Beyond Here Lies Nothing

My thoughts on A Complete Unknown

Over the years, there have been any number of attempts to take Bob Dylan, arguably the greatest and certainly the most enigmatic of post-war American musical artists, and explore/exploit both his artistry and mystique in cinematic terms in both documentaries and straightforward narratives. The best of these films—of which I would include Todd Haynes’s audacious I’m Not There, Martin Scorsese’s droll documentary Rolling Thunder Revue (a playful remix of Dylan’s own self-directed film Renaldo and Clara) and the flawed-but-fascinating mind-bender Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan himself both co-wrote and starred in—are the ones that have attempted to emulate his own often contradictory nature, his propensity for self-mythology and his habitual refusal to go down the paths that others believe that he should follow. Admittedly, these are films that those not already deeply into Dylan and his work may find to be too perplexing to fully grasp but they are the ones that seem the most interested in digging beneath the surface to attempt to grapple with the meaning of his work and which have dared to do so in ways that have dared to ignore the usual cliches in much the same way that Dylan himself eschewed the sort of “moon-June-spoon” style lyrics in ways that would revolutionize songwriting in ways that are still being felt today.

Now comes the latest cinematic take on the former Mr. Zimmerman, the eagerly anticipated A Complete Unknown, and on the surface, it seems to have everything going for it—a healthy budget to ensure that the 60s era depicted has been recreated with meticulous detail, a director in James Mangold who has previously shown his facility for handling biopics of musical icons with Walk the Line and an A-list cast headed by Timothee Chalamet, the reigning young male superstar actor du jour. The trouble is that the film not only then proceeds to fail to delve much beneath that surface but does what it does in the most blandly familiar style imaginable. In the case of any number of other musical artists, such an approach might be forgivable but when dealing with one as singular as Dylan, it comes across as an almost perverse misunderstanding of his life and his work. Here is someone whose life needs—nay, requires—an approach as idiosyncratic and distinctive as he himself has proven to have been over the decades and instead, it has been rendered in such an inertly generic manner that it might as well have served as the basis for a chronicle on the legacy of Donovan.

Instead of trying to cover Dylan’s entire career—one that is still unfolding in alternately fascinating and confounding ways today—within the confines of a standard running time, A Complete Unknown essentially functions as an origin story, charting the early years in which he leapt from mysterious and shrouded origins to become the voice of his generation. It begins as he arrives in New York City in 1961, having hitchhiked there from points unknown to seek out his idol, singer/activist Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who is wasting away in a hospital from Huntington’s Disease, which would claim his life a few years later. When he arrives at his bedside, he encounters not only Guthrie but fellow folk icon Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and soon whips out his guitar to play his composition “Song to Woody.” Upon hearing the song, both Guthrie and Seeger instantly realize that this kid is the real deal—Guthrie immediately recognizes him as a kindred spirit while Seeger looks at him as just the kind of person who could help finally put the rising interest in folk music over the top and stamp down that rock and roll nonsense once and for all.

Over the next few years, Dylan begins to make a name for himself in New York’s thriving folk music scene, eventually landing a recording contract and penning such landmark songs as “Blowin in the Wind,” “Masters of War” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” to name just a few. Although undeniably ambitious, Dylan finds himself somewhat at odds with his rising fame—he reacts to a bag of fan mail in the way that others might react to a dirty diaper—and is increasingly reluctant to play the games one is expected to do in order to get ahead in the business. There is upheaval in his personal life as well. Early on, he begins seeing artist/activist Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning, playing a thinly disguised version of the real-life Suze Rotolo), who admires his brilliance as a writer but whose unblemished idealism winds up coming into conflict with his studied condescension towards virtually everything around him, not to mention his inability to take out the damn garbage on time. Before long, he also crosses paths with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who is already a star on the folk scene, and they begin their own contentious relationship in which the harmonies that they demonstrate beautifully when singing together are rarely in evidence when they are off the stage—he suggests that she is more interested in performing pretty and pretty familiar songs in order to satisfy audience expectations in order to be a success while she is perfectly willing to call him out on his pretensions when he gets too obnoxious.

Most of the second half of the film revolves around the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where the now-hugely popular Dylan is slated as the closing act, which Seeger and the other purists running the festival believe will serve as a massive rebuke to the increasing popularity of groups like the Beatles with their electric guitars and lack of covers of songs like “Copper Kettle” in their repertoires. The problem is that Dylan himself has been shifting further and further away from the folk firmament that he never really adhered to in the first place and has just cut a new album, Highway 61 Revisited, in which he was backed on every song, save for “Desolation Row,” by a full rock band to help amplify such soon-to-be-classics as “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Tombstone Blues” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” As he arrives at the concert site, he remains cagey about his plans until he ultimately rejects the entreaties of Seeger and the others to stick to something more traditional by taking the stage with his band to play at what was a startling volume at the time in a performance that would almost instantly go down in legend as one of the central moments in contemporary music history.

To give A Complete Unknown some credit, Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks do not attempt to come up with glib, facile explanations for who Dylan was, where he came from and what it was that made him able to transcend the very notions of what could be accomplished within the parameters of a song—considering that people are still analyzing and debating those very points to this day and since Dylan himself has been notoriously non-forthcoming in these regards over the decades, it seems somewhat unfair to expect them to be satisfactorily answered within the confines of a single film. Although that is certainly a relief, they unfortunately neglect to replace that absence with much of anything beyond a rat-a-tat procession of people, places and events that will leave Dylanologists unimpressed and picking at all the various discrepancies (including a howler in transposing the infamous “Judas” comment that Dylan would get during the electric portion of one of his concerts in England a few months after the events covered in the film to Newport) while newcomers may be confused and wondering just who the hell people like Dave van Ronk and Al Kooper, just to name two of the figures in the Dylan legend who turn up briefly here, are supposed to be in the first place. (There is also an encounter with Johnny Cash, though Mangold has thankfully resisted the urge to bring back Joaquin Phoenix, who played the part in his Walk the Line, and instead given the role to Boyd Holbrook instead.)

