A Complete Unknown. Directed by James Mangold, Searchlight Pictures, 2024.
Reviewed by Jonathan Hodgers, Trinity College Dublin
If you’re lucky enough to be around this long, you prolong your career by talking about the past, and you use documentaries and books and films to remind people that you’re here.[1]
Robbie Williams
A Complete Unknown is a deft piece of propaganda about Bob Dylan, with some vivid recreations of his songs by diligent craftspeople. It achieves its modest aims of approximating Dylan’s story and conveying it in a competent, accessible fashion, and does so in an entertaining and carefully calibrated way. Would one like something more insightful and creative? Absolutely.
The film traces Dylan’s career from his arrival in New York until the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, with a lot of elisions, contractions, and embellishments along the way. How one responds to these alterations depends on their tolerance for deviations from reality and whether these creative liberties succeed in capturing the story’s essence, revealing deep truths about the performer, or simply delivering an entertaining two-hour experience. On these levels, I feel it was a qualified success in two categories and a failure in one.
Entertainment Value
On the level of pure entertainment, the film worked for me – and apparently for the large-ish crowd in attendance on the opening weekend in my local cinema. The laugh lines landed, such as Dylan’s crack about Baez’s songwriting (I won’t spoil it here). I remember feeling momentarily excited to walk in Dylan’s shoes, to see a recreation of that corner of New York at that particular time. The coffee shops and supper clubs, the look of the streets – these were fun and interesting sojourns into historical ethnography. While I can’t vouch for their accuracy, the verisimilitude was impressive. The film’s depiction of the hospital where Woody Guthrie stayed – desolate and purgatorial – stood out, and given how faithfully other elements were recreated, I suspect it was accurate. It’s fun to watch the actors navigate their real-life counterparts’ affectations. Timothée Chalamet is never less than watchable and credible. Certain scenes are poignant; not least of all, those with Scoot McNairy’s Guthrie, where we’re exposed not only to the tragedy of Huntington’s disease but also feel for an prodigious talent cruelly rendered inert, confined to being a spectator venerated by participants. And the film is moving in other ways. Edward Norton gives the most affecting performance. Seeger’s reaction to his dreams becoming a reality, but not because of him, is sad and sympathetic. The most haunting shot of the film for me was Seeger clearing away chairs after Newport. Whether it’s real or not, it captures the divide between stars and ordinary people who are famous. The menial tasks he voluntarily performs contrast strikingly with Dylan’s actions, who, in this film, is above everyday altruism.
Fidelity to Dylan’s Story
The film’s attempts to capture Dylan’s story – or at least one version of it – within a fairly narrow time frame, just about works. While it dramatizes some public events proficiently, it struggles to move beyond that, or even intimate that it wants to. This is the hardest pill to swallow: it’s a kind of fantasy. It’s not miles away from Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), albeit it’s not working within the documentary format, and is slyer in its various duplicities because it so accurately and obsessively works to get the accoutrements right.
The film’s fastidiousness in recreating the world its characters inhabit is implicated in the unease I feel about its fictionality. On one hand, the dedication to getting the physics of the film right—the microphones, the jeans, the settings – is admirable. The other side of me distrusts and questions all the meticulousness because the film has overcompensated in this area for deficiencies elsewhere. It obsessively recreates up to a point, such as with the physical space the characters occupy, but is on much less sure footing in recreating other aspects of the characters’ lives and how they interact with one another. The fact is, I don’t believe much of it, whether or not any of us can ever truly know whether certain events happened the way the film suggests (what were Dylan and Suze Rotolo like as a couple behind closed doors? Or for that matter, Baez, beyond what both women shared publicly?). Certain other instances are openly, verifiably counterfactual – the break-up scene with “Sylvie” (Elle Fanning) at Newport, and the argument with Baez (Monica Barbaro) on stage. All these scrupulous recreations of costumes, locations, and props are sleights of hand, aimed at distracting from some (very) fanciful digressions from reality. At its worst (for instance, the breakup at the ferry), it’s hokum: easy, basic, unsubtle, and designed to telegraph narrative developments in the most transparent, unequivocal, unambiguous, and heavy-handed fashion possible.
