"A Complete Unknown" is a Complete Unknown.

There is a scene about a third of the way through James Mangold's Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown" that exemplifies exactly the failure of the exercise. Sylvie Russo -(Elle Fanning) Dylan's long time and long suffering girlfriend stands in the wings of his concert watching as he and his other on again off again Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) share a seemingly intimate moment on the microphone. At first smiling, the more she seems to either; note something still there, or think back to the pain their original tryst caused her, the more she realizes she can't do this. Fanning is effective enough, and Chalamet and Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez ) have enough chemistry to make it believable, the problem is the film to that point had done nothing to build anything meaningful between any of these characters. A Complete Unknown thusly lives up to its title - almost everything in it other than the music functions as something unknowable. Without real intimacy, connection, heart, these relationships are mystifyingly anemic, and it upsets any connection to the audience.

Mangold's film would've been far more effective as a poetic abstraction of the spirit of Dylan. Connecting the epoch, the restless nature of an anxious country in the midst of a piping hot culture war that included the evolving direction of his music, as well as the nations political jostling into something visceral and hymnal. Instead it opts for the feeling of a listicle article titled "20 times Bob Dylan was an asshole" wrapped around his greatest hits. The movie seems to want to speak through the music, the song choices many times connecting the theme of any particular junction of the movie to lyrics. This is flawed at best, ham fisted at worst, as with its ending when Woody Guthrie's "Dusty old Dust" lyrics"So long it's been good to know you” wail across the borders of the screen as Dylan says his final goodbye to Woody Guthrie. The idea in and of itself is sound, but the execution becomes an affect rather than an effect when you've done little to establish the relationship between Guthrie and Dylan over the film - repeating and crystallizing an already frustrating theme in the movie. The people who are meant to supposedly shape Dylan's life, philosophy, and attitudes; rather by conflict, or connection, function like major guest stars on a sitcom meant to elicit applause after they announce their name in the "I Love Lucy" show. This includes major cultural/political events like the Cuban missile crisis, and the civil rights movement, the latter of which appears as a background matte, a cinematic meme for a completely different picture. What these events mean to Dylan, who these people are to Dylan, what their relationship was like, is barely intelligible, and carries no import other than to be sounding boards with which to reverberate just how cool Dylan was or how much of a prick he could be in any given moment. If the message is that Dylan didn't give a damn about any of these people or happenings, it comes through loud and clear, but I believe the message is supposed to be that Dylan was brilliantly involved in his own myth making process, something that aided his music, but harmed anyone's ability to get to know him which shouldn't have had an effect on our ability to get to know them.

Mangold's film is not a terrible movie, it's merely fine. I don't seek to exaggerate its weaknesses. As a movie that seeks to sing through the music there are quite a few occasions where it does so and soars on those wings. Dylan's music is of the sort that even to a layman like myself it provides both a symbolic and literal emotional ampage, an ethereal penetration that demands response from the soul. There is a quality of communion even within this deeply isolated persona. One feels this profoundly, especially in combination with Chalamet’s techniquely resonate performance. Timotheé Chalamet's work as Dylan, his ghostly physicality is one of the films strengths. He permeates the energy of an answered reply, and the film works best when he's singing and performing - his qualities, the boyish charm, the palpable angst, the sense of an ever present distance exactly the tools for the job here. It's a performance in compete tonal alignment with what the film wants to say thematically. The quality of his vocals is not just a good mimic, but seem to be in keeping with the spirit of Dylan. Moments where Dylan is visably distressed or agitated by some form of social anxiety or peer into his actual personhood are adeptly played by Chalamet’s gift for rigid, cold, detachment. If the cause, sensation, effect, on any of the things, people, events, that orbited around him would've been explored in any meaningful, interesting way, a better film would've extended our from it. Had it an ounce of the fantastic, or deviated in any way from the paint-by-numbers formula of the biopic in at least the way 2019’s “Rocketman” did it might have been far more inspiring, but this was a rote exercise in detangling the intricate curls of a man who was far more interesting than the film that encased him. A film that believes because it's titled in a way that calls forth the image it's fine that it actually be a question mark right to the very end.