Ballad of a Thin Man
By Frank Falisi
A Complete Unknown
Dir. James Mangold, U.S., Searchlight Pictures
Early in A Complete Unknown, Bob (Timothée Chalamet) goes to meet Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) at Greystone Park Hospital. The moment is treated as unmistakable hagiography, all holy light sneaking through dingy windows while a camera witnesses elemental energies transfer from Woody—rendered near-immobile and mute from Huntington’s disease—to Bob, just 19 and a hitchhiker with the face of a Hollywood idol. As Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), another would-be saint, looks on, Guthrie hands Bob a card that bears his name on one side. On the other: “I AIN’T DEAD YET.”
It’s a rare moment of cleverness from director and co-writer James Mangold, whose film otherwise forsakes the sharper edges of irony or critique for full-throated celebration. Bob Dylan isn’t dead yet. He released Shadow Kingdom in June 2023, a remix album as revisitation that featured 13 early career tracks re-recorded in the spectral accordion honk that has become Dylan’s modern lingua franca, somehow simultaneously a stark departure from and the logical follow-through of the “thin, wild mercury” of Blonde on Blonde. He toured the United States and Europe for most of 2024 and revived songs as disparate as “Shooting Star” (Oh Mercy, 1989), “My Own Version of You” (Rough and Rowdy Ways, 2020), and “Desolation Row” (Highway 61 Revisited,1965), sometimes all in one evening.
The prospect, then, of “The Bob Dylan Biopic” necessitates an approach different from the canned elegy of most other Hollywood musician chronicles. Whether recent as in Elvis (2022) and Judy (2019) or relatively ancient like The Glenn Miller Story (1954) and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), the settled natures of these films’ subjects allow their lives to be reskinned in the manner most profitable (culturally or fiscally) to the filmmakers—history becomes myth in today’s contextless terrain of mystification. And even if Rocket Man (2019) and Better Man (2025) seemingly break fresh ground—allowing the participant and not merely the heirs a cut of the profits—the lives on display are still rendered like taxidermy, an illusion of movement whose very claims at truth reveal little more than how stitched together they are.
Not only is Bob Dylan not dead yet: he’s still a working artist. He regularly slices open his songs and smooshes their insides around to indicate or indict different perspectives about his or our lives. “Tangled Up in Blue” (Blood on the Tracks, 1975)—performed most recently in 2018—is a codex of plastic versions, some sweeping, some stuttering. One favorite 1978 performance glitches the borders of the first-person and the third into a chorus of gods and gawkers, a decidedly cinematic proof of that final kiss-off lyric, “We always did feel the same/ We just saw it from a different point of view.” The exacting, confident venom of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965) is frailer on the new Shadow Kingdom version, that busted reed voice rushed and hushed like it’s recalling a prayer to its self that could end at any moment. It’s a testament, in part, to the way A Complete Unknown’s Pete Seeger talks about the power of a single song: “A good song can only do good.”
In A Complete Unknown, songs signal narrative function. They do things, otherwise they’re no good. Before that fateful bedside meeting, Seeger appears in federal court via flashback. He’s held in contempt for not naming names at a HUAC trial. He sings Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” on the courtroom steps after a guilty verdict. The song means that he is principled and charming, that he opposes an unprincipled, uncharming world. At Greystone, when Seeger asks Bob to sing something to his stricken hero, the younger man responds with “Song to Woody,” a scratchy ode to the folk singer that becomes one of the two original compositions on Bob’s debut album (Bob Dylan, 1961). The song means that he is a serious, talented artist with a preter(super?)natural access to songs hanging in the air. It means that Pete will take him under his wing and take his songs to the folk revival scene. It means that Bob is on his way to becoming Bob Dylan.
This process of becoming forms the bulk of A Complete Unknown’s (considerable, if standard in 2024) runtime, as Bob swiftly ascends through New York’s downtown folk ecosystem and a cloud of record execs. Along the way, he starts, severs, and restarts a couple of quasi-romantic relationships, first with the Suze Rotolo surrogate “Sylvie Russo” (Elle Fanning), and then with fellow-folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Of this point: for every Bob Dylan song that obtusely reckons with surreal imagery or societal ennui, there are two that simply aspire towards Buddy Holly and Little Richard’s carnal poetry; is there a more welcomely lusty lyric than “Shut the light, shut the shade/ You don’t have to be afraid—I’ll be your baby tonight” (John Wesley Harding, 1967)? In that regard, Mangold is well-served in directing his star to lead with his crotch. Chalamet turns in an admirable impersonation in a film that can’t conceive of any other kind of celebration. It’s accuracy and not turbulence of gesture that matters most here. The hallmark of the Hollywood musical biopic is the positioning of an exceptional individual in opposition to an imperfect—though crucially, salvageable by them—world, a superhero film by another name. Chalamet’s natural charm and easy gravitas convince us of this paradigm. He is a star from go. He sounds good singing the good songs.
