Aurélien NoyerJames Mangold’s Walk The Line was okay. It wasn’t by any means a great film, it wasn’t even a great music biopic… but it was okay. It used Johnny Cash’s life to tell a compelling story. It was the story of a good artist and a flawed human being, someone who had to confront his own demons to finally find peace and to stop hurting people around him, and more specifically the two women in his life, Vivian Cash and June Carter.
It was, if nothing else, a very earnest movie… which is why it was so easy for Jake Kasdan to mock it in the brilliant parody Walk Hard.
A Complete Unknown Lacks Earnestness
A Complete Unknown, also directed by James Mangold, is not that earnest. It’s actually not earnest at all. It’s a movie that fails both as a film and as a biopic because of a flaw deeply rooted in its very concept: James Mangold and his co-screenwriter Jay Cocks made a movie about an artist, not about a human being.
Sure, it’s commonplace to say that Bob Dylan is an enigma. It is true that he tried to resist any characterization that would be imposed on him, that he was reluctant to give any clear explanations about his work, that he would lie about his past. But over the years, biographers have managed to carve a rather accurate image of Dylan throughout his career, thanks to dozens and dozens of interviews with people who interacted with him.
Of course, that doesn’t give us access to Dylan’s most intimate thoughts as he was going through the upheaval that was his career in the ’60s, but that wouldn’t make Bob Dylan “a complete unknown.”
Sadly, it seems that the choice of that line as the title of Mangold’s movie was a form of lampshading. Instead of putting in the work to draw a maybe flawed but earnest portrait of Dylan at the beginning of his career, Mangold immediately gave up.
A Hollow Portrayal of Bob Dylan
As a result, the Bob Dylan portrayed in A Complete Unknown is a hollow figure. His motivations are never quite clear. Things just seem to happen to him because he’s just so talented. The people around him don’t really have any kind of real connections to him. They are simply in awe of his gift as a songwriter and bow before him. In a way, they don’t even exist… which makes the movie almost insulting towards the people depicted.
Pete Seeger is cruelly depicted as a well-meaning but completely out-of-touch old guy. Despite her accomplishments as an artist, Joan Baez is promptly relegated to being a love interest and a one-woman Bob Dylan cover band. Sylvie Russo (aka Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend in his early New York years) isn’t the woman who introduced him to French poetry or Bertolt Brecht’s theatre—she’s just an enamored muse and a pushover. Toshi Seeger isn’t a multi-talented activist, producer, filmmaker, and music scholar. She’s a mostly silent sidekick for her husband.
Misogyny and Missed Opportunities
In general, the depiction of women and the historically inaccurate love triangle in A Complete Unknown could legitimately be seen as crass misogyny, but these issues stem from the appalling idea I mentioned before.
James Mangold and Jay Cocks could have chosen to show how Dylan was incredibly charming when he wanted to be. They could have chosen to show how much his art was influenced and nourished by the people around him. They could have chosen to show how crushingly overwhelming his sudden fame must have felt. It even could have been interesting to point out the contrast between Joan Baez, the daughter of a wealthy and politically active family, and Dylan, the son of a middle-class family from rural Minnesota, in dealing with fame. They could have chosen to show how, even when he went electric, Dylan never strayed very far from his folk and blues roots.
Instead of all that, Mangold and Cocks just rehash the myth of the lonely genius, of the brilliant visionary who has to impose his vision against everyone else.
The Myth of the Lonely Genius
In that optic, it doesn’t matter that people in the early ’60s folk scene had legitimate reasons to be wary of what was at the time called pop music. The fact that the music industry at the time was overly controlling of its artists and was manufacturing careers and fads with shameless cynicism doesn’t matter. All that matters is to show Dylan as the Artist with a capital A, and all the others can only be enthralled followers or out-of-touch idiots.
Even when the movie manages to show some heartfelt moments—such as the Pete Seeger TV show where Dylan genuinely enjoys jamming with an old bluesman, or when Woody Guthrie insists that Dylan keep his harmonica at the end—they are tainted by the failed concept at the root of the movie. For instance, the cut between Dylan recording Subterranean Homesick Blues and Pete Seeger recording his TV show cruelly mocks the latter as outdated. As for the last sequence, it is a touching moment… but given the tone of the whole movie, it can be interpreted as Woody Guthrie choosing Dylan as his one and only heir, the bearer of the flame of true American music… which again is a bit insulting to all the people who kept folk music alive for many years, whether they were represented in the movie or not.
A Strong Performance Lost in a Weak Script
Apart from that, one can still praise Timothée Chalamet’s involvement in the project. He does make a convincing Dylan, especially during the music scenes where his singing and guitar playing show all the work he put in preparing for the role. But it’s even more of a shame that the screenplay doesn’t give him much to play, apart from more of the same mumbling and brooding.
I have to admit that when the project was announced, I was rather skeptical. I didn’t expect James Mangold to be able to compete with Todd Haynes’ artful and poetic depiction of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There… but I was still expecting him to make a simplistic yet touching version of Bob Dylan’s early career. After all, he had managed to find some emotional heart in projects such as Logan or Ford v Ferrari. I wasn’t expecting him to make such a hollow movie.
But it’s okay. I’m Not There still exists. Dont Look Back still exists. Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home still exists. And if you really want to see a caricature of Bob Dylan, the hilariously bad Hearts of Fire still exists. So… “want some eggs?”
