A Complete Unknown (2024)

QFS No. 165 - The invitation for February 12, 2025
Is A Complete Unknown this year’s Elvis (2023)? No, of course not, because for one thing, it’s about Bob Dylan and not Elvis Presley. Also, this week’s film is directed by James Mangold, who is a very very different filmmaker than Baz Luhrmann is so many ways. First, they spell and pronounce their names differently, which is how you know they are different people. Second, Mangold is an American while Luhrmann is from Australia, two entirely different places. And third, Mangold is about as mainstream, down-the-line filmmaker as we get these days – which is something that you wouldn’t say about Luhrmann. When you want a film that hits all the marks but might not push the envelope too much, you hire Mangold. This generation’s Chris Columbus (the filmmaker, not the explorer), or, perhaps, Ron Howard.*

Mangold, of course, is no stranger to big name music icon biopics, having directed Walk the Line (2005), the solid film about the life of Johnny Cash. That film earned Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for portraying June Carter Cash and a nomination for Joaquin Phoenix in the title role. Fast forward twenty years later** and Timothee Chalamet is nominated for Best Actor with Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro getting nominations in the supporting categories.

So let’s continue our march to watching all the Best Picture nominees and discussing a few of them between now and the end of the month! Get out to the theater and see A Complete Unknown and join the discussion!

*No disrespect intended. Hit singles and doubles consistently and you’re in the Hall of Fame.

**What?! Twenty years since Walk the Line?

A Complete Unknown (2024) Directed by James Mangold

Reactions and Analyses:
Perhaps it only has to be about the music.

This was a sentiment shared by a few of us discussing A Complete Unknown (2024). James Mangold, a solid, steady filmmaker, didn’t fall into the standard clichés of the biopic – including the clichés to which he was susceptible in his Walk the Line (2004) musical biopic two decades ago. In that, the roots of Johnny Cash’s music are explained. His childhood, his loneliness and drug use, depression and ultimately redemption – all of it captured as a cause, a wellspring for his music. It’s the “Rosebud” effect, a childhood trauma that explains an adult’s life.

A Complete Unknown skips all of that. We know very little about Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) as he arrives in the folk-rock scene of New York City in the early 1960s and right away he spins beautiful poetry as he sings to his hero, the bed-ridden Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). We don’t see Dylan being directly inspired by the world around him except for one civil rights rally he attends and current events unfolding in the background - but he must be inspired by the world because his music speaks to the time and tumult of the era. We don’t see his writing process or how he develops his poetry, but it comes to him and he writes it without struggle. He is a conduit from on high, the filmmakers appear to be saying.

And yet, the movie is enjoyable, pleasant, and inoffensive throughout. Perhaps all you need is (a) legendary music by the only Nobel Prize-winning American songwriter in history and (b) utterly fantastic performances by great actors. Without exception, the cast is stunning and the fact that they play their own instruments and sing is even more astonishing.

Narratively though, there is no specific central tension of the film. Dylan doesn’t struggle with depression or doubt, though he does try the patience of those around him. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), both lovers, both find him to be kind of a jerk (to paraphrase them). He’s not a tortured artist, but he’s a selfish one - an enigma as you’d expect from a demigod. Dylan expresses the belief that music is music, it doesn’t need to be put into a category or sanctified, which is how he finds himself up against folk music establishment, including his early mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).

It's that tension between innovation and tradition that is almost at the center of the film. “Almost” because it’s not overtly the driving central narrative of the film, but an undercurrent that culminates in the well-known Newport Folk Festival in which “Dylan Goes Electric.” And here, the filmmakers attempt to create a dramatic conclusion of the film, exaggerating history for dramatic effect. Which is fine – filmmakers often bend real events to fit the narrative of a biopic. But the culmination, the climax is somewhat affixed at the end as opposed to building towards it.

And they can’t be blamed. With all of Bob Dylan’s music at the fingertips of the filmmakers and all the artistry and poetry contained in Dylan’s words, a film about his life and ascent to the apex of American music and culture doesn’t have to be more than a celebration of the music and a nostalgic portrayal of a turbulent time in history. The film only spans four or five years of Dylan’s life and we know almost as much about him at the end as we did the beginning. A Complete Unknown is, therefore, an apt title – he remains an enigma and the film doesn’t strive to demystify him. Music comes to him as visions to an oracle, it seems. A telling line in the film, one of the most effective, is spoken by Dylan after getting punched in the face at a bar and arrives a his ex-girlfriend Sylvie’s home. He says, “Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they're not asking where the songs come from. They're asking why the songs didn't come to them.”

This is the closest the film gets to an insight or reflection of Dylan. Is the answer it came to him because he is sent from the heavens? It’s as plausible an explanation in this narrative.

One other scene gives us an insight into Dylan as a person. It’s the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis when all of New York is panicking with nuclear war possibly looming. But Dylan, instead of preparing to flee as Joan Baez is, instead plays music in the basement of the folk bar, railing against the idiocy of global war. The world might end, but to him it’s only about the music. These two scenes are the closest Mangold gets to probing the soul of Dylan.

The scenes lack visual dynamism or real cinematographic artistry. Which is the polar opposite of last year’s celebrated biopic of another American groundbreaking legend of music and culture, Elvis (2023). In that film, Baz Luhrman uses frantic, manic, expressionistic mayhem to bring music and the Elvis Pressley experience to visual life. In that way, Elvis more about the filmmaking than it is about Elivs, you could argue. Contrast A Complete Unknown with this or something like Whiplash (2014), in which Damien Chazelle brings music and the experience of playing music to life visually. Or even 8 Mile (2002), where Curtis Hanson portrays the life of a young musician who finds inspiration for his music from the immediate world around him, and also a glimpse into how he crafts the music – writing, rewriting, testing.

Dylan, in Mangold’s hands, does none of that. He arrives in the film a phenomenon and remains one. Dylan inherits mantle of the folk masters and their tradition of speaking truth to power on behalf of the undercast, then removes folk music from the dustbowl into the mainstream and ultimately electrifies it. Is it all planned out by a god from on high? It feels that way in A Complete Unknown.

But perhaps that’s all it needs. Perhaps it just has to be about the music.