The biopic turns its topic’s independence and idiosyncrasies into the stuff of bland abstract.
The present of Bob Dylan’s music is to make the world appear weirder, or relatively to disclose the world to be as unusual because it actually is. He sings of life as a movement of jumbled-up indicators and sensations, some actual and a few not, carrying which means past phrases. Even at his most strident, he wheezes out an anti-narrative: Thou shalt not simplify, classify, categorize.
A Full Unknown, James Mangold’s biopic centered on the bard’s early profession, understands this—and betrays it. The movie portrays Dylan as a prophet bringing independence and idiosyncrasy to a world of rule-enforcers and followers. Timothée Chalamet does glorious work placing Dylan’s steadiness of unworldliness and humanity. But no film about unconventionality needs to be as blandly standard as this one is.
The issue begins on the degree of conception. Mangold has chosen to look at essentially the most chewed-over chapters of Dylan’s profession: his early days within the New York Metropolis people scene, starting in 1961 and main as much as the 1965 Newport Folks Competition, when he shocked acoustic-guitar purists by going electrical. Newsie cap on his head, Dylan blows into Greenwich Village on the movie’s begin, gigs round, and rapidly wins the admiration of his idols—Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Johnny Money—in addition to of the scene’s rising star, Joan Baez. Rebel brings acclaim, which brings public expectations, which brings extra rise up: a cycle that’s true to Dylan’s life, but additionally that of many earlier iconoclasts portrayed on movie.
Mangold is aware of the foundations of biopics properly; his 2005 Money exploration, Stroll the Line, set the trendy template for how one can bend a fancy particular person’s life right into a satisfying arc. Right here, the director and his co-writer, Jay Cocks, diverge from the template in a single intriguing method. Dylan’s behavior of mendacity and misdirection has made the query of who the person born Robert Zimmerman actually is, and why precisely he does what he does, one in every of music’s enduring mysteries. Somewhat than attempt to crack the case with backstory offering psychological trigger and impact, A Full Unknown simply lets Dylan be … unknown. When he tells Baez that he was once a carnie, she exasperatedly replies that he’s stuffed with it. He could be. However he’s dwelling out an concept that he professes in a key little bit of dialogue: To succeed onstage, you need to encourage the identical fascination as a freak present.
Chalamet does simply that. He performs Dylan with heavy-lidded stillness, making him appear perpetually on the verge of dozing off, mumbling as if in a dream. The movie overflows with efficiency scenes wherein Chalamet captures Dylan’s managed erraticism, singing in a method that spins people conventions right into a galactic spiral of feeling. The true-life Dylan of the Nineteen Sixties was a bit lighter and funnier than the solemn determine Chalamet cuts, however his prankster soul flashes by often, comparable to when he broadcasts himself to be God after which breaks into a smile. And although Dylan himself had some enter within the film, Chalamet doesn’t boring the artist’s merciless edge; at one level, with glassy anger in his eyes, he tells Baez her songs are fairly like work in a dentist’s workplace.
Sadly, the remainder of the film has that very same antiseptic high quality that Dylan stood in opposition to. New York appears to be like as stagey and cheerful as an amusement park. Dylan’s romance with Sylvie Russo—a fictionalized model of his real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo, performed by Elle Fanning—principally appears to exist to offer trivia about Dylan’s love songs. Historic giants are sketched in 2-D: Ed Norton’s Seeger is a delicate idealist with a touch of crafty; Monica Barbaro’s Baez is all confidence aside from when she’s all insecurity. Most irritating are the groan-worthy winks to the viewers. “Watch out on that factor!” Seeger admonishes as Dylan rides his bike, a couple of years earlier than the singer’s career-altering, still-mysterious crash of 1966.
Due to Chalamet’s efficiency, the movie’s hokiness isn’t completely deadly to the viewing expertise. But when A Full Unknown is Hollywood’s grand, Oscar-baiting summation of Dylan’s legacy, then the implication is unhappy: Even when attempting to have a good time originality, the leisure trade insists on predictability. The movie needn’t be an art-house riddle—Todd Haynes already took that method to Dylan in 2007 with I’m Not There—however a shaggier, extra naturalistic model would have higher suited its topic. The movie does convey one true concept, at the least: Worshipping an artist is totally different from listening to what they need to say.
