by Oscar O’Sullivan

I have a complicated relationship with the music biopic. On the one hand, I’m well aware of their limitations and foibles, and exceedingly wary of the deluge of low-quality rush jobs that have proliferated in recent years. Dewey Cox was very much the last word on the genre years before it truly blew up. And yet, a part of the reason Dewey Cox transcends parody is that the fundamental structure it lampoons does work when executed with the right craft and care. Rocketman soars through a combination of raw honesty and the dazzling Old Hollywood Musical form it assumes, while Elvis is one of my favourite films precisely because it can best be described as a parody played straight. So when I say that A Complete Unknown is both too safe and too unconventional, you’ll forgive me if that sounds like a contradiction. I both admire the attempt to tell an unsanitized version of events and am disappointed at its insistence on sticking to a well-worn and ill-suited structure that does the material no favours. Bob Dylan is presented as a maverick, an unfiltered artist who refused to be what other people expected him to – if only the script had been similarly unfettered.

James Mangold’s film is based on the book Dylan Goes Electric!, though this central controversy doesn’t appear until the final act. Like most reasonable biopics, we focus in on a narrow stretch of the subject’s career rather than trying to take in his entire life. We meet the young Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) at the moment he first arrives in New York as a penniless hitchhiker, where he is almost immediately discovered by wholesome folk idol Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and set on the fast track to fame and fortune. While most hagiographies of this type will focus on the struggles of their heroes to reach these lofty heights, Dylan seems to float to victory on a wave of goodwill and talent. There’s an implication that this rapid and unopposed race to the top is partially responsible for his later disillusionment and lack of direction, but nothing concrete is discussed at any length. It’s never really clear what Dylan wants, personally or professionally, but on this point I have to praise the film. Its portrait of the artist is blunt and unsentimental, not lavishing undue praise on his genius or wallowing in pity for his struggles.

Chalamet plays Dylan as a pragmatist and a cynic, a pathological liar who presents himself as whatever he thinks people want to see. Once his position is secure and he no longer has to rely on the support of others, he completely drops the facade and just does what he wants. He seeks the company of women but it’s debatable whether love enters the equation – both Sylvie (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) drop in and out of his affections without much visible effect on his emotional state. There’s something opportunistic about the way he’s shown jumping on political and social causes, using them as fuel for his writing and as a way to break out of the restrictive genre box his label wants to put him in. While it would be uncharitable to say the film portrays him as entirely uncaring, there’s an undeniable coldness in the way he operates. Timothee plays him as very outwardly charming but also as someone with very little patience for the expectations of others and no interest in coddling people’s feelings. In the absence of a tragic backstory (“everybody invents their own past” he rambles when called out on his lying) and without any serious obstacles in his way, his one apparent motivation becomes an arcane devotion to the art of music itself. He immediately grows tired of fame, doesn’t care much for the small fortune he accrues and is dismissive of Seeger’s pleas to use his music to keep spreading peace and goodwill. When Dylan assembles a gaggle of young players and begins laying down electric tracks with more enthusiasm than he’s shown for any other venture so far, it becomes clear that for him, the action is the juice – all he wants to do is make music, and he doesn’t really care if people even like it, smirking and rolling his eyes at booing crowds of disappointed fans. Everyone else in the film is so blinded by his genius that they are surprised when he turns his back on them, even though he makes his intentions clear from the word go – “I want to be a musician and I want to eat”.

I fear I’ve made the film sound more interesting than it really is – perhaps the fact that I was able to read this much into it is more of an endorsement than I realise. The problem is that the films great formal strength, it’s cutting objectivity, is at odds with the generic structure, which demands the kind of grand emotional catharsis that simply cannot be wrung out of this story as told. There are many attempts here to shoehorn in emotional connections, almost finding success through Dylan’s recurring visits with his idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), hospitalised and unable to speak but silently encouraging Dylan to keep going with his art. The closest our hero comes to remorse for betraying the folk movement is during his final visit at the film’s end, a wordless moment where Chalamet seems to apologise purely with the sadness in his eyes. Yet these visits are too few and far between to serve as a true emotional core, while his aforementioned relationships with Sylvie and Joan are made overly melodramatic without touching a nerve. Perhaps this attempt at romantic tragedy would be more effective if the viewpoints of the women who loved him were better explored or made the central conceit of the film. Fanning is quite likeable as Sylvie, though the biggest shifts in their relationship are largely off screen, while Barbaro is a show stealer as Joan Baez, who seems to have wandered in from her own unseen biography as a fully-formed and self-motivated character. Her public and private clashes with Dylan are the most believable conflicts in a film sorely lacking in tension. While the performances are solid across the board, most every actor is limited by the fact that all characters here share the same dramatic function – to be awed by Dylan’s talent and infuriated by his personality.

While the film is visually unadventurous, I don’t especially hold that against it. In fact, the stripped-back simplicity goes a way to elevating the musical performance scenes. To draw a point of comparison to Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis – that film transforms the star performances into visually dynamic, mind-boggling sequences of absurd spectacle, edited to within an inch of their lives until the entire film feels like one long musical interlude. That approach suits that film because they highlight how much of Elvis’ power came from the overwhelming energy and flash that he unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. By presenting Bob Dylan’s music and performances in a simple, direct manner, the film is commenting upon the disarming simplicity that made him famous. The focus is squarely on the lyrics. On another level, the many steady and uninterrupted takes of Chalamet singing are a great showcase for his performance. James Mangold is a director who has always painted inside the lines, but one thing that is consistent across his spotty filmography is that he understands how to present an actor. He’s a director that seems equally comfortable in all genres, without having an exceptional understanding of or vision for any of them – hence this film’s dull submission to structural conventions that it doesn’t need. The lowkey, measured presentation is also at odds with the attempts to elevate the stakes in the final act, but on the whole I think it rather suits the story – a chilled out biography of a man who never seems to care about anything.

A Complete Unknown is a perfectly fine movie – not boring, not offensive, not badly made, but also not exciting, not innovative and not especially insightful. Everything we learn about Dylan could be summed up in a Wikipedia article. What makes this a worthwhile way of hearing the story is Chalamet’s swaggering performance and the head-bopping soundtrack. We were spoiled by the quality of last year’s Best Picture lineup – this is the exact kind of stolid mediocrity that the Academy is most likely to award. Chalamet would be a deserving recipient of Best Actor (though my pick remains Colman Domingo for the superb Sing Sing), but any other accolades for this unadventurous ode to an unmanageable genius would be laughable. 6/10.