This unfortunately drags the film into territory well-trodden by other biopics, not just musical ones. Obsessive recreations of physical spaces are used to serve cliched soap opera tropes – shopworn scenes of strife between romantic couples seem to take priority over everything else. These scenes are not only of questionable validity, but often fail to capture complexity even within that narrow focus. Dylan’s personal life, despite the extensive screentime devoted to it, is not depicted with the nuance it actually possessed. This is partly due to Sara’s absence (a shared trait with Rolling Thunder Revue and No Direction Home), likely omitted for privacy reasons or due to divorce settlement terms. Regardless, even this aspect of his life is oversimplified, streamlined into melodrama that obscures the richer, more dramatic reality. Often doubling down on the simplifications, many of the scenes, as written, manage to flatline on account of sheer heavy-handedness. Trusting nothing to chance, the filmmakers serve up blunt dialogue with a large dollop of symbolism (they just had to include the fence in the breakup scene, didn’t they?). It doesn’t matter that such overstatement is cliché enough to be mocked in music biopic parodies (“the ‘60s are an important and exciting time!”).[2] The filmmakers still seem to believe it’s more compelling than the other facets of Dylan’s life that influenced his music. Yet there are no shortage of fascinating influences on Dylan’s development. Blink and you’ll miss Van Ronk. Izzy Young is nowhere to be found (though a stand-in for the Folklore Center appears), nor is Victor Maymudes; Eve and Mac McKenzie are similarly absent … the list goes on. The point isn’t to fact-check the film, but to illustrate that omitting so much weave from the Village tapestry has a way of distorting how Dylan became who he was over the time period covered by the film. The Village in A Complete Unknown is depicted as something to transcend – almost like an adversary, a Devouring Mother. However, that’s an overly simplistic view and undermines the audience’s understanding of the Village music scene and the path to artistic and professional ascension at the time. Never mind how Dylan himself eventually saw it – Rolling Thunder literature poignantly reveals how much Dylan tried to recreate that very Village in the mid-70s. As a result, too many gradations are missing – both regarding the protagonists and the broader Village ecosystem. Even though the film doggedly tries to convey as rich a sense of place as possible, it’s done to shore up rather corny prevarications and a significantly simplified account of events.
Another byproduct of this anal retentiveness is the intimation of hard graft behind the scenes – the sense of studious dedication and reverence, but not joy. The film has done its homework, in the worst sense of the term. Boxes ticked, chores done, t’s crossed, i’s dotted – we feel the labour behind the film, the years of effort, all of which have been hammered into us by the PR. Dylan’s music is joyous, in the moment, and delightfully cavalier at times (who cares if a musician made a mistake or Dylan fluffed a lyric?). That sensibility is not to be found here – just veneration, the same nagging fanboyishness that suffocates many comic book films and resurrections of older IPs. It feels like toil – arduous, painstaking even – all of which comes at the expense of spark.
The problem here is that real life as mediated to us in other media told us something more interesting and nuanced. A telling comparison is Dont Look Back (1967), which portrays Baez’s marginalisation in a subtle, drawn-out manner rather than through a crude onstage confrontation. That documentary shows her sad exit through a hotel door, all but unnoticed except by Pennebaker’s camera. In contrast, A Complete Unknown presents an assertive Joan Baez rejecting Dylan – another fabrication. Films, of course, must condense and dramatize events, but here, it lapses into the flaws of other biopics; it makes up conflicts and distorts the behaviour of real-life individuals in the process, leaving us, ironically, with less effective drama.
And the film does lack real drama in the form of suspense. There’s never a sense of tension that Dylan is being pulled in two directions – no feeling that history might go awry. It feels rote. It presents what happened as if it was inevitable. There’s no flicker of doubt, no pull of the metaverse, nothing that would call into question whether things always had to happen the way they did. In other words, it doesn’t make us feel present in the moment when the future was uncertain. We never forget what happens, and never suspend our knowledge of how the story ends. Compare this with No Direction Home (2005), which, with great skill, managed to introduce a frisson of uncertainty – it’s exciting, in a way this film isn’t. In the scene with Seeger’s teaspoon analogy, did Dylan ever look remotely like he would back out of going electric at Newport? There is conflict in the sense that the two characters have contrasting beliefs, but little inner conflict among either party (although Seeger’s character does evolve more than that of Dylan’s), which has a way of flattening them out as people, but also diluting the suspense we might feel by witnessing 3D individuals having to think about their choices and figure things out in the present. (One recalls several expert scenes in Tarantino’s films, where characters pause to really think about their circumstances and choices.) Uncertainty – the lack of detours, the fact that Guthrie liked his singing more than his writing, that Dylan mocked Cash initially, his trajectory as a songwriter for Leeds and then Witmark – it’s not here; just Dylan’s manifest destiny to be the person James Mangold and Jay Cocks (and, it has to be said, Bob Dylan), portray him as being.
