An Unmitigated Disaster
In the nearly two decades since James Mangold’s last Wikipedia biopic, Walk the Line, the moviegoing experience has become significantly worse, literacy rates plummeted, and smartphones zapped the will, imagination, and attention span not just of Generation Z, but anyone not careful enough to limit their use as one would with a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of Percocet. Smartphones have diminished and degraded our world, not just our culture, and yet no one has proposed treating them as they should—like cigarettes. Who will be the Rob Reiner of smartphone bans? The fact that it’s even a question whether or not to ban them from schools is insane.
Walk the Line may have earned Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar, but it belonged to a genre that, until recently, was widely considered low-rent, schmaltzy, and cheap. 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a not particularly searing parody of the genre more than Mangold’s movie, killed the musician biopic for about a decade; 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody brought it back with more music and cortisone.
These cough medicine fantasias—Elvis, Rocketman—are even more empty and nakedly manipulative than their “prestigious predecessors,” movies like Ray, Walk the Line, and The Doors, all of which compressed history, got important things wrong, and served no one except those that had never heard or heard of the artists in question. Fair enough: by 2005, Johnny Cash had been dead two years, and was largely known to my generation for his now-iconic cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” That was 2003, and between that and the only songs he’s remembered for, there’s a gulf of about 40 years. Cash was neither active nor close to the apex of pop culture when his biopic came out; neither was Ray Charles.
Bob Dylan is still one of the most famous artists in the world. He still tours the world, plays to thousands every night, and, unlike nearly everyone else his age, his new music is listened to and, at the very least, considered. Many people love it. I don’t, but I’m glad he’s still working. What else are you going to do? Move forward—Dylan’s M.O. for his entire life. His stratospheric rise to fame, his associates, his collaborators, lovers, enemies, and all of the circumstances are well-known and long since become clichéd: “voice of a generation,” “musical revolutionary,” “going electric,” “Judas,” “play it fucking loud.” This legend was already set in stone by the 1970s, and for the most part, Dylan continued to reject and resent it. He received countless movie offers over the years, only offering music and life rights to Todd Haynes for his 2007 masterpiece I’m Not There, a movie that completely captures what Dylan is about: the many faces, constant transformation, irreverence of the jester, the grace of genius, only glimpsed at the end with footage of Dylan himself performing a harmonica solo during “Mr. Tambourine Man” in 1966.
Haynes’ film was like another Dylan album, made with the same spirit; if it can be boiled down, there is more truth in obscurity than “reality.” Consider the final lines of Dylan’s excellent 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One (which, typically, doesn’t yet have a second volume): “I went straight into it. It was wide open. One thing for sure, not only was it not run by God, but it wasn't run by the devil either.” Twenty-five years earlier, he confused the world by becoming a born-again Christian; if he received belated institutional approval and even greater critical plaudits with every album after 1997’s Time Out of Mind, he continued to fucking suck as a live performer. Bizarrely, this is now a selling point for his concerts. Again, good for him—I’d expect nothing less.
A Complete Unknown is far less, worse than nothing, a completely unnecessary film and an insult to anyone with half a brain. It spits in the face of everything that Dylan has done, has said, has stood for; it’s everything that he rebelled against and continues to reject. Do I blame him for accepting what must’ve been one FATASS check for the rights to his life and music once again, to a much lesser movie? No. He wrote “Like a Rolling Stone,” he can lock away the masters forever or license it to Raytheon, it’s his right. Bob Dylan tarnishing his legacy ever so slightly by cashing in on a movie this opposed to his entire life’s work isn’t the problem.
Timothée Chalamet also isn’t the problem. He’s not particularly good, but he’s not awful, and he’s not the reason why this movie is worthless. He carries a movie that should’ve never been made, and his co-stars—Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Edward Norton—are even better, but they can never succeed inside of a movie so thoroughly false and anti-gravitational to its own subject. Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Jim Morrison, Johnny Cash: these aren’t obscure people, nor are they brilliant artists. Great songwriters, performers, and singers, but not geniuses. There are two geniuses of the 1960s: Bob Dylan and The Beatles. The reason you so rarely hear their music licensed in film, television, and commercials is because it’s too powerful—it will inevitably overwhelm whatever it’s selling or emphasizing.
Mangold, who co-wrote the movie with Jay “Gangs of New York” Cocks, compresses events, alters key details, and sticks to the surface, refusing to be interesting or subversive for even one second—you could argue that a film this dumbed down and cookie-cutter is its own outré Dylanesque provocation, but any hints of intelligence are drowned out by the drone of money counters and algorithms that will soon be able to produce these kinds of movies without any human beings involved (except for those collecting the checks).
Even if everyone doesn’t know the COMPLETELY EXHAUSTED story of Dylan “going electric”—the original title of the movie, before, rumor has it, Dylan himself suggested A Complete Unknown—this movie provides them with nothing that Dylan’s Wikipedia article doesn’t already have. Ditto Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home. Again, I’m Not There came out in 2007, and while it wasn’t met with the effusive praise this movie’s getting, it was a seriously-considered work of American pop culture—“a movie for adults.” A Complete Unknown is for the lobotomized, and its popularity is a symptom of how deracinated and malnourished our culture has become in less than two decades. It’s “well made,” but one doesn’t compliment a bottle of poison on its vivid color. Nothing good will come of this. I hope Dylan enjoys his check; really, he’s the only one who benefits from this boil on the ass of America.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith