Posted in: Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review | Tagged: a complete unknown

A Complete Unknown Review: The Music Shines, But The Story Stumbles

A Complete Unknown is far from the worst thing you'll see this Christmas season, and many people will probably like it simply because of the various performances.

A Complete Unknown might have the added benefit of everyone in the cast singing and playing their own instruments, but weird pacing and structure decisions mean we come into a film about Bob Dylan learning almost nothing new about the man himself.

Director: James Mangold
Summary: In 1961, unknown 19-year-old Bob Dylan arrives in New York City with his guitar. He forges relationships with music icons of Greenwich Village on his meteoric rise, culminating in a groundbreaking performance that reverberates worldwide.

A Complete Unknown Has Live Performances Going For It And Nothing Else

People have been making biopics about musicians for a long time, but it feels like they have become the bread and butter of the awards season in the last ten years. Director James Mangold is returning to the genre after directing Walk The Line in 2005. There are a couple of different ways of approaching it, ranging from leaning into being a musical like Rocketman to giving people Oscars for lip-syncing Queen. The quality of the films seems to vary, but like any other biopic, it is much harder to look at the impact of someone's life while they are still alive, and you can't really take them to task for the damage they might have done. A Complete Unknown focuses almost entirely on the performances of its cast, which are very good, but they are snapshots in a film that doesn't have anything to say while telling the story of a musician who seemed to have plenty to say.

For the hard time that we and others continue to rightfully give Bohemian Rhapsody, it was like everyone woke up the day after the Oscars and realized that they should probably get actors who can sing if they are going to make movies about singers. It limits who and what you can cover, but it also makes everything feel more authentic and genuine. So, much like Wicked, A Complete Unknown and its marketing team cannot stop talking about the singing and instrument work the cast is putting into this film. They have every right to play this aspect up since everyone does a great job. Musicians make playing the guitar while singing look easy, but keeping tempo while singing at the time and maintaining a stage presence is what sets some above the rest. So the work that Timothée Chalamet, Monica Barbaro, Edward Norton, and more put into making themselves look natural on stage with these instruments absolutely must be praised.

The Film Meanders Aimlessly From One Event To Another

However, all that talent, work, and performance are put inside a film that seems to meander through some of Dylan's formative years. No one's life is told in a three-act structure, but this is a movie, and a movie needs structure and flow to make it watchable. That goes double for a film that goes beyond that dreaded two-hour runtime, and A Complete Unknown clocks in at 141 minutes. Since there is no structure, there is no pacing, which means we feel every minute of that runtime.

The film makes the strange decision only to show dates twice, and there is a moment where there is a time jump that is so badly shot and edited that it is unclear whether a time jump happened or how long it has even been. The movie didn't need to tell us it had been two months, for example, but they didn't even use any real visual cues to show the passage of time, like the sun rising and setting or the seasons changing. It's one of many baffling decisions that make this film feel incredibly disjointed and like it doesn't have any narrative throughline. This is a movie, and even if it is about the life of a real person, there is supposed to be some form of structure or pacing. It feels like Mangold is a novice to this genre somehow, like he isn't sure how to approach it, which makes no sense because he directed another biopic that feels very similar to this with all of the good and the bad two decades ago.

However, the thing that really knocks A Complete Unknown down into the depths of being yet another mediocre winter release is how little it ultimately has to say. The whole point of a movie like this is to show the audience a new side of someone they might have loved for many years. However, this film doesn't tell us much of anything about Dylan. He is notoriously mysterious about his past, and we don't need to know his backstory to make this film work. However, if someone went into this movie knowing nothing about Dylan, and then you asked them at the end what mattered to Dylan and what he stood for, it would be hard to answer because it feels rather muddled. Dylan moves through history like a specter, putting out music with something to say while remaining a blank slate to everyone else. That works for listening to a record, but a blank slate is boring when you're watching a movie about said person.

A Complete Unknown is far from the worst thing you'll see this Christmas season, and many people will probably like it simply because of the various performances the cast put on. Those performances will eventually make their way online, and unlike Wicked, these live performances don't have any spectacle. You're just watching a concert movie done by actors instead of the musicians that occasionally cuts back to moments where certain life events happened. It's 2024, and somehow, Walk Hard is better than any serious biopic a major studio has put out in nearly twenty years.

A Complete Unknown

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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6/10

A Complete Unknown might have the added benefit of everyone in the cast singing and playing their own instruments, but weird pacing and structure decisions mean we come into a film about Bob Dylan learning almost nothing new about the man himself.

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