A Complete Unknown 2024 Review
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Somewhere near the middle of Like A Complete Unknown, folk icon Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro), says to Timothèe Chalamet's Bob Dylan: "You're kind of an a**hole, Bob." After a pause, Dylan replies "Yeah...I guess so." You can watch this movie full of free on Afdah movies.
This was a crucial moment for me, a cinephile who has grown weary of the way Hollywood tells stories about real people. The last decade of biopics has often seen its subjects presented not merely as talented people, but as superheroes who are not unlike Greek Gods: legendary in status, perched atop a pantheon that lies far outside of human reach. In these films, they're not like us. They never were. They were always "other," bred of stardust and mercury. Through twists of fate that sometimes seem cosmic in scope, the modern biopic no longer presents slightly-exaggerated history, packaged for easy consumption; it now turns human stories into manufactured myth of Shakespearean proportions.
That's what makes the Baez line so refreshing. It makes it clear, in one simple exchange, that the Bob Dylan presented in the film is not a man without flaws. He's human, and by showing those rough edges--highlighting them, even--the accomplishments of the real man are amplified, not diminished. When film seeks to exaggerate reality beyond factual feasibility, it robs us of the inspiration that we can find in real people who are not unlike us, and who overcome (or sometimes don't) the kinds of trials that we ourselves face. James Mangold's filmography consists of multiple biopics, such as the 2005 Johnny Cash story Walk The Line and 2019's Ford v Ferrari, that sit uncomfortably on the same shelf as his superhero blockbusters and franchise tentpoles, including Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. This movie really could have gone either way.
Thankfully, A Complete Unknown does justice to one of rock history's greatest tales. Adapted from the book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald, the film tells the story of young Bob Dylan arriving in New York and taking the folk music scene in Greenwich Village by storm. Within just a few short years, he had become a global sensation: a hero to peaceniks and poets, a cash cow for the record company, and an icon for the folk music scene. But Dylan bristled at these expectations and carved out a new path form himself, culminating with a fully-electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, an act of treason to the acoustic folk establishment. It must have been tempting for Mangold, along with co-writers Wald and Jay Cocks, to exaggerate the events into some sort of full-scale cultural war, with Dylan as both martyr and disciple, or even a Christ-like totem. Thankfully, they resist. Dylan remains a man in the film. A talented, ambitious, acerbic, socially-awkward man.
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