Bobby Bland - A Complete Unknown (2024)

Bob Dylan contains multitudes (see also, I’m Not There), is a towering cultural presence and has been for sixty years. The significance of his work is immeasurable and the man himself remains something of an enigma, and an artist who doesn’t look back. He reinvents himself routinely and has done so for all these decades. 

In his eighties, he still tours relentlessly and if you’ve seen him more than once, you don’t know what you’re going to get which can be cause for elation or disappointment. But you can’t say Dylan is boring and I hate to say it, but James Mangold, Jay Cocks, and Timotheé Chalamet did a good job of rendering him so.

Look, to me biopics are the lowest form of cinema. Few and far between are the ones I actually like and I don’t care how much they fudge the truth or indulge in hagiography, even (no, that’s not true; I hate that shit). However, it should be a criminal offense to make your subject so dead-eyed petulant and try to fob that off as edgy or to use that word again, enigmatic.

As a Dylanophile, I wouldn’t fault the film for taking some liberties here and there and doing the usual biopic stuff of compressing time periods and mixing people together or what have you; but Lordy, did this become a slog after the first act. 

When we first meet Bob coming out of the Manhattan Tunnel in winter 1961, he’s in the back of a station wagon, writing and as he gets out of the car and strolls over to Greenwich Village, I was all-in. When he meets Pete Seeger sitting with Woody Guthrie in Greystone Psychiatric Hospital suffering from Huntingdon’s, I thought we were off to a solid start. By the time we get to Sylvie, I had a sense that we were going somewhere rich, delving into the twenty-year-old Robert Zimmerman’s mind and his relationship with his first true love, Suzie Motolo, here renamed Sylvie at Dylan’s request. 

But by the time he meets Joan Baez, my bullshit meter was going off. Not because of what might/might not have happened historically; it’s because both Sylvie (Elle Fanning) and Baez (Monica Barbara) are sketches of women, just as Chalamet’s Dylan is less the young wunderkind than a poster boy for Sullen Twenty-something Magazine. 

Outside of the principles, the background characters have considerably more life and read as actual humans. Scoot McNairy’s Johnny Cash was a welcome shot in the arm at a point where the only reason I remained in my seat is because the soundtrack is a banger, predictably. Even Edward Norton as Pete Seeger began to grate, since he was given a minimal register to work in; mostly as a nice, anodyne mentor to the sleepy Bobby. 

You might have expected to read “firebrand” or “restless genius”, but as he’s written and worse, portrayed, Dylan’s the smartest guy in the room and regrettably so, because he’s just kind of a dick from the get-go. He shows no interest in anyone around him, has the verbal acuity of a stale doughnut, and is essentially, not the kid from Minnesota who was going to rewrite how you write a song and redefine the parameters for folk and rock music and music in general. 

To be sure, Dylan could be and is on record for extreme dickishness. There’s no getting around that he could be a selfish prick and oblivious of others’ feelings. But he’s also been loyal to people throughout the years and has surely been put in his place more than once. Not so unlike all of us, except that he’s Bob-fucking=Dylan.

All of this just feeds into the titanic misfire of Mangold’s passion project; he posits that Dylan is fully formed upon arriving in New York and just seems to know more than everyone. There’s no nuance or subtlety here. Dylan is less person than archetype and as mentioned earlier, acted like a self-absorbed theater kid trying to get into his character for the school play. Chalamet’s eyes are as dead as Ben Affleck’s in Gigli.

Mangold and Cocks wrote a script that fails repeatedly. Perhaps it’s meant to be an Ode To BD or Paean to America’s Greatest Living Troubadour or some such nonsense, but it’s none of that. There was no sense of place, either. 

The New York City of A Complete Unknown is, at best, an idealized version of the period. The background signs and marquees are of the period, but there’s not a car with a dent on it. These are not vehicles that suffered rust from too many snows and too much sea salt and sand used after plowing. It’s a shiny NYC. Even the garbage, piled high, looks just-so, perfectly placed in a self-conscious sense of set design. 

There is no life here. There is some kick-ass music (how could there not be?) and Chalamet deserves credit for learning to play the guitar well enough and sing like the man himself to sing them, but beyond that, I got nuthin’. Elle Fanning is sad throughout the picture which given how young people usually act when they’re first finding out who they are and who each other is, is usually a little more dynamic. 

Sure, I had friends who were laconic and sullen in their 20s. I could even be accused of that, as well. But there is no glint in Dylan’s eyes when he meets his first true love and there is no reciprocal affection in Fanning’s Sylvie’s eyes, either. As for Barbaro’s Baez, she tries but the script works against her. 

My understanding is that Mangold wanted to preserve Dylan’s mythology and mythologizing; he failed miserably. There’s no myth to give a shit about here and the self-mythologizing that is one of Dylan’s hallmarks is just some kid’s bullshit obfuscation at best, or dumbass negging, at worst. 

The different periods of Dylan’s early years come in rapid sequence and one noticeable point is barely finished before the next one begins. Here, he meets Sylvie, here is Albert Grossman his manager, here’s Joan Baez, here’s a party with movers and shakers where he’s asked to perform for “a worthy cause” but it pisses him off and he leaves his date behind because he’s now fed up with fame. He goes to a club and hears Bob Neuwirth, he gets Mike Bloomfield and the rest of the musicians together for the Highway 61 Revisited sessions, there’s Bob and Joan singing “It Ain’t Me, Babe” while Sylvie looks on tearfully, in the wings, and so on and so forth.

The major centerpiece, of course, is the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 where Dylan infamously went electric and the crowd lost its shit and booed. History, of course, tells us that the crowd booed less because he went electric than that he only played three songs and the sound system sucked. Doesn’t matter; Mangold leans into some kind of Altmanesque technique here which would have served the film much better had it been employed earlier. Jesus, what a Dylan biopic by Robert Altman would have been.

Well, we didn’t get that here. Mangold isn’t Altman, but he’s an often reliable and solid director. However, I wonder if his ambition outstripped his talent here.