By Matthew Moorcroft

Strong Recommendation

• Directed by James Mangold
• Starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro
• R

In 2005, director James Mangold released Walk the Line, a biopic on legendary singer and artist Johnny Cash. While many a music biopic have come and gone these days, Walk the Line is in a lot of ways the prototype for the type of film that most have come to except from the genre, for better and for worse. So much so that two years later the great parody film Walk Hard basically blew it to smithereens; it’s basically impossible now to make one of these things and not avoid comparisons to that film. Because of that, it seems easy to forget that Walk the Line is a really damn fine film, proving James Mangold early as a force to reckoned with in Hollywood.

It’s been nearly 20 years since then, and Mangold has become an even bigger force in Hollywood. As the king of the “dad movie”, it makes sense that after several high profile projects, he would return to the genre that initially gave him these opportunities in the first place, and what better figure to do it with then the enigmatic and difficult to read Bob Dylan, a person so complex and fascinating that he resembles the main character in, well, a Bob Dylan song.

Not only that, it’s a great way to show that Mangold really is the guy you go to for these kinds of films, as A Complete Unknown is probably the best of it’s kind in quite a while. It’s a film with layers of texture and a smokey, thick vibe to it’s frames, easily getting lost in it’s near-perfect recreation of the times. It’s Oscar bait, sure, but this is the kind of great Oscar bait we used to get on a constant basis and frankly it’s sort of nostalgic to bring it back.

This isn’t to say A Complete Unknown isn’t just a way for one of Hollywood’s hottest current actors to get an Oscar, though it’s certainly that. Timothée Chalamet embodies Bob Dylan so effectively and with such perfection that you basically forget you aren’t seeing the real, younger version of Dylan on screen here. It’s especially evident in the second half, once Chalamet dones the full black attire and the glasses, blending into the background and leaning into the mysterious figure he’s built himself up to be; it’s boring to say yeah, but he really does become Dylan here and it’s one of the most impressive performances of the year by that very nature alone. Helps he’s surrounded by a great, almost impossibly stacked supporting cast that all feel like they are putting in just as much work as him here. Norton and Barbaro in particular are basically running the races here with some truly magnetic concert work, and I especially love Barbaro’s vitriolic – and sometimes achingly romantic – chemistry with Chalamet, capturing Dylan and Joan Baez’s real life on-again, off-again relationship with ease.

No, A Complete Unknown‘s best stuff is actually how it manages to capture Dylan’s own elusiveness but what it choose to not show. While some biopics are keen to meld and change history to fit the constraints of a Hollywood picture, the smart thing A Complete Unknown does is recognize that Bob Dylan himself rewrote, embellished, changed, and morphed his own backstory constantly and uses that to it’s advantage. When we first meet Dylan, the specifics of his childhood and his life beforehand are mostly left unsaid, though we are given hints. A Complete Unknown keeps Dylan at a distance in that regard though, more interested in how he interacts with the world around him in those specific moments in time. The people closest to him don’t even know him, and it’s hard to say if he simply is a jackass or actually is scared of people getting close to him cause Chalamet purposefully hides himself through a smile that cuts deep.

While this distance probably hampers some of the more socio-political stuff that influenced much of the landscape of folk music at the time, it does mean A Complete Unknown works as a snapshot of Dylan as if the audience himself knew him at the time. He’s both quirky and mysterious while also frustrating and constantly having you questioning if he’s crazy. This does mean the film, which manages to squeeze a ton of concert scenes in it’s 141 minute runtime, has a heavier focus on the actual played music unlike Walk the Line, which occupied itself with Cash’s personal life.

It’s difficult to say whether or not A Complete Unknown will appeal anybody not already on the Bob Dylan train, as that aforementioned distance and coldness is something that’s more of a feature and not a bug, and people who aren’t into his music probably won’t get much out of this. But it’s a significantly strong portrait, one that manages to capture the then radical nature of his music with ease and reaffirms Mangold as one of our absolute best journeymen directors working today. Highly recommend to Dylan enthusiasts as well anybody looking for a solid holiday drama.