Timothée Chalamet plays music legend Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s latest, which appears totally unwilling to escape the vapid biopic formula.
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.
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Published 10 Dec 2024
Mangold has been on a long run of very mid movies, but Chalamet has the ability to surprise.
Lots of time spent getting the central impression right, very little on fashioning an actual film.
Keen to hear justifications for its brazen lack of fidelity for very well known record of fact.
Cold exteriors and warm interiors combine in the Coen brothers’ rhapsodic portrait of a ’60s folk singer.
Freddie Mercury and Queen receive the long-awaited glossy biopic treatment courtesy of Bryan Singer.
Hugh Jackman brings boundless energy and enthusiasm to this crowd-pleasing circus musical.
Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
