A COMPLETE UNKNOWN REVIEW

“A Complete Unknown will make anyone watching, fan or not, listen to Dylan with fresh new ears”

As a long-time James Mangold fan – honestly, I think maybe his Indiana Jones movie might be the only thing he’s done that I haven’t much cared for – I’m always excited to see what he’ll do next. Although I’ve never been a fan of Bob Dylan at all, Mangold did such a great job turning me into a Johnny Cash fan with Walk the Line, so I went into A Complete Unknown with potentially impossible-to-meet expectations.

This is a far more traditional biopic than even Walk the Line, but Mangold once again has a fantastic cast led by Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, whom I’ll have a lot more to talk about later in this review.

It’s 1961, and we meet “Bobby” as he arrives in New York looking to meet his hero Woody Guthrie, who has been hospitalized out in New Jersey. In the process, he meets other important proponents of the folk movement, one Pete Seeger, as played by Edward Norton, and Monica Barbaro‘s Joan Baez. Eventually, he gets out to the Jersey hospital where Guthrie (Scott McNairy) is being treated and gets the folk great’s blessing before Dylan makes his MacDougal Street debut and meets folk enthusiast Sylvie (Elle Fanning). The film then covers Dylan’s rise-to-fame, which explodes with the release of his second album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” comprised solely of originals like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which turned him into a household name at a time when the Beatles still hadn’t broken big in the States.

Being based on an adaptation of Eljiah Wald’s novel “Dylan Goes Electric!,” one can expect this is all leading up to the famed 1965 Newport Folk Festival where Dylan played with a loud rock band backing him, which caused quite an uproar, including with Seeger, who felt like it was a slight against the growing success of folk music among the populace. (It was interesting to me that the title was changed from “Going Electric” to a line from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” his big hit from that era.)

I just can’t say enough about the performance by Chalamet, who just delivers on every level. This is not just an impersonation, because we’re seeing Dylan in all of his moods and personalities over the course of those five years during his early career. He’s brooding at times, playful at others, and as an audience, you never know what you’re going to get, similar to everyone who is dealing with Dylan around this time. I even enjoyed Chalamet’s very different singing deliverance here to last year’s Wonka, to the point that even any bum or sour note just makes him sound even closer to the real Dylan.

As much as this is about Dylan’s music and his early days, the film also establishes a love triangle between him with Sylvie and Joan, who he’s often having relationships with at the exact same time, making you especially feel for Sylvie in the way she’s treated. The first time I heard Monica Barbaro singing as Joan Baez, I got bonafide goosebumps, maybe since I had very recently seen a great doc about the folk singer who continues to perform to this day. Her performances with Dylan are also the film’s high points, since you get a better contrast of their different vocal styles.

There’s no way to skirt the fact that the young Dylan is a bit of an a-hole, so A Complete Unknown is not a biopic that’s deliberately trying to create an overly-complimentary portrait of an artist, as these things often do. The rest of the cast is equally great, with Norton as Seeger, but also nice surprises like Boyd Holbrook (who appeared in Mangold’s Logan) portraying Johnny Cash, a very different side of the country superstar than how Joaquin Phoenix portrayed him in Walk the Line. Mangold also survives the main cast with great character actors like Dan Fogler, PJ Byrne, and Norbert Leo Butz, as some of the music biz that Dylan interacts with, not always in a favorable way.

Crafts are so crucial in creating any period piece like this, and I was particularly impressed with the way that Mangold’s regular production designer François Audouy takes us back in time to the New York City of the early ‘60s, as well as the recreation of the Newport Folk Festival over the years.

For some, the elephant in the room might be Todd Haynes’ underrated I’m Not There, a far more experimental look at Dylan that had versions of him played by different actors, including Cate Blanchett and the late Heath Ledger. That was very deliberately done in a way to pay tribute to Dylan without necessarily being a direct biopic, and this film’s focus on the first half of the ‘60s goes a long way to not feel like it’s overreaching.

Frankly, I think James Mangold is one of America’s finest current directors, up there with Scorsese and others. Hopefully, A Complete Unknown gets him more respect among his peers, including the Academy, who has only nominated him for Oscars in the screenplay category and as a producer. If you’re going to make a movie about Dylan, you have to get a lot of things right, and Mangold is clearly no slouch in doing the necessary research and putting together just the right team and cast to make it all happen.

The best compliment that I can give to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is that it will make anyone who watches it (including non-fans like myself) listen to Dylan with fresh new ears, whereas normally, I would do my best to try to avoid his music. It’s a film that achieves so much, while still remaining a fairly simple and focused idea, allowing the depth within the characters to create its scope.

Rating: 9/10

A Complete Unknown opens nationwide on Christmas Day, which is a Wednesday.