Review: A Complete Unknown

Image courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Although it's a bit on the nose, there's a scene in James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown" that adequately sums up the film and the life of its subject, troubadour Bob Dylan. 

"I wish they'd just let me be," he says to a stranger, who turns out to be Mike Bloomfield, of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, in an elevator. "Be what?" Bloomfield asks. "Whatever it is that they don't want me to be." 

In this case, what they want him to be is an acoustic folk singer, but Dylan later shocks them all when he goes electric in an iconic moment at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965. In the late 1970s, his music took a religious turn. In recent years, he has recorded American standards. Whenever people want one Bob Dylan, he gives them another.

Although Todd Haynes' remarkable "I'm Not There" is still the definitive statement on the chameleonic folk singer-turned rock star because that picture captured his essence through a series of vignettes portraying Dylan as all of us, Mangold's film portrays him as a more singular being, one who doesn't take kindly to direction, even when it's provided kindly - in this case, through the mentorship of Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).

Dylan has been portrayed many times on film - whether it's Haynes' phantasmagoria, Martin Scorsese's straightforward "No Direction Home" or the more pranksterish "Rolling Thunder Revue." There's the more sarcastic and prickly Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker's "Don't Look Back" and even the wacky "Renaldo and Clara." Timothee Chalamet does an outstanding job of channeling Dylan in Mangold's film, even convincingly singing the songs himself. 

Like many films about unique artists, "A Complete Unknown" covers a specific period in the artist's life - in this case, from his mysterious arrival in New York City in the early 1960s up until that groundbreaking moment at the Newport Folk Festival. In the film's beginning, Dylan shows up at a hospital to meet his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), and serenades him to "Song to Woody," which he wrote, and impressing Seeger, who's there to visit.

Seeger takes Dylan in and helps him to get some gigs, where he runs into Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), with whom he has an on-again-off-again relationship, and meets Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a fictionalized version of Dylan's first New York girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who is on the cover of Dylan's first great album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan."

The film portrays Dylan as a genius who is quick with a barb - he says that Baez's music sounds like an "oil painting at the dentist's office" - and is not above using his friends occasionally (he defends allowing Baez to cover his "Blowin' in the Wind" because it will help to raise his profile). There's a warmth to his friendship with Seeger, which makes their eventual clash all the more heartbreaking.

While Mangold's film may not be as inventive as "I'm Not There," it's an engaging music biopic with a terrific lead performance, great supporting performances (Norton especially), a lot of great music, a compelling depiction of the New York City folk scene of the early 1960s, unique takes on historic events (the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance), and a few surprise cameos of legends - Johnny Cash and Dave Von Ronk, to name a few.

There are a lot of great moments involving the creation of Dylan's music, from a rousing moment when he performs "The Times They are a Changin'" for the first time to an audience at the Newport festival to smaller moments, such as when Al Kooper introduces the organ in "Like a Rolling Stone" or when Dylan buys a siren whistle on the streets of New York and puts it to good use in "Highway 61 Revisited."

"I'm Not There" not only remains the definitive Dylan movie, but likely the best and most unique movie ever made about a musician. Therefore, I thought that making a straightforward Dylan biopic was probably unnecessary after that former film did such a fantastic job of capturing his essence. But I was pleasantly surprised by Mangold's film. It does about as good a job as one could do in trying to sum up the life - or, at least part of it - of someone who has gone out of his way to defy classification and easy summarization.