A Complete Unknown – A Moderate Musical Misfire (Early Review)

James Mangold’s 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line wasn’t the first paint-by-numbers exploration of a musician’s life, but its status as an emblem of everything these films can (under)achieve was forever cemented two years later with the release of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. The impact of Jake Kasdan’s parody film may not have deterred audiences from spending heaps of money in the intervening decade-and-a-half on countless films that exploit every single cliché it lampoons—Bohemian Rhapsody still holds several box office records and, somehow, four Oscars—but there remains, to this day, the persistent shadow of John C. Reilly’s goofy mug hanging over every such film that banks on the viewer’s recognition and loyalty towards a musical brand they already worship.

By all accounts, Mangold of all people should have been wary to revisit such waters (particularly in a year that has already given audiences a one-two punch of failed efforts to tarnish the legacies of Bob Marley and Amy Winehouse), but after a disastrous attempt to take a franchise mantle from Steven freaking Spielberg of all people, it perhaps makes sense that the typically reliable journeyman would find solace in something of a quasi-franchise that he helped to solidify for the new century. The man even felt the need to return to old comforts with the presence of good ol’ Johnny, but Mr. Cash is only one of many bite-sized players in A Complete Unknown, the standardized overview of one Bob Dylan. Unfortunately, these side players’ status as passing fancies comes to be wholeheartedly shared by the shade-donning enigma on the film’s poster.

This time, Mangold has learned from the reputation of a sub-genre he partially cultivated, and his focus lies squarely on a five-year period in Dylan’s life: the early 1960s, in which the folk crooner (Chalamet) has begun to break into the industry. Not content to be yet another folk star rehashing classic tunes, Dylan’s meteoric rise gives him the inspiration to start experimenting with a more electronic sound, much to the chagrin of the classic folk scene. In the intervening time, it’s Dylan’s contentious relationships with artist Sylvie Russo (Fanning) and frequent collaborator Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) that will (supposedly) provide insight into the boorish man behind the music.

In choosing to avoid the cradle-to-grave narrative of a typical musical biopic, Mangold has already set his sights towards a less common and more creatively rich well of psychological analysis for his lead; he even sidestepped the cliché of naming the film either after the artist themselves or one of their albums/songs (we’ll give him a pass for a lyric on the chorus)! This five-year run is all audiences are afforded to get a peek into the cryptic poet with the guitar, but Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks never find any layers to that mystery, instead confusing lifelessness with obscurity. In our brief time with Dylan (brief relative to the artist’s life, though not to the film’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour length), Mangold never demonstrates how or why he is so inscrutable; just that he is. One could argue that this is the point, but the repetitiveness of the film’s structure and shallowness of its interest in the folk music arena in which Dylan operates never comes to translate anyone’s sense of care onto the viewer.

Most of A Complete Unknown can be boiled down to this: Dylan practices a song that everybody loves, he smokes a cigarette and says something discourteous, Baez calls him an asshole, and he performs onstage to a loving crowd. Rinse and repeat. For all of the film’s many stage performances, though, Mangold’s insistence on Dylan’s impenetrability carries over into its glib understanding of folk culture, thus making his later rallies against the traditionalist scene seem entirely hollow. Mangold never offers up a strong view of what folk music is like at the time of Dylan’s entry, nor what makes him special; by the time he’s disrupting the system, leaving audiences puzzled at what exactly he’s disrupting, in spite of the fact that we’ve heard him perform these songs in front of crowds some four or five times by this point.

If a standard musical biopic serves any tangible purpose, however, it’s primarily as an awards vehicle for its leading star. Chalamet, in this respect, puts in an effortful turn with a very commendable Bob Dylan impression. With a persona as easy to caricature as Dylan’s, none would envy Chalamet’s task of trying not to appear as if doing a bit on SNL, and his consistent grumbling is largely committed. That said, the precision of his physical and vocal quirks indicate a stark difference between performing self-consciousness and a self-conscious performer, as Chalamet’s measured mannerisms find him unable to disappear into a role whose surrounding shallow elements only serve to continually remind audiences of the artifice of this endeavour.

It would be impossible to discuss A Complete Unknown without addressing the Todd Haynes-shaped elephant in the room, as James Mangold’s struggles are multiplied tenfold by the simple fact that we already had a Bob Dylan film that gets to the heart of his ambiguity (2007’s I’m Not There)—not by way of superficial distance, but by diving into that ambiguity head-first with an overtly experimental framework. Mangold, on the other hand, however indebted he feels to Robert Altman (as if a Nashville comparison would do this film any favours…), simply can’t explore a figure this intentionally obscure in the sort of holistic sense most beneficial to viewing Dylan’s place within the folk music industry. Instead, he resorts to a more oblique but no less uninspired “play the hits” mindset; the least he attempts to do is give us an understanding of those hits, but his drive to match his subject’s slanted disposition without finding the purpose in that attitude leaves A Complete Unknown to wholeheartedly live up to its title.

still courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

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Julian Malandruccolo

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