A Com­plete Unknown review – drips with hol­low trivia

The worst scene in the Coen broth­ers’ 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis is vast­ly supe­ri­or to the best scene in James Mangold’s A Com­plete Unknown, an icky, fawn­ing screen bio of Ebbing, Minnesota’s own bar­row­boy-capped min­strel, Robert Zim­mer­man. I state this for the sim­ple rea­son that the Coens’ film is about some­thing, and Mangold’s film isn’t. It’s been made for the sole pur­pose of visu­al­is­ing a short stretch of pop his­to­ry and cre­at­ing a glossy, unnec­es­sary record of fact. There’s no ark; few com­pelling char­ac­ters; no coher­ent dra­ma or sense of lessons being learned, wis­dom impart­ed and dif­fi­cult emo­tions grap­pled with. 

The screen­play seems tac­ti­cal­ly averse to any kind of antag­o­nism, always on Dylan’s side of things and often sat­is­fied with say­ing that those who were angry with him even­tu­al­ly saw the error of their ways. It doesn’t shy away from say­ing that Dylan had the poten­tial to be a wretched human being, but always with­in the con­text of, well wouldn’t you be a total ass if you were sur­round­ed by back­ward-look­ing dolts?

The women in his life blow in and out on the wind, with Man­gold keep­ing their own inner lives and artis­tic mer­its at bay so as not to dilute his wor­ship of the cen­tral god-king. Joan Baez (Mon­i­ca Bar­baro) is framed as a pop­ulist stick-in-the-mud who leapfrogged on Dylan’s song­writ­ing, while Sylvie Rus­so (a name-swapped ver­sion of para­mour Suze Roto­lo, played by Elle Fan­ning) seems to be react­ing to sit­u­a­tions and behav­iour that the audi­ence aren’t par­ty to. 

There’s no point where you’re lis­ten­ing to Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met do his exem­plary Dylan cos­play where you feel you’re being bet­ter served than had you stayed home and whacked on ​‘The Times They Are a‑Changin’. Indeed, the film has lit­tle inter­est in the music, instead it’s more intent to assure the audi­ence that it’s good and impor­tant via an omnipresent pha­lanx of grotesque, beam­ing reac­tion shots.

It’s a hot-waxed shrine to its sub­ject, an offi­cial ver­sion which drips with hol­low triv­ia and is hap­py to namecheck that thing it knows you like rather than reveal some­thing that you didn’t. It’s strange, also, how a film can paint a pic­ture of a rebel poet who is so declassé, so boor­ish, so com­plete­ly stripped of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. It leans too heav­i­ly on the idea that his­to­ry revealed that Bob was right rather than to search for rea­sons why he might have been wrong. Dylan too often comes across as petu­lant and irri­tat­ing, and his deci­sion to amp-up for the mil­i­tant­ly acoustic-only New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in 1965 is very much not the epochal, sock-it-to-the-man type vic­to­ry that it’s clear­ly intend­ed to be.

Ed Norton’s aggres­sive­ly avun­cu­lar take on folk­ways leg­end Pete Seger plays like a char­ac­ter from a goth­ic hor­ror movie, where you’re wait­ing for him to switch into beast mode and give every­one what for with his long-necked ban­jo. Worst of all, it lazi­ly stages the famous ​“Judas!” heck­le at New­port rather than the Man­ches­ter Free Trade Hall where it actu­al­ly hap­pened. Sure, Bob Dylan was no stick­ler for the truth when it came to con­coct­ing his own mythos, but at least through his sub­lime poet­ry he was able to rev­el essen­tial, obscure truths about the world. James Man­gold has yet to earn that right.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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