The point is made several times in the course of A COMPLETE UNKNOWN that its subject, Bob Dylan is a complete jerk. In one particularly satisfying moment, Joan Baez tosses him out of her room at the fabled Chelsea Hotel calling him just that after he makes a booty call and then withdraws into the complete self-absorption that is part of the Dylan mystique. The only question that floats to mind while watching this biopic is why anyone would have put up with him, aside, of course, from the record label that was making millions off of him. And the only question that comes to mind after watching it is why a film about a self-absorbed narcissist would work when played with so little charisma and even less charm by Timothée Chalamet. Yes, the music, performed by Mr. Chalamet and the others in the talented supporting cast, is great. Yes, the filmmaker has gotten across that most difficult of concepts, showing the radical change that Dylan brought to the folk music scene of the early 1960s. But it persists in presenting Dylan as a diffident egomaniac, hiding behind sunglasses and whining about the price of fame (while also persistently chasing it). By the time we get to the Newport Folk Festival performance where even his more ardent fans all but boo him off the stage, we wonder why it took so long.
Chalamet, sporting Dylan’s poodle hair and showily introverted affect, embodies the myth without telling us much about the man. Where is the mordant wit? Where the puckish irony in the man? For that we are treated to the consternation of folk troubadour Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who takes up the scruffy kid who came to visit fellow folkie Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in his hospital room late one night. He played a song, blew them away, and before you can say jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, Dylan is wowing them in Greenwich Village clubs, thanks to Seeger’s sponsorship, and intriguing the reigning queen of folk, the silvery-voiced Baez (a tough Monica Barbaro). He’s also winning over Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), the long-suffering girlfriend who feeds the skinny guy who picks her up at a concert and then lives to regret when she discovers that she can’t get him out of her system when he does her wrong. Repeatedly.
The meteoric rise, not meteoric enough for Dylan who sulks when Baez’s albums sell out before his do, is accompanied by the exponential rise in Dylan’s inability to care about anyone else. Sure, it’s fun to watch him make the music biz types squirm (exquisitely distilled by Dan Fogler playing Albert Grossman) as they promote a kind of music that they really don’t understand beyond the bottom line, but to witness the nonchalant dismissal of Seeger is painful to watch. Part of that is Norton’s dead-on performance than captures the singer’s affinity for the working man and complete lack of anything approaching pretension. It would not be going too far to say that it is Norton’s injection of humanity that makes the film bearable at all, serving as it does as a yardstick to measure just how unbearable Dylan becomes. That and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash before he got sober parking his car in fanciful ways and tearing up the screen in search of a good time, and McNairy in an all but wordless performance that conveys the essence of Guthrie’s forceful nature even as Huntington’s Disease sapped his body of its strength.
There are also a few genuinely insightful moments, not to mention entertaining, interspersed in this pedestrian march to destiny, such as when Dylan deigns to show up, very late, for Seeger’s public television show and jams with the fill-in bluesman (scene-stealing Big Bill Morganfield as a profane and sublime Jesse Moffette). The entente the three of them have while making music is a precis on what the rest of the film should have been like instead of this sketchy hagiography.
This review nailed it.