Again, if this were a biopic of practically any other musical figure, this kind of entry-level approach to the subject at hand might have been acceptable or, at the very least, forgivable. In this case, however, it doesn’t work and give viewers the bewildering sight of a film that takes a subject of a artist who definitively broke the proverbial mold and spends nearly 2 1/2 hours trying to stick him back into it. It never really seems to have any idea of what it wants to say about Dylan, either as a person or as an artist, beyond the most obvious of observations. As opposed to a film like the truly daring I’m Not There, which went so far as to cast multiple actors, covering a wide range of ages, genders and ethnicities, to underscore how Dylan and his legacy could never be neatly pigeonholed, this film’s biggest idea is to take the schism between the folk and rock movements and how his expanding ambitions could not simply be confined to one or the other and ultimately reduce it to something along the lines of Amadeus with harmonicas with the conflict being less about there being too many notes and more about said notes being played too damn loud. This is just Oscar bait pure and simple and while that may work for some, those with a genuine interest in Dylan is likely to quickly become annoyed with how little interest it seems to hold regarding him and his work.

Likewise, the personal conflicts that Dylan is seen experiencing here also boiled down in the blandest ways imaginable and do deep disservices to people who don’t deserve them. When we hear Baez begin to perform Dylan songs in her sets, there is the distinct implication that he was correct in his assumption that she is just a craven crowd-pleaser blithely giving the folks what they want, ignoring the fact that his rising popularity was stoked in no small part by her recordings of his compositions. As for Seeger, although the film resists the largely debunked legend that he was so outraged by Dylan’s electric set that he supposedly tried to literally cut the cord fueling the noise with an axe backstage, it nevertheless only sees a man who was a genuine icon in the realms of both folk music and civil rights as a humorless and borderline didactic wet blanket that at times weirdly feels like an extension of the character that Norton played in, of all things, Death to Smoochy.

Maybe the most frustrating thing about the entire film is the way that it takes Dylan’s most enduring attribute—his extraordinary gifts as a songwriter—and betrays practically zero interest in it. Yes, I am well aware of the fact that observing someone writing is not exactly the most cinematic of activities but you would think that if you are going to go to the effort to make a film about one of the greatest and most influential American lyricists of the 20th century and beyond, you might consider spending at least a sliver of the running time to observing him going about practicing said craft. Instead, this is another one of those biopics where legendary songs seem to have just dropped fully formed from the sky with no consideration of the inspiration or work that went into their creation or how they evolved. At one point, there is a scene showing the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone,” one of Dylan’s most enduring songs and one that sounds as fresh and vital today as it did when it was recorded nearly 60 years ago. Obviously, it didn’t emerge entirely from whole cloth and indeed, on a box set of outtakes covering this particular era in Dylan’s recording history, there is an entire CD dedicated to how it evolved from something played practically at a waltz tempo to the searing sonic landscape that it would eventually become. Some acknowledgement and examination of Dylan’s artistic process might have made this sequence into something memorable but instead, a scene depicting one of the seminal moments in rock music history proves to have nothing more on its mind than giving Timothee Chalamet another chance to show off his Dylan impersonation.

Though his impersonation is admittedly not too bad, it ultimately proves to be just that and nothing more. Throughout the film, he poses, pouts and sneers but never quite manages to suggest that there is anything to him besides his unique voice and sneering attitude—we never get any real hint of the charisma, energy and sense of self-possession that Dylan must have had in abundance even in his early days that proved so electrifying to practically everyone who came into his orbit. When Todd Haynes went about his ambitious casting for I’m Not There, he selected none other than Cate Blanchett to portray the version of Dylan in the era covering his shift from folk to rock music and while it may have seemed like a stunt at first, it was one that paid off beautifully as she, in just a few minutes of screen time, created an indelible impression that went far beyond mere imitation to give a powerful, penetrating and fiercely convincing look at a seminal figure going through what would prove to be a seminal moment in their life—the kind that is largely absent from this film as a whole. The only performance that comes close to this is the one from Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. As I suggested earlier, I think the film does Baez dirty in certain respects but Barbaro rises above the script flaws by presenting a fully formed and convincing portrait of Baez throughout. Her scenes—especially the ones in which she dares take Dylan to task—have a real snap to them and when the film is over, I found myself coming away from it wishing that there had been more of her and less of virtually everything else.

A Complete Unknown is a bad movie but it is, I suppose, hardly a disaster—in terms of the musical biopics released in 2024, it certainly beats the likes of the actively insulting Back to Black, the mystifyingly cruddy Bob Marley: One Love or the conceptually garish Better Man. It does a decent job of recreating its period settings, it contains that strong performance from Barbaro and perhaps it will inspire a new generation of listeners to begin to explore Dylan’s legacy for themselves for the first time. However, by taking that legacy and essentially giving it the Wikipedia treatment instead of even trying to find an approach as daring and singular as the subject at hand, the result cannot help but come across like a profound disappointment. The whole thing feels like the world’s longest version of one of those highlight reels that prefaces the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award—it ticks off the required highlights with meticulous precision but when it comes to demonstrating any nuanced understanding of what made those moments highlights in the first place, it comes up woefully short.