[COLUMN] A Complete Unknown Challenges Its Audience | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for A Complete Unknown. And Bob Dylan’s career, I guess.

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is a fairly conventional and straight-down-the-middle musical biopic for most of its runtime, which makes its third act so interesting.

A Complete Unknown is certainly less experimental in its storytelling than Todd Haynes’ avant-garde approach to Bob Dylan’s life in I’m Not There. The film is stuffed to the gills with the familiar clichés of the genre. Characters are constantly finding notebooks and scraps of paper with soon-to-be-iconic lyrics on them, while Dylan himself (Timothée Chalamet) collects nicknacks and life-experiences that will inform and fuel his beloved discography.

A Complete Unknown runs down the checklist of musician biopic tropes. “You know, you’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) helpfully states at one point, to which Dylan thoughtfully responds, “I guess I am.” There is the troubled relationship with his true love, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), based on Suze Rotolo. There is the fractured relationship with his mentor, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). There is the battle with the musical establishment. There is anxiety over fame.

There is also the soundtrack, which is designed to remind the audience just how much they love Dylan, who (as the closing text reminds viewers) would go on to be the only singer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. This description probably sounds very dismissive of A Complete Unknown, but the truth is that there is something appealing about this sort of old-fashioned crowd-pleasing awards fare. It’s very satisfying to see a movie like this hit its marks with relative grace and skill.

Mangold has form. The director helped to define and codify the modern musical biographical film with Walk the Line, a Johnny Cash biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix. Walk the Line was a major and obvious influence on Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard, a pitch-perfect spoof of the genre’s convention so effective that Mangold has had to discuss A Complete Unknown in the context of that parody. A Complete Unknown even features Cash, this time played by Mangold regular Boyd Holbrook.

Walk the Line helped establish one of the conventions that defines the modern musical biopic, with its third act depicting the legendary live recording of At Folsom Prison. This would become part and parcel of the structure of these sorts of films, perhaps most triumphantly with the third act of Bohemian Rhapsody given over to a stunning recreation of Queen’s iconic Live Aid set from Wembley Stadium, playing several songs in full.

It is easy to understand why so many modern musical biographies adopt a similar structure, inviting the audience to imagine what it would be like to be present for one of the great moments in musical history. A Complete Unknown looks like it is building to a similar moment, as the climax of the film focuses on Bob Dylan’s performance at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965. The characters buzz around it. Tension hangs in the air over it. There is a sense that history is waiting to be made.

The song “Like a Rolling Stone” haunts A Complete Unknown, with the film taking its title from one of the song’s key lyrics. It is very hard to overstate the seismic impact and import of “Like a Rolling Stone”, a song that had “a revolutionary impact on music industry norms.” In the words of musician Joe Henry, “Like a Rolling Stone” was a record that “changed everything that followed.” Mangold understands the song’s import, withholding its performance until that third act concert.

As such, one might expect that climax of A Complete Unknown to be a moment of artistic and personal triumph for Bob Dylan, as Folsom was for Johnny Cash in Walk the Line and Wembley was for Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) in Bohemian Rhapsody. The structure of these films is built around the performance of these songs as a sort of emotional catharsis that leaves the audience feeling triumphant and invigorated, as if they have been able to recreate a singular beautiful moment.

The most interesting choice in A Complete Unknown is to completely explode that idea and deconstruct it. The live debut of “Like a Rolling Stone” at Newport in 1965 was not a moment of unqualified triumph. It was an incredibly fraught and controversial chapter in the singer’s history. The crowd infamously turned on Dylan, who opted to perform more modern music at a folk festival. In promoting A Complete Unknown, Dylan himself talked about “the fiasco at Newport.”

To be fair, some historians dispute the intensity of the audience’s response. Others argue the audience was responding to the sound quality. Still, the crowd turned on Dylan. “Well, I did this very crazy thing,” Dylan stated at a conference later that year. “I didn’t know what was going to happen, but they certainly booed, I’ll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place.” Dylan had dared to step outside the rigid boundaries the audience had imposed on him, and that was provocation.

“The people who were upset had always thought of Dylan as one of them, and this performance was very much an in-your-face declaration that he wasn’t,” explains musician and journalist Elijah Wald. Musician Curt Bessette was present for the performance and argued, “I’m fairly sure that there were no vague ‘middle of the road’ opinions in that crowd that night – you either loved it or you hated it.” Haynes’ I’m Not There depicts Dylan’s performance as a literal attack upon the audience.

