Watched “A Complete Unknown” – the biopic of Bob Dylan, on the plane. I was disappointed. Yes, it is well acted, well filmed etc – but, for me, it is essentially a carefully made pastiche, a re-presentation of Dylan the public man as I already knew him – the myth. I found it dissatisfying. We are shown this shuffling young guy, endlessly smoking cigarettes, not making much eye-contact with people and, most importantly, never actually saying anything particularly interesting – a few obscure, knowing, gnomic phrases here and there, but hardly any meaningful conversation with the other characters at all.
Timothée Chalamet has carefully and skillfully mastered Dylan’s known external style and gestures, but the film doesn’t seem to have any substance behind this. At the end of the film, I knew nothing more about Dylan the person, his thinking, how he created his songs, than I already knew. Yes, I picked up some historical factoids – I didn’t know that he collaborated so extensively with Pete Seeger. But pretty much everything else, to me, was already in the public record which I’m familiar with – a re-presentation of known history.
It doesn’t help that Dylan simply comes across as a jerk who doesn’t relate to other people, and in fact uses them. There is no hint of any deep connectedness with anyone else – which begs a huge question: if he was this disconnected and apparently indifferent to so many things, how did he become such an excellent artist? As presented in the film, this question doesn’t have an answer. My belief/hunch is that successful artists are very curious people, very engaged with life, mystified/fascinated/provoked by all kinds of things and other people. Always drawing on their surroundings to fuel their work. I just don’t get any sense of this from the Dylan in this film.
. Other things that don’t help: there are a great many shots of beautiful women staring at him – awed by his creativity, trying to figure out his evasive “genius”, fascinated by him, or longing to have his love and attention and jealous that his attention is being given to another woman. The gender dynamics are not particularly subtle here or illuminating – despite good performances by the two leading female characters.
OK we hear his songs – some of the famous ones, and it’s good to hear them performed – but of course, I already know the famous songs and this doesn’t really add much at all. Apart from that, why would these women really spend the time of day with him? As a person, he simply isn’t compelling, as portrayed in the film. He’s annoyingly evasive, detached, unresponsive, self-focused. And the problem isn’t simply that he’s a jerk – I could imagine a much better film in which he is, indeed, a jerk. The issue is that here he’s an uninteresting and uninterested jerk.
The movie is pleasant to look at, and mostly somewhat engaging despite the above flaws. As mentioned, Timothée Chalamet does a good job of presenting a simulacrum of the Dylan we know, but there’s no penetration, no surprise, no revelation. I wouldn’t mind if the movie made a different character out of Dylan than one I would have guessed at, or a characterization that I disagreed with. But it doesn’t go that far. It doesn’t make Dylan a fully rounded, believable person. He’s a walking pastiche. This is the danger of the biopic – it shows us the surface, the known, the history. This film fails to do more than that – it goes down for me as a passable but unimaginative film.
This movie also relies on a hackneyed idea of artistic genius – the Romantic notion of something that comes out of nothing, ex nihilo, a mystery. Genius just is and there’s no real possibility of really grasping it. But artistic “genius,” if we have to refer to that very over-used word, doesn’t come out of nothing. It comes out of artists’ experience in life, the way their brains and bodies function, their interactions and, yes, their curiosity. Here we are asked to believe that excellent songs and lyrics emerge out of a shuffling, disconnected, uninterested, self-absorbed jerk. I don’t believe it.
Surely Dylan is more interesting as a person than this?
francismead.com 
Leave a comment