A Complete Unknown

As long as there are iconic musicians, there will be musician biopics. This year has brought four new additions to that class and while I haven’t yet seen all of them, it feels safe to declare James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown the best of the bunch. This film dramatizes the emergence and success experienced by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan from 1961 to 1965.

Mangold already made one of the better musician biopics in 2005’s Walk the Line, a drama about Johnny and June Cash that generated big profits and won an Oscar for leading lady Rese Witherspoon. Whereas that one spanned decades to cover Cash’s prominent ups and downs, this one restrains itself to the aforementioned few years in which Dylan went from a nobody with a notebook and guitar to an American icon.

Making the most of his time in the limelight, Timothée Chalamet portrays Dylan and proves to be a better fit than you might expect. The actor pulls off Dylan’s effortless look and nasal sound, which is essential because it’s tough to imagine anyone enduring two hours and twenty minutes of a bad Bob Dylan impression.

Our introduction to Dylan comes in his arrival to New York, where he asks at a bar where he can find the hospital where the stricken folk singer Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is staying. There, Dylan pays his respects and shares a song with the now-debilitated, non-verbal folk icon, who is simultaneously being visited by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who we’ve been introduced to via his contempt of Congress charges. Dylan impresses Seeger and then gets to crash on his couch, establishing an influential mentor-mentee relationship at the heart of this film.

Before long, Dylan is performing in New York City clubs and having his songs covered by Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) prior to even recording them himself. Dylan’s complex relationship of Baez is among the film’s interests. So too is his romance with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a renamed version of Dylan’s somewhat on-off girlfriend during these years. But unlike Walk the Line, this film does not have an enduring love at its heart. Dylan’s great love is music and the world mostly loves him back for that.

The standard issue musician biopic has become overly familiar this century, as the beats are almost always the same. Opposition. Surprise. Success. Change. No one tells the story of an unsuccessful singer, unless it’s the invention of the Coen brothers or the terrific 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Mangold is a good enough filmmaker to keep A Complete Unknown from settling into routine mediocrity. It helps that he has an especially compelling subject in Dylan. It also helps that Chalamet and Norton are committed to the production, each delivering one of the better performances of their, respectively, fifteen and thirty years in the business.

Both turns will draw recognition this awards season in the two male acting categories, each already having generated a number of deserved nominations. I kind of doubt the recognition for A Complete Unknown will go any further than those nominations, but who foresaw Rami Malek going the distance for Bohemian Rhapsody or that middling Queen biopic grossing nearly a billion dollars worldwide? If the public takes to A Complete Unknown, that will help its chances and a Golden Globe win for Chalamet over both Adrien Brody and Ralph Fiennes could start shifting the tides of what appears to be the most competitive of this year’s Oscar races.

Chalamet has had some box office success of late, as the star of the Warner Bros. tentpoles Dune, Dune: Part Two, and, in between them, Wonka. No one would argue the actor is the primary reason for any of those movies’ commercial success, but their high quality is not unrelated to Chalamet’s talent. Talent alone does not explain the success Chalamet has had. The actor has thrived largely by collaborating with proven filmmakers, repeatedly teaming with Luca Guadagnino and Greta Gerwig as well as linking up with the dependable likes of Wes Anderson and Adam McKay, in addition to the aformentioned Warner hits from the never disappointing Denis Villeneuve and Paul King.

A Complete Unknown might be Chalamet’s biggest test as a movie star, or at least on par with the challenges of Wonka that he met a year ago. This time, Chalamet does not have to dance, only sing and talk, albeit in the unmistakable way of one of the 20th century’s most famous and celebrated musicians. The performance is absolutely on point, mumbly and genuine. Mangold and his co-writer Jay Cocks avoid painting Dylan as simply a genius. They acknowledge his less than charming demeanor in his personal relationships and the consequences of him putting his music above all else.

Dylan’s first years in the music business do not appear to be full of adversity, a fact that leads Mangold and Cocks to settle on the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as the dramatic climax of the film. That performance is at the heart of the Wikipedia entry titled “Electric Dylan controversy”, which tries to make sense of the boos that Dylan may or may not have elicited at that festival by evolving to more of a rock sound with electric instruments. This tumultous finale feels like one of the less authentic moments of A Complete Unknown and is one of a number of scenes that had me trying not to think of Walk Hard, the musician biopic parody I inevitably always compare true musician biopics to. If Walk Hard most directly lampooned Mangold’s Walk the Line, it makes sense that the director’s comparable latest effort would produce further evocations. For that matter, Complete Unknown features Cash quite a bit and even gives him the film’s biggest laugh. No, Joaquin Phoenix does not reprise the role, which instead reunites Mangold with his Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny actor Boyd Holbrook, who is surprisingly much more visually convincing as Cash than Phoenix ever was.

Taking a more cautious approach than 20th Century Fox did with Walk the Line nearly twenty years ago, Searchlight will debut A Complete Unknown in limited release on Christmas Day with the expectation of expansion in tandem with the presumed awards recognition.