Relatedly, I’m not sure the story-as-told is as strong as Mangold et al. thought. The events are dramatic, but the Dylan of the film (not the real-life Dylan) isn’t an especially easy figure to identify or side with, and as a result, the conflict is robbed of some of its urgency. It’s not always 100 per cent clear what Dylan wants or why, beyond a contrarian desire not to be what others want him to be. It’s a touch negative, as if there was nothing positive to his actions. He seems to not especially enjoy music or its performance. Chalamet’s Dylan is grumpier than what real life suggested, like a mix of the front covers of The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) and Highway 61 Revisited (1965). The likes of the Halloween concert Dylan (The Bootleg Series Vol. 6) aren’t to be found. The protagonist is a sort of amalgamation of Dylans: a summation of Dylan, assembled from multiple eras, and perhaps a vague cultural memory of how he was at the time. It’s not easy to know what Dylan’s thinking, which is par for the course, but Chalamet’s Dylan is obtuse at times, gnomic and uncommunicative in a way that seems off versus Dont Look Back, which is near this film chronologically. Again though, we’re reminded that we’re witnessing a fantasy. The deep well of empathy that it’s possible to feel for Dylan never quite emerges, and the film’s various conflicts suffer as a result from a lack of a strong point of identification.
The inconsistent fidelity to the real people again conspires to rob the film of dramatic heft. It’s normal and inevitable that critics have critiqued the various participants’ portrayals: Suze/Sylvie, Baez, Grossman, Cash … it hardly matters in some way; they’re reasonable simulacrums, low res and streamlined, like much else in the film. (Grossman, especially, has lost his real-life capacity to illicit discomfort.) Within these confines, however, the actors work hard. Chalamet mimics Dylan well – or at least some instantiations of him: the way he lowers his head and glowers out from underneath his eyebrows when he sings, the way he seems to put his sunglasses on with both hands … it’s a not-insignificant achievement that he’s not inadvertently silly (cf. Ben Whishaw and Christian Bale in 2007’s I’m Not There). I’m not sure I ever fully embraced him, however. It’s an impossible task in some ways, as with all major public figures one knows reasonably well from documentaries and interviews. One always watches and judges how well the impression aligns with their memory of the person. The more familiar we are with the real person’s body language, the harder it is to sink into the performance and see a character rather than an impression. In that way, it might have been helpful to have known Dylan less – the performance itself might have distracted less (Dylan neophytes obviously won’t be bothered by this). However, the first time we hear Chalamet sing in the film with “Song to Woody,” he certainly convinced me that he had done his homework.
The Question of Truth
How much should one care about the film’s correspondence to reality? There seems to be an Overton window: complete distortions will be rejected, but some make-believe is tolerated if it serves an “emotional truth.” But does A Complete Unknown get at something deeper about Dylan?
Emotional or spiritual truth is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. Praising the film for being emotionally true often just means that it aligns with the viewer’s pre-formed impression of Dylan, or at least doesn’t move the needle too much. By this metric, the filmmakers succeeded – they printed the legend. But much is lost in the process. If the film is “spiritually true,” it has sacrificed an awful lot to get there.
Regardless of one’s tolerance for falsehoods, the key question is whether those falsehoods were worth it. For all the cutting and pasting, I don’t think the filmmakers access the spiritual or emotional truth they are striving for. I don’t think, for instance, that there’s a sequence here as good as the “I Want You” sequence in Haynes’s I’m Not There. Unlike that exciting montage, A Complete Unknown doesn’t seem to be able to tap into the thrill of striking out on one’s own, of the cocktail of sex, poetry, motorbikes, and young love, although all are present, duller and flatter, in A Complete Unknown.
