It’s always a little odd when a dramatized biographical film is made about a still-living person. Sometimes they’re even “played” by the person themselves—a bizarre niche of cinema that’s encompassed everyone from Audie Murphy and Muhammad Ali to English pop star Robbie Williams (in the imminent Better Man). But it’s no less strange when actors earnestly impersonate people still very much in the public eye. We may not mind much when it’s a matter of sports figures or other inspirational celebrities whose fame is fairly narrow, their backstories not particularly well-known. But some subjects hit the screen already so throughly scrutinized, it feels like we already “know” them, like old friends or family members. It’s weird to have their familiar origin stories and career bullet-points reenacted within the conventions of narrative filmmaking.
That is somehow especially true for the new A Complete Unknown, though it may not be so for anyone to whom Bob Dylan is a remote figure relevant only to prior generations’ experiences and culture. Of course, if you’re past a certain age, he’s probably felt inescapable for most of your life—even if (like me) you’ve never been a superfan. Those who were around in the Sixties saw him as a kind of avatar for all its tumult, not just in taking the folk revival in a more personal, up-to-the-moment direction or leading it into rock, but articulating their own dissatisfaction with the status quo.
His singularity kept him from being bracketed or shelved with any passing fad. So while later audiences may have found him an esoteric acquired taste, he nonetheless held berth as an almost god-like reference point—the guy you had to grasp in order to truly understand so many worthwhile musicians who came after. (Led Zeppelin would hold a similar role for people whose taste never strayed past metal.)
And unlike nearly all his peers, Dylan never became a nostalgia act. Stubbornly carving out his own path as ever, he just kept touring, putting out new albums, and taking new stylistic tacts. He has, in a way, become more accessible than ever in recent decades—exposing more of himself via visual art, writing (including Vol. 1 of a memoir and that Nobel Prize for Literature), and high-profile collaborations. Still, a core mystique endures. 83-year-old Dylan has attained the status of beloved elder, but we don’t and wouldn’t want to think him being as knowable as anyone’s dear old grandpa.
So A Complete Unknown treads on dangerous ground, risking making something pat of a man and a myth we’d prefer stayed somewhat inexplicable. Like recent Trump interpretation The Apprentice, it’s a making-of story that skips past childhood to the adult ready to assert themselves on an unsuspecting world. We meet this Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet)—he’s already shed the Robert Zimmerman of Minnesota—at age 19 in early 1961, drawn to NYC not just by its folk scene but word that his hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is terminally ill.
After a brief initial stop in Greenwich Village, he lands at the state hospital where Woody, bedridden and muted by Huntington’s disease, is already being visited by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). The latter takes this talented if squirrelly young stranger under wing…not that he needs the help so much. Soon Dylan has acqiured his own following, a record contract, and celebrity fans including a magnetic Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash and Monica Barbaro playing Joan Baez as a pouty diva.
Written by director James Mangold and veteran critic/scenarist Jay Cocks, based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, A Complete Unknown spans four and a half years that feel like a sprawling epoch—because there sure was a lot happening in those turbulent Sixties, even well before the Summer of Love. Big Events like the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s assassination get worked into the narrative. Sometimes it seems our protagonist only ever meets other famous people, and each time a song is heard, it’s a certifiable Classic.
Even at 141 astutely-paced minutes, this movie feels like a compacted highlight reel, with no time for lesser personalities or moments. It works its way towards a climax that, despite much worried discussion beforehand, may bewilder younger viewers: The furious response of the audience at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival to their acoustic idol turning “Judas” by showing up with an electrified rock band. Just a year or two later, such shocked purism would seem absurdly passe.
Mangold’s film does what pretty much every film of its ilk does: Reduce complicated lives down to a few easy-to-identify, simplified strokes. The reduction here flatters Seeger, Cash and a few others; Baez, Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), and miscellaneous subsidiary figures, not so much. (Nonetheless, we get where she’s coming from when this Baez tells Dylan “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.” Which he does not deny.) Men in suits are bad. Chicks exist mostly to throw themselves at our hero, then pine at his ramblin’-man inattention—the thing Elle Fanning gets thanklessly stuck doing throughout as on/off girlfriend Sylvie Russo aka Suze Rotolo.
Things quite possibly were just as depicted here. Even so, these feel like showbiz-biopic cliches. Yet it’s amazing how thoroughly A Complete Unknown works, no matter how often you may roll your eyes at familiar tropes… not least the spectacle of prettier professional actors standing in for real people still sharp in our recall. This snow-globe version of the early 1960s feels a bit detached from messy life. But then practically everything portrayed has passed so far into legend, it can hardly avoid those invisible quote marks.
The screenplay’s formulaic aspects cannot be ignored, yet its imposed structure really does lend a rock-solid grip to the storytelling here. Let’s face it, just the fact that a large-scale Hollywood crowdpleaser could be eked now from the folk-goes-electric controversy of 60 years ago is a minor miracle. Today’s viewers not only don’t remember a pre-rock era, they live in a largely post-rock one.
