A Complete Unknown is Completely Unknown

An icon is reimagined. Hollywood’s hottest young actor gives a jaw-dropping performance. There is excellent folk music by one of the greatest lyricists of all time. The visuals, the style, everything's there except the most important thing: the story.  A Complete Unknown is certainly an immersive film. Watching it, one lives through the 60s, the politically tumultuous time when Bob Dylan rose to fame in the folk scene, his poetic lyricism capturing the country’s mentality in a way that no other art form had until then. As an idea, the biopic is extremely exciting and watching it was enjoyable. However, I felt as if it was a song missing a note. The film definitely showed me Dylan’s originality as an artist and his unique approach to music. What it failed to show me, or even give me a glimpse of, was Dylan’s character. 

A Complete Unknown is not meant to be a traditional biographical film. It starts in medias res, featuring Dylan coming to New York for the first time to meet his music idol,Woody Guthrie, and follows his entry into folk music and subsequent fame. It is supposed to be a snapshot, capturing a specific period in Dylan’s life. I get that it is not supposed to be a narrative introspecting the nuances of Dylan’s psyche. However, Dylan sheds very little light on who Dylan is as a person and what his motivations seem to be. For the majority of the film, Dylan’s character is shown to be aloof. He mistreats everyone around him – his girlfriend, Joan Baez (whom he is having an affair with), his folk mentor, Pete Seeger, et cetera. He alienates everyone and for no conceivable reason. It is not that I wanted the film to show Dylan in a flattering light: the whole egotistical, caustic genius trope is a good one if utilized well. It worked very well for “A Social Network” for instance. However, in that film, Mark Zuckerberg was shown to be an anti-social misanthrope who did not have enough emotional intelligence to deal with girls, even though he had every other kind of intelligence. But in this biopic, there doesn’t seem to be any reason given for Dylan’s horrible behavior. 

There is some tension shown between Dylan’s desire for artistic freedom and the demands of the folk artists and people that propelled him to fame. But the tension doesn’t seem fraught enough. The film doesn’t really delve properly into why Dylan wishes to perform using the electric guitar at a folk festival. Presumably, it is because he thinks that folk can be transformed and redefined into something new, but the direction of the film barely gives this storyline any space to develop. Despite Timothee Chalamet’s breathtaking performance (which makes a film without a clear narrative, story or vision watchable), the icon he portrays remains as mysterious as ever. The musical recreations of Dylan’s songs are exceptional and hopefully will introduce younger generations to his music. However, the fact that Dylan is a musical genius has been well-established. His lyrics were revolutionary, his use of sound innovative. But the film fails to comment on him as an artist, or even a human being at all.  It merely depicts his life at a certain point, and vaguely outlines the struggles of an extremely famous musical genius and artist, which are very unsurprisingly few and hard to sympathize with. Dylan himself remains obscure – a complete unknown. “Who is he?” I asked myself after leaving the theatre. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…