“A Complete Unknown” is Only Concerned With Dylan’s Sound, Not His Circumstance

Something is happening here, but we should know what it is

No one is quite as incompatible with the biopic as Bob Dylan and his kaleidoscope of manmade personas. He is a form resistant to formula, always in motion and propelled to mutation by external instincts to distill his image. Dylan’s many lives are fundamentally at odds with a glossy, mimetic journey to stardom — which is why it is not only surprising that A Complete Unknown was made in the first place, but that it comes after Todd Haynes did the impossible and captured the many reflections of Dylan, in all his truths and fictions, in the film I’m Not There.

Haynes has an unmatched aptitude for capturing the mythos of American stardom, and his correctly chose to see Dylan through fable. I’m Not There creates a melodramatic series of distorted reflections of the mysteries of Dylan’s many iterations — in Haynes’ words, a “poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity.” Haynes forgoes formal logic to capture the essence of the myth while still never veiling the faults of the man. 

A Complete Unknown is also concerned with Dylan as an enigma — how could it not be — but it doesn’t choose to speak his poetry in return. Instead, James Mangold’s highly anticipated biopic suffers from a bad case of Wikipedia-itis, a blow-by-blow account of Bobby’s life from when he first lopes down MacDougal Street to when he introduces the electric sound to the Newport Folk Festival stage. 

My unwavering loyalty to I’m Not There and my short temper with the biopic blueprint put me at odds with A Complete Unknown, and I’ll now admit that my predisposed impatience was partially unwarranted. For one, Timothée Chalamet understands Dylan with an unexpected nuance: while the story starts well after he’s left Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Chalamet’s Bobby is still burdened by the gap between the act and the actual. Chalamet’s real-life stardom might inhibit his Dylan from ever feeling like a “complete unknown,” but it perfectly interpolates the tension between his animas and the paradox of adopting a persona for an audience, only for that audience to demand a drop of the mask.  

While Chalamet is consistently captivating, it is Mangold’s ineptitude that keeps his character from existing beyond a serviceable impression. His operating formula simply cannot tolerate it, and without the capacity to handle Dylan, we’re left with a fine-tuned look and sound of the singer but an absence of his phrasing and ethos. Mangold’s tired devices maintain the enigma, but he seems to use the elusiveness of Dylan’s character as a scapegoat for a conceptual deficiency. 

The routine narrative of A Complete Unknown might not be as prismatic as Dylan himself, but the most obvious gap in the film’s conception of the character is its nearsighted concern with aesthetics. The film is only interested in Dylan’s “sound” and not his circumstance, presenting a politically and culturally isolated version of the man. He’s just a directionless contrarian who spent his early years puttering around the Village with his back to the world, more reactive to the ornamental women who rotate through his bedroom than any broader cultural circumstances.

A Complete Unknown introduces all of the era-defining events that are essential to understanding the real-life Dylan through the TV in his bedroom, reducing these moments of unrest to ephemeral satellites with a peripheral relationship to Dylan’s music rather than a formative one. In the film, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the shadow of the Beat Generation have no real sway in Dylan’s prose or politics. Instead they come to him from the comfortable distance of that little plasma screen, like Kronkite’s announcement of Kennedy’s death; or they are bounced off of other people in proximity to Dylan, like his girlfriend Sylvie’s (Elle Fanning) volunteer work in the Civil Rights field; or they float past him like apparitions, with about as much tangibility as a ghost (an Allen Ginsberg analog passes behind him at a party, or a battered copy of On the Road sits on his desk. Both go unmentioned). Even Dylan’s famous performance at the March on Washington gets the same passive treatment — a throwaway mention, a universally recognized moment kept at an archival distance. 

Dylan’s classic song “Masters of War” gets the most substantial nod in the context of global politics, suggesting that it originated during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thankfully, the threat of nuclear annihilation only lasts long enough for Dylan to draw an audience for a night, before it becomes a vehicle for his first hookup with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). It’s gone by the time the sun rises the next morning. 

This anecdote canonizes a rumored origin of the song, and speaks to the broader philosophy of the film; in Mangold’s (limited) imagination, social unrest just introduces new marketing demographics to Dylan and can’t possibly have a more nuanced relationship with his changing personas. In Howard Sounes’ biography Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, he writes that Dylan once said he penned the song “simply because he thought it would sell,” a sentiment that Sounes believes was voiced just to provoke Joan Baez and not because Dylan’s primary focus was meshing with commercial interests. 

But Mangold runs with this sentiment, framing Dylan’s stylistic choices and changes as purely reactionary or commercially motivated. His morphing public character is portrayed as a result of petty personal politics, like adopting an electric sound to adapt to the British invasion and ruffle the feathers of his manager or undermining Pete Seeger’s (Ed Norton Jr.) interest to the integrity of the folk market (Seeger and Woody Guthrie both feature heavily, but their left-wing politics are also omitted). The edge of Dylan’s work is completely sanded away; he’s not disrupting any paradigms unless it provides an opportunity to enact some pathetic personal slight against his contemporaries or his audience. 

The film shows Dylan criticizing others’ music for being commercial or vapid — he compares Joan Baez’s music to “an oil painting in the dentist’s office” — but does nothing to convince us that he lacks the same vacancy, other than his ability to recognize it in others or the countless reverse shots of listeners in awe of his prophetic talent. 

It is impossible to say that the real Dylan’s artistic trajectory was not commercially motivated in part, but it is insidious to suggest profit and pettiness were his sole motivations while scrubbing away his connection to radical political milieus. The Newport Folk Festival might have seen going electric as pandering to the mainstream, but Highway 61 Revisited was beloved by more than just the charts, including Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Kwame Ture. Not only does the film not consider Dylan’s music as being forged from a place of protest, it does not consider the unrest that it might have motivated, or at the very least affirmed. Disruption beyond aesthetics is completely absent from the whole process. 

We can debate the authenticity of Dylan’s ethos, but history can speak to its influence, and A Complete Unknown does not really care to consider either. Instead, the film seems interested in keeping Dylan true to its title: an absent articulation of the eternal pathetic-cool-guy, with politics that are ephemeral and aesthetics that are immortal. 

A Complete Unknown was released on December 25, 2024 and is currently showing in U.S. theaters.