A Complete Unknown review: blowing in the wind

For every triumph like Barbara Streisand inhabiting the spirit of Fanny Brice in Funny Girl or the brilliance of NWA origin story Straight Outta Compton, the music biopic route is littered with roadkill like the straight-washing Bohemian Rhapsody or offensively naff Amy Winehouse misfire Back to Black.

Credit where it’s due, at least Walk the Line director James Mangold – returning to familiar territory with a different Johnny Cash in tow (Boyd Holbrook) – and his co-writer Jay Cocks (Silence) avoid the standard biopic pitfall with their eight Oscars nomination-attracting young Bob Dylan story, A Complete Unknown. Rather than cramming their way through a Wikipedia entry, they instead land on a moment in time.

It’s just that the moment, as interesting as it was in reality, is but a walking shadow here, to borrow a turn of phrase from another bard of note. And as gifted a young actor as Timothée Chalamet undoubtedly is, wholeheartedly evoking Dylan whilst also singing impressively, the film’s all sound but very little fury.

Watch the trailer for A Complete Unknown below.

Meagre lines

Much like the ruffled protagonist of the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, which memorably teased Dylan’s Greenwich Village uprising at the Gaslight, we meet Chalamet’s version just as the revolutionary ’60s are kicking off.

Hitching a lift to Manhattan with little more than his guitar case, our first view of him is a backlit mess of dark curls as he perches on other folks’ luggage. Hoping to make it to Greystone hospital to pay tribute to rapidly fading folk music star Woody Guthrie (a thankless task for Scoot McNairy, even before we get into the disability representation debate), he’s duly informed that he’s on the wrong side of the Hudson.

Schlepping it to New Jersey and finally connecting with his hero, he performs ‘Song to Woody’ for him and Guthrie’s other (regular) visitor, Pete Seeger, an aggressively twee depiction of folk’s elder statesman by Edward Norton, who grates throughout. Of course, they spy his talent immediately, as does Columbia Records manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler, also playing it irksomely cartoonish) upon spying him at open mic night at Gerde’s Folk City.

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It’s here that Dylan first crosses paths with the already big deal Joan Baez. As portrayed by an outstanding Monica Barbaro, she immediately steals the film from Chalamet and everyone else, nimbly managing a fleet-footed turn that allows for deeper meaning between the plodding screenplay’s meagre lines, regularly inventing stuff that never happened but not knowing what to do with them. Don’t expect much in the way of Baez’s outspoken support for equal rights. That’s pretty much done and dusted after one clip of the pair attending a rally, with no mention of her Mexican heritage.

While New York’s handsomely recreated, it’s almost as blindingly white as the alternate reality presented by Friends. What few people of colour there are here are mercilessly pushed to the margins. Despite the lumbering, near-two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Eriko Hatsune’s Toshi Seeger barely registers beyond ‘Seeger’s supportive housewife’, through no fault of her own, despite being an integral player in founding the Newport Folk Festival and a seminal filmmaker recording its import. Real-life blues guitarist Big Bill Morganfield has a desultory moment as a fictional player. Almost comically, while we’re shown a newsflash of Walter Cronkite announcing JFK’s assassination, removing his glasses, the murder of Martin Luther King is dashed off as a mere footnote.

Cold War sparks

For the most part, A Complete Unknown is chronically uninterested in the politics of the time, all the weirder given they’re sewn into Dylan’s lyrics. Unfortunately, this lack of curiosity, paired with a steadfast refusal to get under the revered singer-songwriter’s skin, is exacerbated by a genuinely intriguing moment in act one.

While poor Elle Fanning is saddled with a dreary cut-and-paste girlfriend template – a disservice to real-life artist Suze Rotolo – sparks fly when she heads overseas for a few weeks and an impetuously self-centred Dylan is left stewing in a fortress of Chinese takeaway cartons.

The so-called Cold War heats up in a flash to almost nuclear during the Cuban missile crisis. Mangold finally catches an electric riff, as the terrifying news of impending doom radiates from countless apartment windows lit with an eerie TV glow. He imagines a scenario in which a panicking Baez packs her bags. Attempting to get the hell off the island, she instead falls into the Gaslight bunker where Dylan is performing. Largely thanks to Barbaro, their subsequent frustrated affair introduces some life into this stilted affair. Alas, the sequence sets an early high bar and it’s all downhill into rote from there.

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Chalamet does a grand enough job with what little is there, if hardly Oscar-deserving, but Superstar filmmaker Todd Hayne’s I’m Not There remains the seminal Dylan biopic, far better suggesting the artist formerly known as Robert Zimmerman’s alchemical shimmering via a rotating cast including Australian star Cate Blanchett.

While mega-fans will no doubt relish watching Dylan’s Newport rebellion, bringing a rock sensibility to folk’s hush-hush temple spurred on by a drunken Cash in Mangold’s timeline tweak, A Complete Unknown is mostly blowing in the wind. There’s but the vaguest sense of history spinning and Dylan’s place within that milieu, but to borrow from Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature-winning no-show speech, ‘It’s probably buried so deep that they don’t even know it’s there.’

A Complete Unknown is now in cinemas.