James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown rests on three fairly safe assumptions about our culture. First, that many people enjoy conventional biopics. Second, that many people enjoy the actor Timothée Chalamet. And third, that many people buy into the idea of Bob Dylan as a man of such inscrutable genius that he is beyond mortal ken. Therefore, it figures that A Complete Unknown, a highly typical biopic starring Chalamet as young Dylan, would be doing pretty well in theaters. Which it is.
But I dislike all of those things, so it also figures that I’m one of the naysayers who was quietly grousing to myself in the back row. It’s my experience that biopics, when they follow the genre formula, manage to avoid the most startling and illuminating aspects of any given human’s life in favor of serving some ideologically favored narrative the public is already presold on. And in that regard, A Complete Unknown can stand as Exhibit A.
With a script by Jay Cocks and director James Mangold, A Complete Unknown is based on the 2015 nonfiction book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald. So the material is already focused on the preferred section of Dylan’s life, the most legendary part. It starts when he arrives in New York City and sets out to visit the dying folk singer Woody Guthrie in the hospital, the hugely influential singer-songwriter who did so much to popularize folk music. It ends with Dylan’s famously controversial appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he scandalized the folk music community by plugging in his electric guitar.
Slender mop-haired Chalamet looks enough like Dylan to pass and seems to have no trouble affecting Dylan’s flat, sullen stare, Guthrie-inspired nasal twang, and general air of enormous self-regard. To see how highly punchable a personality young Dylan was, you can watch him in all his bratty, puckish glory in D. A. Pennebaker’s landmark…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
