I should admit, first of all, that I went into this film with limited expectations. I am a borderline Dylan obsessive, and the idea of a boilerplate biopic focused on the period of his life that has already been covered to within an inch of its life hardly enticed me. However, I felt as though I had to see it.
The film tracks Dylan’s early career, from the point he arrives in New York to the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan definitively moved away from the Folk scene. This moment marked a changing of the guard for Dylan’s career, music, and 20th-century culture—a “Crossing the Rubicon” moment.
The film is not entirely without merit. Boyd Holbrook’s addled Johnny Cash is very entertaining, and Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro are convincing as Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, respectively. It must also be said that it is a competently made film.
However, it is competence without even the slightest hint of inspiration. It does not appear that Mangold, or anyone involved in the film, has the remotest affection for, or understanding of, Bob Dylan. Timothée Chalamet’s performance resembles a feeble caricature. Not only is there no spark whatsoever between him and Monica Barbaro’s Baez, but his performance entirely ignores Dylan’s sense of humour and misinterprets his mannerisms. This is a reduction of Dylan to his most surface-level stereotypes, taking us from one distinct point in his career to another without any explanation of how these moments occurred, saying nothing of any note about the character. Stylistically, it seems to have drawn no influence from Dylan and instead adheres to far more conventional and polished tropes. It is formulaic and predictable in the extreme.
This is perhaps preferable to the alternative. I’m Not There, the last Dylan biopic, is a faux-intellectual, pretentious mess. It does attempt to enlighten its audience about its subject; however, not only is it all nonsense, but it is delivered in an obnoxiously self-satisfied manner. A Complete Unknown avoids this by offering a cursory glance at an incorrect Wikipedia page instead.
The inaccuracies could have been a mere annoyance to people like me, but in the final scenes, they shift from frustrating (the Beatles barely getting a mention is not necessarily inaccurate but is certainly a glaring omission) to making the entire film seem completely contrived.
If the film has a central premise, it is that Dylan annoyed Folk purists simply by going electric. To illustrate this, we are shown Pete Seeger attempting to cut the wires of the amps with an axe at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. This is a ridiculous fabrication. Seeger cared little that Dylan had chosen rock and roll; rather, he noted that the sound quality was so bad he should have cut the wires with an axe. This is not merely creative licence but undermines any credibility the film had in telling Dylan’s story.
The film attempts to impose a simplistic and reductive narrative onto a story that is far more nuanced and complex. Dylan going electric and abandoning protest music was not a singular moment but a process.
Most of the time, the film plods along steadily, but in the final stages, Mangold appears to fear running out of time and rushes to cram everything in. To ensure all the key moments are included, someone in the crowd at Newport shouts “Judas” at Dylan, an event that actually took place a year later in Manchester. This is the equivalent of having the Beatles play the rooftop concert in Sgt. Pepper’s outfits. Any notion that this is a serious film, or anything more than a corporate sanitisation, disappears completely at that point.
Despite my feelings about the film, I can hardly say I am disappointed. In fact, it was precisely what I expected. Very few music biopics escape the absurd simplifications and crass dumbing-down that have become hallmarks of the genre. This film is no exception. It is not as offensively terrible as something like Bohemian Rhapsody and is fairly watchable. However, for an artist like Dylan, this approach feels ridiculous. Not only was the bulk of his career (and his best music) long after the period this film focuses on, but simplifying him so ruthlessly feels absurd.
Ultimately, it is very lazy to attempt to reduce such a complex and mysterious figure into a two-hour music biopic, replete with all the usual clichés and contrivances. This is a film that plays it very safe, setting out to achieve nothing beyond box office receipts. It is too clean and too corporate, and I can scarcely believe a film focused on something I love so much could leave me feeling so little.