A Complete Unknown

dir: James Mangold

2024

Ah, musician biopics. For some viewers, these inhabit the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno, reserved for traitors and people who pick their teeth in public.

This director previously scored big with Walk the Line, which was not only very successful, but set forth the template for all these loathsome biopics, whereby they have become parodies of themselves, and we keep lapping them up like the slavering Pavlovian dogs that we are.

Just before doing some important thing, let me think back on all the moments that brought me here. Let every song I ever wrote be inspired by something someone said, or something I saw on the way to the laundromat. Let everyone, especially my first wife, tell me I’ll never amount to nothin’ until I become the biggest star in the world. Let my inevitable descent into addiction be magically healed by the love of a good woman. And let there be a concert at the end where everyone, my true believers and my doubters, be united in celebrating the awesomeness that is me.

Because twenty years separates the release of the two films, I would not hazard a guess that Mangold has matured as a director or as a person, because, frankly, let’s be honest, none of us have particularly matured in the last twenty years unless we were zygotes when Walk the Line came out. Though I do remember that someone brought their newborn infant to the packed out screening I was at back in the day at the Nova all those years ago. That’s dedication to the Man in Black for you.

The approach, for all the bullshit I just served up in the last couple of paragraphs, is very different from what you might expect. For one thing, it covers only 4 years in the life of the legend that is Bob Dylan. Another point is that we learn practically nothing about Dylan whatsoever, other than what we pick up from how he interacts with people and how he sings.

He's hungry, at least we know that. When he arrives in New York in 1961, he seeks out Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNeery), who is dying in a hospital somewhere in New Jersey. His good friend Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) looks after him and speaks for him, translating his guttural utterances since strokes have robbed him of his elocution. Dylan plays a song honouring Guthrie, and, well, maybe they’re impressed, like we might be in the audience, that Timothée Chalamet can sing so well. He does less of an impression, and more of a personal rendition of not Dylan’s voice, but of that nasally, nagging sneer that you often hear in Dylan’s recordings, whether recent or from the “good” old days where certain people couldn’t ride the bus or vote.

The music’s exactly the same, but the sneering tone is all Chalamet. He’s so great that Guthrie even gives him his harmonica.

You might want to give that a bit of a wash.

People will doubt him, think or say out loud “who is this punk?”, then Dylan plays one of his songs, and people stare at him incredulously, because now they get it.

Having worked his way into Pete Seeger’s good graces, and therefore in the New York folk scene, Dylan goes about seducing all the right people in order to get a record deal, which he does, but he’s still not happy. They require him to just do covers, covers of well-known folk songs. The folk scene itself is depicted as a bunch of, ironically enough, deeply conservative people who just want songs to sound the same forever more, with the same instruments, same lyrics, same tempos.

It’s also very, very white, oh so white, but that’s a secondary problem. Dylan inveigles himself into the good graces of some artist with money (Elle Fanning) they call Sylvie, who he stays with, but the queen of the Village folk scene obviously must be Joan Baez (Monica Barbero), and Dylan knows he needs to get in good with her before stardom comes his way. Like most people, when she hears him playing his guitar and signing one of his songs, she looks at him with awe / disbelief, but she also stares at him as if to say “I can tell how much of a fucker you are, you won’t fool me.”

She’s great, and if she did her own signing, she sings great too. She does more of a straight imitation of Baez, down to that trademark vibrato, but their duets together (which are meant to seem spontaneous and are clearly anything but, because, hey, this is a movie, after all) are sublime, as she alternates between harmonising in higher and then lower registers as she sees fit on a song she’s never heard before.

By this time, by the time that he’s playing at the annual Newport Folk Festival everyone thinks they have Dylan’s number, or the box they need him to be in, to keep him in. Like an agent of chaos the film brings in a penpal relationship between, of all people, Dylan and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), which is, I have to say, kinda hilarious. As a director, to have become a sought after A-lister after directing a hellishly successful biopic about Johnny Cash, to then bring him in as a side-character in another biopic, is very cheeky. And I wonder if the production for a few moments even considered asking Joaquin Phoenix if he’d do it, before thinking “nah, he’s too difficult to work with these days”.

Boyd Holbrook doesn’t care. He gets to play Cash in his drunken prime, crossed with a bit of Heath Ledger’s Joker. He doesn’t give a fuck about anything, least of all the sensibilities of the blue bloods who rule the folk world with an iron fist.

You can see where this is going, I mean, even if you’ve never heard of the “traumatic” event that tore the folk community asunder, you can sense that something is coming, something that will result in a break after which nothing will be the same.

In a lazier flick, in a less competent flick made by the same director twenty years ago, you would have had people explain, possibly in voiceover, everything that the characters were thinking and doing, and why they were doing it. You would also have had people yelling at Dylan “You KNOW Bob, the times, they are a changin’!” before Dylan retires to his guitar and starts plucking out a tune, duly inspired by the moment.

You’d also have him telling people why they don’t know him at all, and how he owes them nothing, and that he needs to change what he plays because this bird has to spread its wings and fly. Maybe he should write a song about a bird spreading its wings and flying?

The film does what it does without underlining, without highlighting, and I appreciate that. I also appreciate, seeing as I am an adult in this, the so-called ‘real’ world, that when the film depicts the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Dylan on the spot writing Masters of War and playing it to an audience of concerned beatniks and folk appreciators, and Joan Baez hearing it and deciding “I must bang Bob Dylan, since we all might be dead tomorrow”, that it’s not even vaguely pretending to be truthful. As in, come on now, you’re taking the piss.

Most of the flick isn’t like that. The build up to the breach is heavily signposted, though. We have multiple indicators, where characters explicitly ask him whether he wants an electric guitar or an acoustic, and he keeps choosing the acoustic. For now.

Until he doesn’t.

We know what’s coming, because, spoiler alert, anyone who knows anything about American music since the 1960s knows about the ruckus that happened when Dylan went electric. But it really is treated like the biggest deal in the whole wide world, and then like something trivial that happened to a bunch of people that were really fixated on their petty thing, after which they shrugged their shoulders and returned to their regular programming.

But we know what a betrayal it much have been, to people who thought they had Dylan’s measure, who maybe felt they had to control him for a little bit longer in order to feather their own nests. But Dylan, as depicted here, didn’t care about any of it. He didn’t care about the need to keep everything quiet and pleasant, or whether it would adversely impact on an insular scene, or the political / protesting stuff, or any of it. And it’s not even a choice between the “Old” and the “Young” anymore

It had to be about him. You don’t put out 55 goddamn albums over a sixty year plus career by doing twee covers of Mother may I have another scone? or Those corporations sometimes do less than ideal things and other of folk music’s greatest hits. No, you go your own way and create some absolute classics, and a whole bunch of duds as well (like, maybe the Christmas album wasn’t the greatest idea, champ).

I write all of this as someone who doesn’t even really like Bob Dylan that much. I am no keeper of the eternal flame or fanboy, at all. At All. Never owned a single Dylan record, tape or CD in my life. If a flick can get me to engage with a story about someone I don’t even like, and yet I find it compelling for those two plus hours, it’s doing something right. It’s irritating to be put in the position of complimenting Timothée Chalamet as well. So young, so arrogant. But he’s pretty solid in a flick that doesn’t work without him.

I really enjoyed it. It was far more enjoyable than having to listen to Bob Dylan albums instead.

8 times I prefer silence to Bob Dylan’s singing out of 10

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“Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they're not asking where the songs come from. They're asking why the songs didn't come to them.” – they just hate you because they ain’t you - A Complete Unknown

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2538325529