A Complete Unknown (2024)

Rated R mostly for language.  Like, this movie is pretty easy to edit down into a PG-13 cut, but the prestige of having the R seems to grant it verisimilitude.  It should be pointed out that Bob Dylan slept around a bit and cheated on significant others.  There's also a lot of rudeness, coupled with some almost contractually obligated drinking.  Still, it's a pretty tame R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  James Mangold

I don't know how I'm going to do it.  I realistically can't do what I want to do.  I am practically done with the Academy Award list before tonight's Oscars.  It's just that I watched a lot of movies in the past 48 hours and I don't think that I'll be able to write about them all before the Oscars start.  It would probably make me a bad dad and make my writing crap.  Still, I'm going to write when I can.  Whatever I get done is what I get done.  I understand my own limitations and I am going to write what I can.

This blog is going to be fairly predictable.  I'm so sick of this movie.  This is the movie that shows up every Oscar season.  It rarely sticks with me.  The music biopic is such Oscar bait that I actively get mad when I watch these movies.  The worst part is that I finished Better Man moments ago and that's a significantly better version of this movie, so I'm confused about what I'm really getting out of this movie.  I never actively liked this movie, but I think I'm feeling a bit more rough with this movie right now in the shadow of Better Man.  The nicest take on this movie is that Timothee Chalamet did a great job, Edward Norton needs to do more roles like these, and James Mangold is a good director.  But does this movie have any reason to exist outside of just appealing to Bob Dylan and nostalgia heads?  Not really.

Before we started this movie (and this might highlight my bias / frustration with this subgenre a bit), I decided to watch the trailer to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.  I think I might have to watch Walk Hard again before watching another music biopic. While A Complete Unknown doesn't hit all of the tropes that Walk Hard lampoons, it does hit quite a few of them.  My wife started off this movie by even stating, "This is going to be one of those music biopics where the main character has a sweetheart while he's still an up-and-comer.  He'll cheat on her, but he'll always treat her as the one that he really loved."  Congrats, my wife. You nailed this movie exactly.

I get that there is an audience that wants to explore the world of Bob Dylan.  That makes a ton of sense to me.  I've always said that, as much as I am a pop culture nerd, music was always my weak spot.  I know that Bob Dylan means something special to a lot of people.  I just think that Bob Dylan might be the worst subject when it comes to making a biopic.  Part of the reason that we get biopics is that we want to understand the person behind the persona.  Bob Dylan has always been incredibly enigmatic.  The fact that I know that I have a Bob Dylan impression behind me without ever really caring about Bob Dylan means that he's impacted the cultural zeitgeist enough that we can understand the ego of Bob Dylan without needing to find out who he really is.

The problem with A Complete Unknown is that I don't think that James Mangold or Timothee Chalamet know who Bob Dylan is.  They get part of him. There's a lot of speculating.  But instead of being an actual examination of what makes Bob Dylan tick is that this is a movie more about how Bob Dylan affected the world around him as opposed to figuring out who he is.  We meet Dylan at a unique spot in history.  He's already musically proficient. He has this reverence for music, causing him to go on a pilgrimage to see an ailing Woody Guthrie.  In this moment, Guthrie and Pete Seeger see Dylan for what he is: raw talent.

But instead of really getting Dylan through the trenches of what it means to be a once-in-a-lifetime artist, Dylan keeps just succeeding because Pete Seeger believes in him.  Honestly, this is where I make the case for a Pete Seeger movie because I understand that character incredibly well.  Seeger loves music and he loves passion.  He's a guy who sees his genre of choice disappearing to the energy of rock 'n roll and he wants to hold onto the purity of music.  He's not a zealot.  He's not a guy who sticks his head in the sand, hoping that the music of yesteryear takes over once again.  Instead, he's a guy who loves music.  Dylan coming to him offers him a chance to see his genre take the spotlight once again.  It's a great character.  But that's Pete Seeger.  That's not Bob Dylan.

Instead, we kind of just understand that Bob Dylan is a jerk.  His only redeemable quality is that he loves music.  I happen to like that he's on the right side of politics, but that's more of a lucky thing for me as opposed to something that is a choice on behalf of Dylan.  The issue is that he's really mean to everyone.  I wish I could understand where it came from.  But it almost seems like Mangold is forgiving himself a motivation for this character with the idea that most biopics have the protagonist turn into a monster because they are performers and for no other reason.  A lot of this movie is Dylan choosing to be a monster to those around him because he rose to fame quickly.  But we don't see Dylan hiding from the spotlight.  It's almost like he just enjoys the chaos of ignoring reasonable requests.

While my wife was right about Dylan's casual nature of affairs, it's always really weird when he's mean those women in his life.  That girl that is his first love is Sylvie.  Now, I'm not saying that Dylan is locked into being with Sylvie his entire life.  That's not a reasonable thing outside of movies.  Maybe they didn't click.  I'll even go as far as to say that Dylan might regret his relationship with Sylvie because of his obsession with Joan Baez.  But he's really mean to her for no reason.  He has this aloof, alien attitude towards people with the sole purpose of driving them away.  But it's hard to sympathize with a character who is chasing after Sylvie despite constantly being mean to her.

But the same thing can be said about Joan Baez.  Dylan's first interaction with Baez is complimenting her, implying that he's a sweet guy.  But he refuses to do comply with the most simple requests. Like, it's like Bob Dylan enjoys hurting those people around him without really a motive behind each choice.  Now, if I'm trying to meet the movie in the middle, I could write it off as Dylan is a genius and has a hard time relating to the common man.  But here's the bigger problem.  Joan Baez is also a genius and she doesn't really deserve any thing that Dylan is throwing at her.  You know how I said that Pete Seeger needed to have a movie about him?  Same thing is true about Joan Baez.  A Joan Baez movie about how Bob Dylan was a jerk to her the entire time would have been a far more intriguing movie than what A Complete Unknown offered. 

It's just another music biopic.  In some ways, it's a lazier music biopic than most.  Again, I stand by my stance that James Mangold makes a good movie.  Aesthetically, this movie is pretty good.  It's not even un-entertaining.  It's more along the line that a biopic is meant to help us understand someone else's life.  I know nothing about what makes Bob Dylan tick outside the fact that he feels more special than anyone else in the room.  

The real nail in the coffin was the climax of the film at the Newport Folk Festival.  The level of stakes that the movie gave to Bob Dylan playing --by today's standards --fairly tame rock at a folk festival was just stupid. The amount of vitriol that the crowd gave Dylan was something that we see in movies.  What was a row of axes doing just sitting by the booth?  The attempt to make a minor moment into something catastrophic completely took me out of the movie and spent what little emotional investment I had left.

As I've harped upon, I'm so tired of this same movie over and over.  There has to be better storytelling than just returning to the same well with a new skin.  Oscar season shouldn't be a rehash of the same movies over and over.