‘A Complete Unknown’ Doesn’t Explain Bob Dylan’s Enigmatic Place in Pop Culture

There is a particular scene in too many Hollywood biopics that goes like this: While the brilliant-but-prickly hero is splashing paint on a canvas or solving an unsolvable math equation or writing a protest song that will define the ‘60s counterculture, the camera cuts to a close-up of a secondary character—usually an underwritten girlfriend—staring at them in slack-jawed awe. The intention, of course, is to convey the subject of the biopic’s genius. But it’s almost always a cheat designed to tip us to the idea that we’re in the presence of greatness, even if the screenplay has failed to make the case. And it happens at least a dozen times in James Mangold’s new movie about Bob Dylan’s transformation from acoustic folkie troubadour to defiant, badass electric messiah at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

I suspect that many Dylan fans flocking to the multiplex over the holidays will have a similar look on their faces while watching A Complete Unknown. After all, it’s hard to think of a more (rightly) celebrated 20^th-century artist than Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota. Or a fanbase as pre-sold on its idol’s artistry. Timothée Chalamet—who has Dylan’s poses, croaky singing voice, and mumbled non sequiturs down cold—does as good a job as any actor could given the difficulty of pinning down such an impossible-to-pin-down figure. But over and over again, Mangold keeps stacking the deck with clichés until the film ends up feeling as dishonest as Dylan’s own self-mythologizing tall tales about growing up in a traveling carnival.

Maybe that was the point. Any movie about Dylan is tricky to pull off. The singer isn’t the type of person who can be easily explained or summed up in two hours. He is one of the most enigmatic figures in American pop culture. Even at 83, he’s still a mystery. And Dylan met with the filmmaker and offered his own notations on the script. If ever there was a character who deserved a more nuanced treatment—without going the full Todd Haynes I’m Not There route—it’s Dylan. Instead, we get a safe, by-the-numbers biopic. Therein lies the challenge and ultimate shortcoming of the movie. The point of a straightforward hagiography is to give the audience a better understanding of the subject. As it is, Dylan’s a riddle throughout, despite the envious gazes of folk legend Pete Seeger (an excellently square Edward Norton), Dylan’s on-again-off-again musical and romantic partner Joan Baez (a very good Monica Barbaro), and his fictionalized, put-upon bohemian Greenwich Village girlfriend (Elle Fanning, doing what she can with an undercooked role). Ultimately, the movie is a surprisingly shallow and toothless exercise in Boomer nostalgia.

Kicking off with the nineteen-year-old Dylan’s arrival in New York City in 1961, the film hits all of the most iconic and well-documented moments of the singer’s American origin story: The visit to Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in a New Jersey hospital, where he’s gone to “catch a spark” of the folk legend’s genius even though Guthrie is no longer able to speak; the protective father-son relationship with Seeger, who takes the blazing young talent under his wing even though he’s not quite sure where the kid’s headed next; the devouring opportunism of his ambitious, star-making manager, Albert Grossman (a cartoonish Dan Fogler); the half-hearted romances that Dylan’s too driven to give himself fully to; the rapid ascent from coffee-house performer to Columbia Records sensation and generational avatar; and finally, the headstrong rebel who won’t be told what kind of music to play and ends up being called a “Judas” by the Kingston Trio-loving college students at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where the story decides to skid to its finale.