James Mangold (2024)
Catching part of James Mangold’s Walk the Line (2005) on TV the other week reminded me how much I like the film despite its dreary biopic cliches, and why. It’s a dual biography, of June Carter as well as Johnny Cash, and both are splendidly portrayed (by Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix). The whole story tends towards the happy ending of June agreeing to marry Johnny; it’s a happier ending because we already know that the marriage endured. There’s lots of good music too, as there also is in Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, but this Bob Dylan biopic, starring Timothée Chalamet, lacks other things that Walk the Line had, romantic momentum among them. To the extent that Mangold means to present Chalamet’s Dylan as enigmatically inaccessible – the film’s title, echoing the phrase in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, makes this clear enough – there’s no reason why romantic momentum should feature strongly. Yet the screenplay, by the director and Jay Cocks, is hardly more imaginative than the Walk the Line script Mangold wrote with Gill Dennis: A Complete Unknown still depends heavily, for example, on dramatising the main character’s love life – Dylan’s affairs with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) – and it does so in a thoroughly conventional way. The same applies to the crude, cartoonish presentation of Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) and other mercenary music industry figures. To deliver on the ambitious approach to a biopic protagonist that his movie seems to profess, Mangold needed to ground it in a much more imaginative narrative than he supplies.
Not that Bob-Dylan-the-enigma is an original screen concept anyway. Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007) was premised on Dylan’s elusiveness, realised by Haynes having different actors incarnating different aspects of Dylan’s persona – none of these incarnations was called Bob Dylan – during his already long career. The acknowledged source material for Mangold and Cocks’ screenplay, Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, sounds to have a very specific subject; and A Complete Unknown‘s timeframe is short, 1961 to 1965. As context, Mangold trots out, via black-and-white television screens, the usual big news events of the period: the Cuban Missile Crisis; the March on Washington (with Timothée Chalamet inserted into the footage for Dylan’s appearance there); the Kennedy assassination. The film’s supposed climax is the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 – specifically what Elijah Wald’s subtitle to Dylan Goes Electric! labels the ‘Night That Split the Sixties’.
Before Dylan goes ahead with his electric guitar performance, despite the pleas of Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and others on the Newport committee, he and Joan Baez duet ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’. Bob and Sylvie Russo (aka Suze Rotolo: according to Wikipedia, the real Bob Dylan asked the filmmakers not to use Rotolo’s real name) appear to have split up some time ago but he chooses the occasion to persuade her to get on his motor bike with him and come along to Newport. This means that, as Bob and Joan are singing, Sylvie can stand in the wings, reduced to tears by the unignorable strength of connection of the pair onstage: ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ is suddenly telling the story of what’s happening on screen as obviously as many a number did in the traditional movie musical. I felt sorry for Elle Fanning (a good actress): Mangold repeatedly cuts back and forth between the stage and Sylvie looking upset until she (Sylvie but perhaps Fanning too) can’t take any more and runs off in distress. To prolong the cliché, Mangold has Dylan follow Sylvie and try in vain to talk her out of exiting his life for good. This episode is meant to be the hors d’oeuvre to the notorious electric set. The latter is staged so lamely that it becomes a standard-issue biopic illustration of the daring artist scandalising their audience. This means there are close-ups of three or four people in the Newport crowd chucking verbal abuse and physical objects Dylan’s way, clumsy and futile attempts by the organisers to mute the sound, and so on.
Timothée Chalamet is a rather shallow actor, which makes it more galling to read rumours that he insisted on being addressed as Bob during the shoot in order to stay uninterruptedly in character. (At least when there were similar stories about Daniel Day-Lewis you could rely on the results making the actor’s demands seem worth it.) Chalamet’s portrait makes sense of the film’s conception of its subject but his singing and guitar-playing are more impressive than his interpretation of Dylan in non-musical parts of the story. What Chalamet does as Dylan the performer is a considerable feat of mimicry – he seems (to these admittedly non-expert ears) to have the original’s nasal whine down to a tee. What’s more, his intense focus on getting the vocals right means that Chalamet on stage seems to be in a world of his own, which corresponds to Dylan’s self-absorption and suggests his creative single-mindedness. When Dylan isn’t performing or in the process of composing songs, however, the effect of not being allowed inside his character is very different. Chalamet sometimes seems merely to be striking attitudes: because that’s something he’s done before on screen (with less justification), it’s hard not to see the attitudinising here as a tendency of the actor rather than a facet of the man he’s playing.
All the actors do their own singing and seem to do it very well, Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton especially. Barbaro’s voice isn’t as rich as Joan Baez’s but it’s lovely to listen to. Norton’s Pete Seeger is infinitely benign and that warmth comes through in his singing as well as his speaking voice – no mean achievement. In what in this film is the small role of Johnny Cash, Boyd Holbrook also gives an enjoyable performance on and off stage. It’s a pity that, later on, Cash keeps reappearing just to support Dylan when no one else seems prepared to: when he hands over his own acoustic guitar for Bob to do a folk song as an encore at Newport, it’s one encouragement too many, even if it did really happen. The narrative starts with Dylan – at this stage a complete unknown in terms of recognition too – visiting Woody Guthrie, his idol, in hospital, when Guthrie’s friend Seeger is also at his bedside, and Bob impresses them both with the ‘Song to Woody’ he’s recently composed. Scoot McNairy is magnetic as the ailing, nearly mute Woody although, after another couple of short scenes between him and Pete, Mangold forgets about Guthrie until the closing sequence, a postscript to the Newport kerfuffle, when Dylan visits him again. This seems to be for bookending purposes only.
The only saving grace of the ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ bit comes when, as she sees Dylan about to join her on stage, Joan Baez gives him the finger, turning so that the Newport audience can’t see what she’s doing. (This was also the only time I laughed throughout the film.) It’s not long into their relationship that Baez says to Dylan one morning, ‘You’re kind of an asshole, Bob’ and he tonelessly replies, ‘I guess’. That exchange sums up James Mangold’s film rather more neatly than it should. Whatever anyone thinks of Bob Dylan, few will deny he’s a hugely consequential figure in twentieth-century music. For all the performing talent in evidence, A Complete Unknown feels inconsequential.
21 January 2025
