A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown, 2024, 4 stars

Coming from the heart

Mangold captures the soul of Dylan’s art

Exclusive to MeierMovies, December 10, 2024

“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet,” Salvador Dali said. “The first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”

And therein lies the nearly impossible task of replicating the life of Bob Dylan, one of our greatest poets and musicians, on screen. Rather than creating new art, you risk ridiculing the original and therefore yourself.

But James Mangold is no idiot. He’s a great artist in his own right. He’s also no stranger to turning the lives of poets and musicians into movies. He did so admirably in Walk the Line (2005), the story of Johnny Cash. A Complete Unknown is even better, though that’s likely because Timothée Chalamet, surprisingly, is a better fit for Dylan than Joaquin Phoenix was for Cash. Mangold is perhaps better known as the director of two X-Men movies and the final Indiana Jones flick. But his best film, Ford v Ferrari (2019), like his two musical bio-pics, also focuses on real people. And though he takes some liberties with the facts in all three films, he clearly has a knack for capturing the spirit of a true tale.

Speaking of liberties, Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks (who was a film critic before shifting to screenplay writing, including frequent collaborations with Martin Scorsese) bend the facts slightly in their new film. (Their screenplay is based on a 2015 book by Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.) One could argue that the changes are necessary to successfully tell the story of Dylan from his arrival in New York City in 1961 until he controversially went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. However, one alteration is particularly odd: renaming Dylan’s girlfriend. Suze Rotolo becomes Sylvie Russo. But before you go criticizing Mangold for historic revisionism, you should know it was actually Dylan, who served as film advisor, who apparently insisted on the change, to protect Rotolo’s privacy. Dylan even claims he convinced Mangold to include an entirely fabricated scene, which proves the futility of total accuracy in a narrative-fiction film while also reinforcing Dylan’s reputation as a troublemaker, even at the age of 83.

For clarification, it’s also worth mentioning that, though Dylan was close to Johnny Cash, as the film portrays, it was Peter Yarrow who handed Dylan a guitar for his acoustic encore at Newport, not Cash. And Dylan did not write Girl from the North County from scratch, as the film suggests. Instead, he based it on folk singer Martin Carthy’s arrangement of a traditional English ballad, Scarborough Fair, the same arrangement Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel used for their Scarborough Fair/Canticle.

Returning to more relevant matters, Chalamet is astounding as Dylan, mastering his mannerisms and his singing while never reducing his turn to just an impersonation. Equally wonderful is Edward Norton, who perfects Dylan’s friend and iconic folk singer in his own right, Pete Seeger. (Look for a supporting-actor Oscar nom for him.) Elle Fanning is both charming and relatable as Sylvie, while Monica Barbaro accomplishes a task almost as tough as Chalamet’s: bringing to life the incomparable Joan Baez, whose professional and personal relationship with Dylan drives the film. And Dan Fogler is hysterical – and just what the film needs to breathe – as Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman.

The movie’s soul wouldn’t be the same without Dylan’s hero, Woody Guthrie. And Scoot McNairy delivers a heartbreaking rendition of the folk father, who, in the 1960s, was dying a slow death from Huntington’s disease in a New Jersey hospital. Dylan, who learned of Guthrie’s whereabouts soon after arriving in New York, made a pilgrimage to visit him, sitting by his side in that dingy hospital room, not hastening to bid him adieu. The bond they established surely brightened both their lives for a while, as it might yours while watching its re-creation on screen. And it’s this and the other characters’ relationships, plus, of course, the amazing music, that more than compensate for some slightly contrived and conventional moments.

So, no, Mangold is no idiot. In fact, by creating one of the five best films of the year, he’s about as far from a cinematic moron as one can get in 2024. Yet he and his movie still don’t fully understand, or explain, Dylan. But that’s OK. Other Dylan films didn’t either, such as Todd Haynes’ annoyingly odd I’m Not There (2007). Neither does Dylan himself, as the singer has admitted. He’s an enigma, content in his recent concerts to never pick up a guitar or harmonica, and not perform any of his folk classics, at least not in a way that most audience members can understand. He also skipped his own Nobel Prize ceremony in 2016. This makes A Complete Unknown (a line from Like a Rolling Stone) the perfect title for his bio-pic, as it seems the answer to the age-old question “Who is Bob Dylan?” is still blowin’ in the wind.

In one revelatory scene from the film, a frustrated Dylan muses about people who pepper him with questions yet don’t really want to know how he writes what he writes. Instead, they long to know why they can’t write it.

Perhaps that’s the darker side of Dylan’s legacy. For Bob, life is colorful and bountiful. But for everyone else, this reviewer included, after comparing our art to his, life’s color is black and its number none.

© 2024 MeierMovies, LLC

For more information about this movie, visit IMDB and Wikipedia. It is scheduled to open wide theatrically in the United States and Canada on December 25.