The film does, in places, pull one into a vicarious sense of Dylan’s achievement. I did feel a spark of schadenfreude when Dylan performed “Like a Rolling Stone” at Newport – a giddiness at giving philistines that most thrilling middle finger in music history (albeit transplanted from Manchester), but that feeling was somewhat tempered by the fact that the film’s Newport audience members are simple and somewhat shallow antagonists (or enough of them are anyway – Mangold does show some happy converts). In the aftermath of the film’s festival, they dance to his music like it’s “Louie Louie.” It’s edifying to see people won over by the power of his electric material, as it is to see small-mindedness and holier-than-thou attitudes attacked, but when those attitudes belong to a cartoonish, generalised audience, one feels the spiritual truth is too disconnected from the actual truth. The Judas moment is here, for instance, conflating and blurring two very different crowds in the whole electric saga. In Tulsa’s Dylan archive, the vox pops featuring the audiences reacting to the ‘66 gigs are remarkable for how articulate, varied, and revealing their responses are. It’s easy to remember the freaks and obsessives (“he’s making a pile out of it!”),[3] but there were (are?) a lot of normies out there with rational, understandable reasons for demurring at various facets of Dylan’s evolution. You wouldn’t know that from A Complete Unknown. They are Pavlov’s dogs, vulgar as they come (“it’s Bob fucking Dylan!”). It’s all part and parcel with how the film sets up the conflict between Dylan-as-rebel and the gatekeepers of folk music, as well as narrow-minded acolytes and fans. Again, the simplifications of events and contracted timeline comprise the film’s emotional and spiritual truth.
Creative Choices
Part of me is disappointed that this is where Dylan and film has gone. We get a conventional Hollywood narrative, working within a restricted bandwidth, with unobtrusive editing, dialogue, and a loose Oedipal trajectory that aims to work primarily on the emotions. Still, my issue isn’t so much the choice of the classic Hollywood cinema paradigm for the telling of the story; it’s more so that the film seems to lack much creative vision for the subject matter, and ultimately doesn’t have all that much interesting to say about it or persuade the audience of beyond what’s been established in multiple other media about Dylan: that he didn’t like to be fenced in artistically, was something of a lyrical savant, and was not always an especially pleasant or considerate person, especially if he found you trite, prying, or square.
Compare Todd Haynes’ thesis. This is no judgement on the quality of either film – just an observation that one takes a firmer stance than the other. In I’m Not There, the trajectory of a number of the Dylans – one thematic thread that unifies them – is the idea that Dylan fears, for want of a better term, the idea of being found out: specifically, the idea that he be exposed as somehow ordinary, or that his story – specifically, his control over his own story – be somehow taken away from him by either being known too well publicly, by getting too close to others, or by being sniffed out by nosy busybodies looking to dig up dirt on him or otherwise uncover and embarrass him. This affects the Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), Jude (Cate Blanchett), Robbie (Heath Ledger), and Billy (Richard Gere) versions of the character (Woody is a runaway from a juvenile corrections center, Jude is a middle-class suburbanite, Robbie is boorish beneath the movie star veneer, and Billy is a wanted man). How disconcerting would it be to have one’s self-delusion or self-presentation suddenly punctured, especially when the carefully crafted persona is so compelling? Haynes doesn’t go much further than this riff on the theme of “Like a Rolling Stone,” but it’s a provocative perspective on Dylan that he might actually be hurt, wounded, or embarrassed by being revealed as banal or false, or might consider himself less-than without all the invention and role-playing – i.e., that he would respond as a human being would to being seen as an imposter. Compare how a similar idea plays out in A Complete Unknown. Baez calls Dylan out on his pretence, but he’s utterly unmoved, despite being put on the spot. One might invoke Renaldo and Clara (1978) as a rejoinder, where Baez teases Dylan and he’s visibly on the defensive. It’s a human moment for both of them, but that’s not what A Complete Unknown wants; it wants an inscrutable hero – dickish, but utterly sure of himself and without anything underneath. There’s no fear of being found out or exposed; he seeks to be a sort of freak because plain people don’t hold an audience’s attention. Once again, I’m Not There provides more fallibility. Look at Robbie on the motorbike – more accurate, and more vulnerable. Look now at the pro speeding around the Village in A Complete Unknown.
It’s the kind of film that I imagine satisfies the conservative, profit-oriented, Oscar-hungry impulse in the filmmakers’ hearts: something like Walk the Line (2005) or Elvis (2022), a film that shows up at 9pm on terrestrial TV after a few months that most of the family can watch. It’s a job I’m Not There didn’t attempt, and it’s filling a hole in Dylan’s filmography, that of the conventional biopic aimed at mass consumption and designed to present a palatable, sanded-down version of the artist in question and a commensurate simplification of his role in history, with enough romances and bust-ups to keep sceptical or distracted viewers engaged. Its wheelhouse is an easily digestible cinematographic vernacular, designed to go unnoticed, with no hint of warring forces or transformative impulses within the film itself.