The decision to end A Complete Unknown with Dylan’s controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival reframes so much of the movie. While the default point of comparison within Mangold’s filmography might logically be Walk the Line, there is also a lot of Ford v. Ferrari in A Complete Unknown. Much like Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale) have to navigate the corporate structures of Ford in Ford v. Ferrari, Dylan has to navigate the musical establishment.

Throughout A Complete Unknown, Dylan faces various expectations about who and what he is supposed to be. His manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), wants him to be commercial. His mentor Pete Seeger wants him to be a mascot for the traditional folk music scene. “Two hundred people in this room and they each want me to be someone else,” Dylan complains as he leaves a party. “They should just let me be.”

For all that A Complete Unknown is a fairly traditional film, lacking the more artistic flourishes of a more ambitious work like I’m Not There, it does reinforce this sense that Dylan is less a fully-formed person than some strange conduit to something larger. He is constantly handed other people’s guitars, expected to play to their tune. Elevator doors close on him, as if he isn’t there. He wanders listlessly through hotel corridors, uncertain which room he should be in. Mangold populates the film with mirrors, but waits until the third act to let the audience see Dylan’s reflection in any of them.

Dylan makes up stories about his own past. He opines that Baez struggles to write her music because she is trying too hard, and suggests that his own music comes to him. He is constantly listening and watching the world around him, soaking in television and radio. It is as if his music is conjured from the very culture around him. In this sense, Mangold seems to agree with Haynes. Maybe Dylan isn’t there. Maybe Dylan is connected to something larger and more difficult to define.

Of course, it is not unusual for films like this to focus on the conflict between creatives and the establishment. It is no surprise when Seeger and the festival organizers try to shut down Dylan’s set at Newport, to stop his music from reaching the assembled audience. That is how these films work. What is really interesting and distinct about A Complete Unknown is the way that it implicates its audience. It’s not just the stuffy suits and the old statesmen who are wrong; it’s the audience.

Seeger and the other organizers argue for a very traditional and rigidly defined idea of folk music. They have very fixed notions of what is expected of a musician, which is challenged by Dylan. A very interesting and deliberate choice in A Complete Unknown is to juxtapose Seeger’s aesthetic conservatism with his political progressivism. Seeger advocates for the environment and for racial equality, but he is absolutely terrified of any approach to folk that exists outside his worldview.

The fantasy of these third act musical performances is the belief the audience would recognize greatness when presented with it, that a viewer sitting in Folsom or at Wembley would know that they had witnessed a moment of massive cultural import. It flatters the audience, affirming their own sense of good taste and judgment. It is the old cliché that “the customer is always right”, taken to its logical extreme as a validation of the viewer. A Complete Unknown questions that.

Throughout A Complete Unknown, Dylan is actively hostile and disrespectful to his audience. He turns his back to them on stage. He refuses to perform “Blowing in the Wind” for them while touring with Baez, despite their protestations, correctly pointing out that the concert was not advertised with a setlist. Baez is accurate in her summary of Dylan. He is “kind of an asshole.” However, A Complete Unknown suggests Dylan is not wrong. Newport was wrong. “Like a Rolling Stone” rocks.

A Complete Unknown is part of a larger wave of movies that feel somewhat antagonistic towards their audiences, most recently Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie á Deux. This perhaps exists in a larger context of a shifting film industry that seeks to reduce art to “content”, turn creation into a service industry and train audiences to see themselves as consumers rather than patrons. It’s an approach that diminishes creativity by making the artist beholden to the audience’s whims.

Mangold, whose work has shifted with prevailing Hollywood winds towards franchise gigs like Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, has spoken about the complicated relationship between modern audiences and creators driven by the “evangelical ferocity” of an audience that is so certain and specific about what it wants to the point of driving “bolder minds” out of the business. As such, it is interesting that A Complete Unknown sides with Bob Dylan rather than his fans.

A Complete Unknown presents the Newport Folk Festival as a disaster. Dylan retreats as the audience throws bottles at him. (In reality, he returned to the stage to play two more songs.) Dylan and Seeger each pass one another, but each avoids taking any potential moment of reconciliation. Seeger is last seen tidying up the audience’s chairs the morning after the gig, as Dylan rides away on his motorbike. Of course, the film’s postscript makes it clear the Dylan ultimately won his argument.

For all that A Complete Unknown draws from “Like a Rolling Stone”, it also resonates with “The Times, They Are A-Changin’”, a study of the changing and evolving cultural landscape of the 1960s and the arrogance of those who would “criticize what [they] don’t understand.” The most interesting aspect of A Complete Unknown is its understanding of the necessity of change and the way in which it challenges the audience’s assumption that they’d be on the right side of it all.