James Mangold, director of this attractive Bob Dylan waxwork, has been admirably sporting about parodies of musical biopics such as the 2007 romp Walk Hard. He would no more be put off making another than should a film-maker “be frightened of making a western in the face of Blazing Saddles”.
Good answer insofar as it goes. But Blazing Saddles was as much celebration as parody. Walk Hard (whose title referenced Mangold’s own Walk the Line, about Johnny Cash, much seen here) was more relentless in its ridiculing of the genre’s bludgeoning cliches.
Those tropes are back in a film that, though abundantly flawed, will serve as an effective devotional tool for the dedicated Bobcat. A Complete Unknown is particularly fond of sequences in which those attending the birth of a new masterpiece collapse into an ecstatic coma, as if the song’s eternal virtues were immediately and indisputably apparent. Nobody here complains (as many did) about Dylan’s unconventional timbre or his irregular guitar picking.
Watch as the legendary folk purist Pete Seeger, in the bald-wigged form of Edward Norton, starts to brush his teeth while Dylan, now an unlikely Timothée Chalamet, sets to the recently composed Girl from the North Country. You just know Pete will leave the bathroom, zombie-eyed, brush jutting from mouth, as toothpaste runs down his spellbound chin.
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Later, Joan Baez, plausibly played by Monica Barbaro, will have her own juddering fit as she first hears Blowin’ in the Wind. At least we were spared a sequence in which someone mentions cannonballs on a blustery day. “Hmm? I wonder how many ...”
One yearns for Mangold and his cowriter, Jay Cocks, to move just a little further from the official legend. A Complete Unknown begins with Dylan making his legendary pilgrimage from Hibbing, Minnesota, to the bedside of a dying Woody Guthrie in New Jersey and ends with him shocking the folkocracy at the Newport festival with an electrical Maggie’s Farm in 1965. So otherwise orthodox is the telling that one savours the mild risk of moving the famous “Judas” heckle from Manchester to that Rhode Island folk event.
The core of the film takes place in an idyllically seedy version of downtown Manhattan that feels as authentic as golden-era Hollywood’s depiction of the American west. Why would it not? We are about as far from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan now as the first silent westerns were from Gunfight at the OK Corral. Rubbish is scattered strategically. The light is boho autumnal. This is a DylanLand theme park. One half expects to see “cast members” walk by dressed as Maggie’s Pa or the ghost of Belle Starr.
There is a sense of Chalamet working his wee nasal cavity to death throughout. The notorious oddness of the singer’s vocal mannerisms are more hindrance than help. Just as almost anyone can “do” a Winston Churchill or a Jimmy Cagney, anyone can have a crack at Dylan, and, though the rising actor tries his best, the performance is, both in song and in conversation, always adjacent to party turn. Remembering David Bowie’s description of Dylan’s “voice like sand and glue”, there is more of the latter than the former here. Chalamet is forever lowering his head and staring forward like a man trying to spy on his neighbours while the blind is only halfway up the window.
[ Joan Baez: Do I ever hear from Bob Dylan? ‘Not a word’Opens in new window ]
For all that, it is hard to imagine anyone even peripherally interested in Dylan not having a pleasant, unchallenging time. If you can endure Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (a version of the late Suze Rotolo) watching Dylan sing It Ain’t Me Babe with Baez and weepily realise that, yes, it ain’t Sylvie, babe, then you can also endure the rest of the Walk Hard clunkiness. Adaptations of Ivanhoe have imagined the past less romantically.
In cinemas from Friday, January 17th
