bob Dylan song feel so gripping. In a particularly memorable scene, Chalamet stares down the camera while warbling out “Masters of War” in a dingy dive bar. Like most biopics, the best part of “A Complete Unknown” is listening to these songs at movie theater volume, even if they’re just close covers.
Even more impressive is Monica Barbaro (“At Midnight”), who plays fellow folk powerhouse Joan Baez and might give an even better performance than Chalamet. Baez’s sweet, unbelievably clear soprano feels even more difficult to imitate than Dylan’s rough-and-tumble rasp, but Barbaro’s natural singing talent pushes her over the edge of believability. Together, the pair’s duets are strong enough to help an audience unfamiliar with their real-life collaboration understand why they complement each other so perfectly.
However, well-acted impressions are standard among Hollywood-level biopics, so what elevates this film? It’s not stellar direction, visual splendor or even a well-paced plot. For the most part, “A Complete Unknown” is a bog-standard Hollywood film with simplistic static camera work and a standard script structure. Instead, it’s simply that Mangold works with inherently odd material.
A little context for a non-Dylan superfan: In 2004, Bob Dylan published a memoir of his early career titled “Chronicles: Volume One.” The book is great, filled to the brim with the strange metaphor-laced sentences that the singer is so known for, while still pulling together a cohesive picture of his life in the East Village. The trouble is that most of the stories inside are either exaggerated or completely false. Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin called it a “pack of lies” and Dylan himself claimed that his strategy for writing the book was to “take some of the stuff that people think is true and … build a story around that.” Why did he do this? Was it a joke? A form of internal myth-making? A way to augment his art by adding a fantastical persona behind his song writing? The answer is likely a bit of all of the above, but more importantly, it’s what he’s always done.
Bob Dylan’s legal name is Robert Zimmerman. Stage names are common enough for performing artists, but unlike most singers, Dylan tries to convince you that “Bob Dylan” is completely real, even after the show is over. Surprisingly, the film depicts the turmoil this strange persona-building has on Dylan’s personal relationships. To both his love interests, Dylan claims that he learned guitar in the circus, and both women refuse to believe his story. In a lesser film more concerned with box-office appeal to Bob Dylan fans, these conversations would never have happened, or even worse, would have been depicted as fact. Instead, Mangold addresses the fact that Dylan isn’t who he insists on being — taking a step past what’s expected of him. It’s a metatextual challenge: how does one venerate the artist while acknowledging that they aren’t who they say they are, without taking away from the beloved persona? Mangold isn’t the first to cover this ground, but to do so with arguably the most influential American singer-songwriter of all time takes some guts.
While the film succeeds in outlining the nuances of Dylan’s character, it falls short in many other areas. Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”), the much older folk singer set up as Dylan’s mentor, is comparatively butchered in his depiction. Seeger is the Mr. Rogers of his musical world — wishing for peace, love and non-violence. While it’s true that Seeger wasn’t a violent man, the film neuters his passion for justice by turning him into a passive and idealistic dreamer, portraying Dylan as the real face of progress in the new era of the ’60s. Seeger wasn’t exactly rock ’n’ roll’s biggest fan, but it is disingenuous to say that he alone was the barrier between Dylan becoming one of the greatest artists of all time. His role in pulling the plug on Dylan’s electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, as portrayed in the film, is likely fanciful and at best exaggerated. While artistic license is understandable, it’s typically taken to add depth and new ideas to a story. Here, Seeger is portrayed so lazily that it removes the ambiguity of the real events.
Mangold’s black-and-white characterization is ultimately what leads to the film’s failure to be truly memorable. Mangold proposes an interesting idea, questioning how Dylan’s constant performance as a persona affects his personal life, but quickly abandons it. This movie has immense potential to elevate the biopic genre and question how the audiences could possibly expect to know anything about performers who actively hide themselves. Instead, Mangold takes the easy path. The film falls back on genre clichés, putting all of the personal, ideological and artistic weight of an entire person on a single performance. The film’s ending completely buys into the mythology of Bob Dylan, showing him not as a real human made of flesh and bone, but instead as a folk figure disappearing alone into the country.
“A Complete Unknown” does more than it has any right to do, but it still fails to deliver on its promise. A true Dylan fan might get some catharsis out of it — we ourselves walked out of the theater singing “Like A Rolling Stone.” But 140 minutes of Chalamet singing directly to the camera as Bob Dylan would have been just as worthwhile as this film.
Daily Arts Writers Grace Sielinski and Zach Loveall can be reached at gsielins@umich.edu and zloveall@umich.edu respectively.
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