I said a few times there were movies I held off on because my girlfriend wanted to see them, and the last of those was A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic. This one is a bit of an unusual choice as her usual desires run more towards the fantasy genre with the occasional science fiction or superhero movie. I figured she was just a fan of lead actor Timothée Chalamet, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it turns out she’s also a fan of folk music. I knew she liked country, but folk? Sure, why not? I don’t mind what she wants to see since I have more fun at the movies when she comes with me, and given how many Oscars A Complete Unknown is up for, I figured (correctly) that we may not have to wait too long to see it, and we even kidded around about how many musical biopics follow a formula where the subject flashes back to how fame made them a jerk before the biggest concert of their career.
Well, the joke was on me: A Complete Unknown doesn’t follow the formula at all.
It’s 1961, and young singer/songwriter Bob Dylan (Chalamet) hits New York City with one thing on his mind: he wants to meet his musical hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), in the hospital due to an unnamed illness that has robbed the man of his ability to play music. By chance, Bob meets Pete Seeger (a soft-spoken Edward Norton) at the hospital, and when Woody requests Bob play a song for him, Pete is so impressed by the original folk song that Bob plays that Pete takes Bob home and eventually introduces Bob to the folk scene, particularly Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Bob also eventually starts dating a young activist named Sylvie (Elle Fanning), and his songs soon make him a big name in the folk music scene.
However, it would be a bit wrong to say that fame changes Bob because Bob is a bit of a jerk pretty much from the beginning, but the better way to look at him is to say he just does what he pleases and doesn’t really stop to explain himself very well. Pretty much everyone Bob knows is pushed away at one point in time or another, particularly the women Bob dates at different points. No one seems really able to guess what Bob wants or what he is even going to do, and many people seem to want to define him. Bob doesn’t care for that much, but does Bob even know what he wants for himself? That may be the real question at the center of the appropriately-titled A Complete Unknown.
However, whether that is the question or not at the center of writer/director James Mangold’s movie, it is the best way I think there is to look at it. Bob is doing jerk things almost from the very beginning. It’s the rare scene when Bob isn’t carrying a guitar or a harmonica or maybe writing something, regardless of where he is or who he is with. Some of what he does is entirely understandable, but he doesn’t explain himself at any point. He doesn’t talk about his past aside from what is probably a made-up story about spending time with a carnival. His music is his music, and he doesn’t necessarily care about pleasing anybody. This sort of attitude rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and in the hands of a lesser actor than Chalamet, he’d be too obnoxious to be even remotely likable.
So, who is Bob Dylan according to this movie? That’s the real question, and the way the movie approaches the question makes for a good deal of food for thought. At its core, A Complete Unknown is arguably more of a celebration of Bob Dylan and folk music in general. Chalamet and Barbaro both do their own singing, and both of them sound fantastic. Arguably, “Who is Bob Dylan?” has been a question that has been asked since he first hit the music scene and made a name for himself, and Mangold isn’t the first writer/director to take a shot at a Dylan biopic and try to answer that question, though his movie is far more straightforward than Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. A Complete Unknown may or may not answer that question, but it does show why Dylan is the sort of man that invites people to ask it in the first place.
Grade: A
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