Mangold, whose movies include “Ford v Ferrari,” is good with actors, but Fanning is ill-served here by a character who torturously morphs into a martyr to Bob’s genius. The problem isn’t Sylvie’s tears, which are well earned, especially when Bob and Joan’s duetting turns intimate and then humiliatingly public; it’s that Sylvie and her pain primarily reflect the wily, elusive, at times callous Bob. Worse, she and Joan — who’s better rounded partly because she is a music great in her own right — spend a lot of time looking at Bob with the kind of awe that suggests they’re witnesses to a miracle (if one who doesn’t know how to make his own coffee).
“A Complete Unknown” probably won’t please Dylan purists or anyone, really, who’s a stickler for documentary facticity in fiction. The movie blurs and plays with years and events, creating a generally seamless narrative out of a messy life as it glances at the larger world (the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement). Some of these global affairs affect the characters more directly than others. Yet while the world’s sorrows and outrages help fuel the folk scene, its finger-pointing (Dylan’s term) protest songs, its politics and concerns, are subsumed by vague notions of authenticity, which are embodied by the suffocatingly sincere Pete and the more openly strident musicologist Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz).
It’s no wonder that Bob rebels against the folkies, whose purity in the movie finally feels more tangible and important than the righteous causes they’re advocating for. Notably, they come off as more square than even the uptown squares who discover Bob after his second album takes off and want a piece of him, as he finds in a Fellini-esque party full of clawing rich gargoyles. Those admirers are bad, but Pete and the folkies can seem worse because they’re dogmatic and because, well, they’re not cool. That seems the point of a scene in which Pete is performing on a low-rent TV show, his wife, Toshi (Eriko Hatsune), supportively, quietly hovering nearby, when Bob walks in looking like the rock star he’s about to become.
Chalamet does look cool, if not as otherworldly as Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’s 2007 film “I’m Not There,” in which she also plays Dylan around the same transformational era. Neither look, sound, feel as cool as Dylan once did. One of the hurdles in biographical movies about contemporary idols is that we know them from the get-go (or think we do) because, like Dylan, they’ve been in mass circulation. And Dylan has been in a lot of movies, including documentaries from D.A. Pennebaker (“Don’t Look Back,” 1967) and Martin Scorsese (“No Direction Home,” 2005). I imagine that Chalamet has made a close study of these great films; he looks and sounds as if he has, even if he never appears pharmaceutically assisted.
The most pleasant surprise in “A Complete Unknown,” and why it works as well as it does, is that even as it builds a realistic world with sweep and detail — the sickly institutional gray-green paint in Woody’s hospital alone will teleport older viewers straight back to the 1960s — it doesn’t try to make Bob palatable, nice or, finally, comprehensible in the usual dreary biopic fashion. For the most part, his genius remains unknowable as does his back story, which is hinted at only in a nod to the surname Zimmerman and a glimpse of a scrapbook. Bob may be a Jesus or a Judas (or both). As this movie underscores, he is very much a beautiful dissimulation, and sometimes there is nothing more authentic than an entertaining con.
A Complete Unknown
Rated R for language. Running time: 2 hours 21 minutes. In theaters.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com