A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan was always there.

By the time I was born, his career was already in its third decade. He was the music of my grandparent's generation – a distant icon who showed up at the Oscars with a catchy theme to Wonder Boys, and a punchline to mumbly, high-pitched imitations.

In high school, I took a creative writing class that studied his lyrics. As a massive Bruce Springsteen fan, I found a lot to appreciate in the folksy, working-class songs that spun tales of downtrodden losers looking to win. They weren't romantic like Springsteen, but they had the same mythic quality that painted America as a land of broken promises still worth exploring. Like Springsteen, Dylan could hardly call himself a working-class grunt, but it was the emotion that mattered.

The more I read about him, the more fascinated I became by his contradictions and falsehoods that served a greater truth. Everything about Dylan is fiction, but everything about him is real, too, to an extent. He is who he says he is, and we take that as the truth. There's a comfort in accepting the myth when reality is so mundane.

Naturally, a single film couldn't contain everything that Dylan is or isn't. His entire career, almost 70 years to date, is one of reinvention and revival. Instead, director James Mangold centers on one of these reinventions: Dylan's first foray into electric instruments.

It's not new ground for Mangold, who directed the beloved, though not well-aged, Walk the Line over 20 years ago. You can see the same assuredness in the way he stages the musical numbers. They're shot lovingly and full of heart. The cast does their own singing, at least as much as we're allowed to know about it. It's all about the illusion anyway, and here it's a pristine one. I believe the folks on the stage, and that's enough.

Everything beyond the stage, however, is a mixed bag. There's no question that Mangold doesn't love this era and its trappings. On a purely technical level, A Complete Unknown is a marvel. It is a rose-colored helping of nostalgia that works because it's pure fantasy: A memory of someone else's memory.

That's the problem.

A Complete Unknown isn't really about anything. It's a hagiography for Dylan, and only Dylan, who the film refuses to explain or understand. Every scene follows the same structure: Dylan wanders around sullenly, while everyone chides him for something or other, only for him to pick up a guitar and instantly belt out an iconic classic. At this point, all the problems in the world fade away, and the cast is left to stare in silent awe at this boy wonder.

A single scene of this could work. Would it be cheesy? Certainly, but a certain amount of that is required for a film like this to work. But this is all that A Complete Unknown offers, and it does so at the expense of real people.

Consider Joan Baez and Toshi Seeger, both incredible activists and artists, who made their marks in history. In the film, Toshi barely has three lines of dialog, and Baez is reduced to a distantly lovesick fling who wants to hate Dylan, but can't because he's just so damn talented.

Elsewhere, Pete Seeger has little to do but a "gosh-darn" routine as he gets out of Dylan's way. In Mangold's hands, one of the most prominent voices of American folk music is little more than an uncomfortable footnote in Dylan's saga. What's worse, there's a genuinely horrendous moment where a dying Woody Guthrie hands Dylan his harmonica like he's passing the torch to the next generation. Mangold frames Seeger in the middle of the act, yet completely removed from the world of these titans, forced to watch as history leaves him behind.

It's these choices that make A Complete Unknown feel like sour grapes. Dylan is already an iconic part of American history. Why rewrite things to make them even more about him? You've won, just give it a rest.

Sure, it's all handsomely produced, with decent performances, and a great soundtrack. But it's also empty, vapid, and often mean-spirited in its desire to please Dylan.

At its worst, A Complete Unknown feels like a repeat of Walk Hard, the blisteringly smart music comedy from the mid-2000s. In it, John C. Reilly parodies Mangold's Walk the Line, yet the satire is so precise, that every other music biopic to date will be measured by how close it hews to Reilly's film.

A Complete Unknown comes very, very close. Especially in scenes where people with serious faces in dim lighting declare: "Dylan's gone electric!" As if it were the end of the world.

You won't learn anything about Bob Dylan from A Complete Unknown, and that's partially the point. But I can't imagine it will instill any love for the era or the music either. They're all stepping stones into Dylan's world, and Mangold's singular vision of deifying one musician at the cost of all others makes for a flat, soulless film that never finds the right tune.