Mangold has had an often impressive if uneven career over the last three decades, his identity hard to pin between variable mid-sized projects, solid Oscar bait (Walk the Line, Ford v Ferrari), popcorn franchise flicks, and more. But A Complete Unknown is “well-crafted” beyond expectations—so much so that it makes near-irresistible a concept that really shouldn’t float at all. Prior films like Todd Haynes’ 2007 I’m Not There and Scorsese’s more recent Rolling Thunder Revue inventively enabled and ornamented Dylan’s own elaborate self-mythologizing. This movie, while winking slyly towards that process’ start, does the opposite. It seeks to render relatable and understandable a man who’s long enjoyed being neither, even before anyone knew/cared who he “really was.”
Perhaps the film’s cleverest balancing act is giving us a Young Dylan who is more of a stock screen type—cute, “moody,” fabled compositions springing forth every time he picks up a guitar—than he ever seemed off-screen, but at the same time thankfully opaque, maybe a little perverse. While I am not a big Timothee Chalamet enthusiast, he pulls it off, providing an acceptable teen-idol equivalency to an eccentric personage that is both homage and subtle cleanup job. The slouch, perpetually unimpressed demeanor, and that rusty-fence-gate voice are all gracefully gestured towards sans outright imitation. (The actor’s vocals are a bit sweeter than the original model’s pipes.)
Like the Newport Festival mob, diehard purists will no doubt find plenty to quibble with—and they’ll be right. What is startling about A Complete Unknown, however, is how effortlessly it seems to ride past such objections, even as you detect just how much effort that took. Like the shamelessly “pop” early covers of Dylan songs by The Byrds et al., this movie may smooth away a degree of authenticity from something whose pricklier first edition remains within memory. But like them, it also sure goes down easy.
The same year Unknown begins, Cuba’s post-revolution government began regarding rock music as “ideological diversionism,” a manifestation of corrupting capitalism along with homosexuality and other supposed “foreign influences.” Some bands acquired an underground following nonetheless, despite the whole idiom being banned from radio, TV, and public spaces, subject to police raids even at private gigs. Incredibly, many of those restrictions remained in place for four decades, until finally eradicated in 2001.
The protagonists in Los Frikis, another new movie “based on a true story,” are first met in 1991, so their identity as rockers is an act of conscious rebellion. The collapse of the Soviet Union has already made hard lives harder, as Cuba goes almost overnight from a Russian dependent to an impoverished economic orphan.
Young Havana brothers Paco (Hector Medina) and Gustavo (Eros de la Puente) have little choice but to labor in the cane fields. There are no other jobs, and even the work they’re forced into comes without any real pay. It’s a bleak situation that mohawk’d Paco copes with by channeling his almost maniacal energy primarily into what others deride as “Yankee music,” fronting a punk band while turning his little bro onto contraband sounds from Nirvana, the Rolling Stones, et al.
When the uncle they live with decides his solution is to construct a raft and hopefully sneak family members off to Miami, he pointedly does not invite troublesome Paco. The latter then makes a drastic decision: Rather than stay starving and alone in Havana, he’ll inject himself with HIV, because in a climate of AIDS paranoia, those who test positive are being quarantined in reportedly idyllic communal circumstances in the countryside. By the time he gets sick, “they’ll have found a cure,” right? Unable to separate from his idolized sibling, Gustavo soon ditches the fam and joins him, getting shipped out to the same communal rural farm being run by the government as a “sanatorium.”
Getting fed, playing music, hanging out with other cool outcasts all day every day—surely it can’t be that good, like some alternative summer camp for young adults. But, well, it is, at least as depicted in Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’s film. I had the same problem with this movie that I did with their last, 2019 sleeper hit The Peanut Butter Falcon: It’s another superficially appealing but unconvincing and underplotted fantasy of “freedom” in fairly adolescent terms, where people with serious medical or other issues are seen as somehow more liberated than the rest of us, and the boring parts of everyday survival (making a living etc.) get magically suspended. Nobody seems to work here, though the farm/camp is supposedly self-sustaining, with no staff beyond sexy Maria (Adria Arjona), who originally came for the sake of a now-deceased brother. Even she seems to lounge about most of the time, later initiating Gustavo in the joys of sex.
“Los Frikis” were indeed a Cuban punk subculture, many of whom went this route (voluntarily self-injecting with HIV+ blood) as a middle finger to the government they were continually harassed by. But we don’t learn much about them as a larger group, especially once the action moves to the countryside, and we don’t learn much about how these state-run sanatoria were run, either. Can they really have been so carefree, the occasional funeral aside?
I doubt it—one fears the filmmakers are just too beguiled by the lure of filling their two-hour film with early-1970s-style montages of youthful gamboling, makeout sessions, band practices, riding horses bareback through fields, shirtless actors striking rebel postures, etc. It feels awfully romanticized, and a bit insipid. I’m as happy to be reminded of old counterculture hits like Billy Jack and King of Hearts as the next fogey. But this is supposed to be fact-based, and instead it feels like somewhat formless wishful-thinking.
Still, there’s a vicarious pull to this depiction that will probably seduce many viewers—particularly those who weren’t born yet during the era dramatized. Utopias are always alluring. It’s just a pesky fact of life that as you get older, you find believing that they can actually functionto be more important than simply reveling in the skinnydipping, endless-jam-session surface.
A Complete Unknown opened in Bay Area theaters, and Los Frikis at SF’s AMC Kabuki 8, both on December 25.
