Movie Breakdown: A Complete Unknown
Pre-Screening Stance:
James Mangold is a good director, Timothée Chalamet is great actor, and Bob Dylan is a legend, but I have pretty minimal interest in A Complete Unknown because – frankly – it’s had the worst teasers/trailers I’ve seen all year. Is this movie a sequel to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story? I really can’t tell. But hey, who knows, maybe the whole thing will work on the screen.
Post-Screening Ramble:
I was very pleasantly surprised with A Complete Unknown. Music biopics have pretty much been run into the ground since James Mangold did Walk The Line back in 2005, but he manages to avoid the banality of the genre’s recent output with a couple of key items. The first is that this movie does not attempt to cover the entirety – or even the majority – of Bob Dylan’s (still going) life. Instead it focuses on his arrival in New York in 1961, his ascension to stardom, and then his desire to go electric. And that’s it. The second is that I would almost classify this movie as more of a musical than a biopic because so much of it consists of performances by Timothée Chalamet (as Dylan, of course) and Monica Barbaro (as Joan Baez), along with Edward Norton (as Pete Seeger), Boyd Holbrook (as Johnny Cash), and more. Sure, you see some of Dylan’s personal relationships with the likes of Sylvie Russo (a fictional version of Suze Rotolo played by Elle Fanning), Woody Guthrie (Scoot Mcnairya), and others, plus there’s the occasional mumbly songwriting session, but Mangold avoids marginalizing these things into some “this is Bob Dylan” statement. Instead, he let’s Dylan’s music (and other key players from that time) speak for itself while showing you glimpses of his life as he becomes the voice of a generation. It’s well done, and when you consider it also houses an award-worthy performance by Chalamet, then what you’ve got is something absolutely worth seeing. The film will open on Christmas Day.
One Last Thought:
It took me ages to realize that Monica Barbaro also played Phoenix in Top Gun: Maverick. What versatility!
