A Complete Unknown Misses the Elusive Genius of Bob Dylan
That Mangold was worried in the first place about alienating the audience tells you something about his tendencies to walk the line, stylistically speaking—especially as compared to a filmmaker like Todd Haynes, whose prismatic 2007 film I’m Not There split its focus between a sextet of surrogates, resulting in a genuinely freewheeling approach. The more that Haynes embellished and enmeshed his material, the more he gave the viewer to think about. A Complete Unknown rarely trusts the audience to think for themselves. When Bob writes an inpromptu song in the living room of a family that’s briefly taken him in as a foundling, the film holds nicely on his ardent concentration before stooping to smiling, wide-eyed reaction shots, as if we couldn’t figure out his genius for ourselves. The film’s structure aims for the long, winding lines of a ballad, but the overall effect is more like a series of catchy, finger-picked jingles; we go behind the music without getting inside of it.
The most interesting idea in A Complete Unknown has to do with the tension between inhabiting and extending a folk tradition and the challenges of rewriting it (a theme the Coen brothers already limned to perfection in Inside Llewyn Davis, which re-created Greenwich Village more vividly on a smaller budget and featured a climactic cameo from you-know-who). When Bobby rolls up on his motorcycle in the film’s opening sequence to visit the bedridden Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital, there’s a nicely ambiguous tone to their interaction: the upstart and the elder, measuring each other out of mutual respect. The implication is that the wizened, stroke-afflicted Guthrie—embodied with silent, stoic fragility by Scoot McNairy—sees the kid for what he really is: a raw, unpolished inheritor who’s going to have to learn to go his own way. By contrast, everyone else who comes into Dylan’s orbit sees him as a potential project, whether it’s Edward Norton’s aggressively avuncular Pete Seeger, who generously offers his “fellow traveler” a place to stay in the hopes he can help galvanize a left-leaning constituency; Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo, a painter and social justice activist modeled on Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo; or Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), a fellow emerging guitar slinger in search of a collaborator, a kindred spirit, and a lover, if not necessarily in that order.
Dylan’s shortcomings as domestic partner are as legendary as his wordplay, and he wrote plenty of songs about them; both Sylvie and Joan have late nights where they’re roused from slumber by his furious scribblings and noodlings. During one postcoital idyll with Joan, Bob spontaneously road-tests “Blowing in the Wind,” like a scrawny, drawling Mozart tossing off operas in a hipster Amadeus. Fanning and Barbaro are both fine actresses—and the latter does a striking vocal impersonation of Baez’s warm, trilling songbird singing voice—but they’re mostly reduced to looking sad-eyed and hypnotized by Chalamet’s Dylan, who’s too busy acting out Behind-the-Music vignettes to consider their feelings, and whose charisma ultimately never quite proves worthy of their—or our—sustained gaze.