Conclusion
Speaking of that recent Robbie Williams biopic, I return to his quotation used as this review’s epigraph: “If you’re lucky enough to be around this long, you prolong your career by talking about the past, and you use documentaries and books and films to remind people that you’re here.” For better or worse, A Complete Unknown ultimately achieved what it aspired to be: a reminder. Underlying Williams’s comment, more importantly, is that need for content, which A Complete Unknown, I’m afraid, feels like to me at times. That it introduced young people to Dylan’s music and drove up his Spotify streams[4] is a positive outcome for anyone who believes his work is valuable and that it should be as widely known as possible. I appreciate why people might praise the film for doing these things, but I wish the film could stand better on its own rather than as a means to an end. A viral TikTok video or strategically placed song in the likes of Stranger Things (2016–) might have achieved something similar. What we got was, again, propaganda, because it’s a form of promotion in the service of an ideology: Dylan-as-enigma, Dylan-as-genius, Dylan-as-lightning rod, Dylan-as-sexy-revolutionary, packaged as part of a simple worldview depicting the individual artist battling against narrower minds and the inequities of a censorial, backwards looking folk world. If it was art, it wouldn’t be so deferential, so eager to please, so in thrall to its central figure. It’s compliant, which is probably the greatest stain on its artistic aspirations. That being said, it’s clear the film worked for some fans and enticed some new ones into the fold. If it succeeds as a gateway drug for the real Dylan, that says something about the film’s quality and its ability to effectively translate and dramatize a world, a series of conflicts, and a group of personalities in a way that resonates with present-day audiences. If it’s somewhat dumbed down and disingenuous, it’s no different than most musical biopics, and perhaps everyone’s sin is no one’s sin. Watch it if you haven’t. I’m going to see it a second time.
Works Cited
Dylan, Bob, dir. Eat the Document. 1972.
Dylan, Bob, dir. Renaldo and Clara. Circuit Films, 1978.
Dylan, Bob. Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia – 512351 2, 2003, compact disc. Originally released in 1965.
Dylan, Bob. The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall. Columbia – 88697732912, 2010, 2 compact discs. Originally released in 2004.
Dylan, Bob. The Times They Are A-Changin’. Columbia – COL 519892 2, 2005, compact disc. Originally released in 1964.
Gracey, Michael, dir. Better Man. Hollywood: Paramount, 2024.
Haynes, Todd, dir. I’m Not There. 2007; Hollywood: Paramount, 2008. DVD.
Kasdan, Jake, dir. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. New York: Sony, 2007. DVD.
Luhrmann, Baz, dir. Elvis. 2022; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros, 2022. Blu-ray Disc,1080p HD.
Mangold, James, dir. A Complete Unknown. Los Angeles: Searchlight, 2024.
Mangold, James, dir. Walk the Line. 2005; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2006. DVD.
Pennebaker, D. A., dir. Dont Look Back. 1967; New York: Criterion, 2016. Blu-ray Disc, 1080p HD.
Scorsese, Martin, dir. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, 2 discs. Hollywood: Paramount, 2005. DVD.
Scorsese, Martin, dir. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix. 2019.
Steiner, Robert. ‘Bob Dylan Streaming Boom Highlights Biopic Bump’. Variety, 28 January 2025. https://variety.com/vip/bob-dylan-biopic-streaming-increase-1236287468/.
The Duffer Brothers, creators. Stranger Things. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2016–.
The Graham Norton Show, season 32, New Years Eve show, “Robbie Williams Has a Message for His Critics.” Aired 31 December 2024, on BBC. Video clip. https://youtu.be/WrQsBRU9u3I?si=ictMP_QJ-k4QmMGn.
[1] The Graham Norton Show, season 32, New Years Eve show, “Robbie Williams Has a Message for His Critics,” aired 31 December 2024, on BBC, video clip, https://youtu.be/WrQsBRU9u3I?si=ictMP_QJ-k4QmMGn.
[2] As spoken in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), here: https://youtu.be/ukq-Zc7nGw8?si=Gtxo-Tmj9Gkztxh6.
[3] From Eat the Document (1972), https://youtu.be/MGylr0S-yZ0?si=YYNNMLR6WEG-cwEv&t=1851.
[4] Steiner, ‘Bob Dylan Streaming Boom Highlights Biopic Bump’.
