A Complete Unknown turns Bob Dylan into a corporate product

Depicting Bob Dylan’s life from the time he arrives in New York City to meet his hero, Woody Guthrie, to his famous “electric” Newport performance in 1965, A Complete Unknown is the latest craven corporatization of the musician’s career to grace our screen in the past decade. Walk the Line director James Mangold takes the helm in this glossy, competent, pacifying look at Dylan’s life, a film that softens not just the mercurial star’s difficult reputation but renders his environment as a branded product, removed of any of its political weight.

A Complete Unknown becomes a series of surfaces — Instagramable faces, costumes and sets that are earthy without being dirty, tailor-made to be consumed. The performances aren’t bad and the movie has enough signs and signals to Dylan aficionados to feel well-researched. It has the appearance of care, even though it lacks in understanding, presenting a story virtually unrooted from its context. It’s a film that substitutes any anti-establishment sentiment with a portrait of unexamined genius, preferring to focus on Dylan’s love affairs as it shows him scrawling lyrics onto paper through the long, dark nights, than anything else. 

For all its perceived failures, a film like Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis uses the cinematic form in anachronistic ways to draw the audience to the feeling of Presley’s rise. This film does little to contextualize or embody the excitement of Dylan’s arrival in the world. It has nothing to say about a young mystery man from the Midwest arriving in New York and quickly becoming a sensation. Even the film’s title, drawn from the lyrics of his song “Like a Rolling Stone,” which suggests an inherent unknowability about Dylan as a person or persona, does more heavy lifting in terms of self-reflection than anything in the film. Taken in tandem with Todd Haynes’ fractured portrait I’m Not There, which imagines Dylan as different incarnations in an attempt to reconcile his multifaceted identity and artistry, A Complete Unknown makes no attempt to understand Dylan or his era.

This leads to the frustrating narrative choices that, at their best, present Dylan’s story as a series of story beats off Wikipedia, and cynically reframe history. The movie’s deplorable moral core positions the world of folk music as an antagonist. While its subject is quite obviously an asshole throughout most of the film, it does little to actually examine Dylan’s true character. As the movie progresses through folk music spaces, musicians like Joan Baez are uprooted from their activism and presented as image-obsessed fame-chasers who search to maintain rather than challenge the status quo.

One particular scene, a recreation of a combative duet between Baez and Dylan of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” presents Dylan as an avant-garde asshole. Baez, who attempts to soften the moment and give the people what they want, becomes framed as the establishment. It renders the ideological and artistic battles within the film as purely individualistic, with Dylan rising to the top. The scene sets up Dylan’s war against the purity of folk music, which bolsters the film’s entire final act, as he rebels against the world he emerged from. This isn’t to say that folk music is above impunity — many films including Inside Llewyn Davis and the aforementioned I’m Not There examine the narcissism inherent to the movement. However, in framing the core conflict this way, the movie diminishes folk music’s opposition to war, inequality and capitalism to a point of almost non-existence.

Though the film uses television sets or radios to establish political and social context, it ends up treating the depiction and creation of art within that context as completely unrelated. Narratively speaking, only Dylan emerges as an anti-establishment artist, and only through his commercial appeal (despite the hostile audience reaction during the final Newport performance) was he able to put them in their place, so to speak. The film’s decision in this context to only examine this early period of Dylan’s life, for a general audience the only period that is palatable and “interesting,” only serves to flatten the radicalism of that departure. It does a disservice not just to Dylan but everyone else within the film.

The entire treatment of history within the film only flattens it. Everything is in favour of storytelling at the detriment of understanding or engagement with ideas or people. The b-narrative integrating Dylan’s friendship with Johnny Cash feels like a not-subtle hint towards Mangold’s previous musical biopic, Walk the Line, and is handled like a Marvel-style Easter egg rather than anything meaningful. Having the actors like Timothée Chalamet sing their own versions of the songs, a seamless work of pantomime, similarly rubs the wrong way, suggesting a kind of interchangeability between original and copy that only further dilutes our relationship to art.

A Complete Unknown doesn’t have the same offensive sheen as something like Bohemian Rhapsody, but part of that digestibility only contributes to the film’s cynicism. It’s a movie that wants to excite audiences through music but doesn’t ask them to understand where that music comes from. It’s a movie about an era heavy with political and cultural change that renders those movements as background elements that are barely consequential within the framing of the story. As the movie attempts, as Elvis did, to also pay tribute to the Black musicians that inspired Dylan, the artistic decision to otherwise divorce folk music from politics (except in the most superficial and palatable ways) feels particularly offensive. Music, art and politics become merely aesthetics, transformed into a corporate product, ready to be consumed. ■

A Complete Unknown opens in Montreal theatres on Wednesday, Dec. 25.

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