More confusingly, Mangold frequently denies access to Bob’s inner world, a decision not necessarily to the film’s detriment. He materializes into the film’s universe via the trunk of a hitchhiked truck and disappears from it astride a motorcycle. In between, we see him sing the songs that track an evolution from folk singer to rock star, songs that appear as reactions to the world around him rather than manifestations of any consciousness we can interpret. While Fanning and Barbaro are mostly enlisted to act by turns charmed and frustrated at Bob’s cool remove, he’s free to become a kind of mirror-vacuum, extracting political, cultural, and social cues from the story of Bob Dylan as raw material for a songbook the spectator, in turn, knows by heart. We never witness Bob work on these songs, really. Occasionally a cursory notebook is scrawled in, or a guitar listlessly strummed while a female scene partner performs the familiar steps of Biopic Wife Fodder. “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” Barbaro’s Baez lobs at him when he reduces her singing to “an oil painting at the dentist’s office.” By the film’s moral calculus, Baez is only slightly more noble than the establishment folkies and record exec vultures trying to bend Bob’s art a way he doesn’t want it to blow. A Complete Unknown gets to have it both ways then: it positions Bob as an asshole artist while simultaneously building a filmic universe where the asshole artist is not only laudable but the cosmic hero.
Watching the film, I thought not infrequently about Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince’s musical maudit Merrily We Roll Along, a coming-of-age that moves in reverse, like Pinter’s Betrayal on Richard Rodgers uppers. The most recent and starriest New York production of this piece came close to cracking its failed dramatic tensions by suggesting that the central figure of the musical’s trio—Franklin Shepard, a former wunderkind composer who sells out his friends and self by becoming a big-shot Hollywood producer—isn’t a tragic figure, but a sociopathic one. He strip-mines his reality, first for songs and then for business and brand. Forgoing the Freud Jr.-isms that plagued Walk the Line (2005), A Complete Unknown could have been a genuinely venomous twist on the musical biopic’s familiar portrait of the artist at the expense of everything and everyone else. It would have been all the sourer positioned in the mouth of a figure too often reduced to “voice of a generation” status without consideration for the labyrinth of contradictions and inversions that snake through the Bob Dylan songbook (an entity that, to the consternation of some critics, exists beyond the fabled sixties and Blood on the Tracks.)
Instead, Mangold buys into and then repackages the hype of Bob Dylan without much care spent on what happens when we treat artists as prophets instead of observers or laborers. A Complete Unknown positions “Blowin’ in the Wind” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963) as an American hymn descended from on high, an untroubled, near-holy address to a consumer society reeling at the way myths of domestic prosperity and the national dream were beginning to splinter. In its laboring middle section, the film renders Bob Dylan as a Gumpian bard—there he is, testifying through Kennedy’s assassination, the March on Washington, the Cuban Missile Crisis—whose stubborn refusal to play nice doesn’t threaten American artistic hegemony so much as it makes a proof of the exceptional individual as the keeper of that hegemony. It occurs to me that “Blowin’ in the Wind”’s true trick is that way it forgoes authority altogether. It’s a trap for ears refusing to listen as much as it is for the listener seeking polemic at the expense of the actual words. How many roads, seas, times, years? Rather than reduce itself to the diminished language of solution-making, the song frustratingly, gracefully opens up at every turn. A hand wave and a hope, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
In truth, A Complete Unknown relates to the songs it loves as transactionally as the villains it presents. Mangold’s willingness to paint sixties establishment folkies as potentially just as extractive as their more legibly villainous record mogul counterparts would have meant something if the film had any interest in actually investigating the prickly relationship between art and commerce. Instead, those poles become merely video game obstacles for the exceptional individual who seemingly cajoles art out of thin air. By treating them as signals in a myth-making legend, Bob’s performances of his songs must mean as much to him as we’re told they mean to history. It’s a strangely literal view of where art and artists must go to matter in our consciousness, and it effectively renders what could have merely been an idolizing bore into a jukebox musical, that lowest-common denominator of theatrical forms which mandates songs are only productive when they advance a personal narrative: “Song to Woody” means the story begins, just as “Masters of War” means Bob means something, just as “Maggie’s Farm” means Bob’s not going to play that way anymore, just as “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” means that it is, indeed, all over now.
When A Complete Unknown finally arrives at its title lyric, sung cool by its teenybopper star instead of wailed like in the live recording it’s aping (Live 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert), it’s positioned to directly address the scene that precedes it. There, Fanning’s long-tortured Sylvie accompanies Bob to the Newport Folk Festival, hopeful to rekindle their romance. After witnessing the singer duet on “It Ain’t Me, Babe” with the still-present Baez, Sylvie tearfully makes a break. Bob follows, and the two share a nearly moving scene between a chain-link fence, a metaphor almost as subtle as the film’s suggestion that Woody Guthrie’s degenerative nerve disease mirrors the corruption of the folk revival scene. And then Sylvie leaves Bob alone. How does it feel? The song is there to instruct us how to feel. Otherwise, it’d be useless.