The last major nominee from this year's Oscars Death March is James Mangold's by-the-numbers Wikipedia-entry-but-less-detailed biopic of Voice of the Boomer Generation Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, named after a line from his song "Like A Rolling Stone." Nominated for eight Oscars - Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor & Actress, Sound, and Costume Design - it is a triumph of imitation performances & period detail fetishism and for anyone who wants to spend a couple of hours watching a famous person's life story without ever gleaning an insight about them, it doesn't get much more middling than this.
Nominated Timothée Chalamet stars as Dylan, a 19-year-old who has hitchhiked from Minnesota to New York City in 1961 to meet his idol, Commie folk singer Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy, Halt and Catch Fire). Learning that he's institutionalized with Huntington's disease, he treks to the hospital where he finds Guthrie being visited by Commie folk singer Pete Seeger (nominated Edward Norton, The Incredible Hulk). After introducing himself, Seeger notes Dylan's guitar case and encourages him to play them a song since he says he's so influenced by Guthrie.
Well, the song impresses Seeger so much be begins introducing him around the Greenwich Village folk scene where he immediately snags a Commie girlfriend, Sylvie (criminally UN-nominated Elle Fanning), a side romance with Commie folk singer Joan Baez (nominated Monica Barbero), a record deal, and within a few years is a massive star, chased by fans, picking up women right and left, and chafing at the rigid strictures of folk purists, broadens his sound culminating in the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival set where he "went electric" and won the crowd over with his boldness. Just kidding, they freaked out, booed him, and threw stuff at the stage, almost fomenting a riot because if there's anyone more violent than a methed-up speed metal crowd it's folkies.
All kidding aside, A Complete Unknown really should've been called Dylanmania (slogan: "Not Bob Dylan, but an incredible simulation.") as it's little more than a series of performances of early Dylan tunes loosely connected with the barest reeds of plot which provide no insight as to how he became a genius (if you buy into that stuff) he is regarded as. Sylvie (who is Suze Rotolo, who appeared with him on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in all but name after Dylan requested they change that) sees his old school notebooks with his birth name, Robert Zimmerman, on them and complains that she feels she doesn't even know who he is. We're never told that "Dylan" was cribbed from poet Dylan Thomas because why should a biopic fill in the bio stuff?
Other than frustrations with his first album being all covers by mandate of the label and annoyance at the attention fame brings, he doesn't seem to have to overcome any obstacles. He shows up at a party at peak fame with a fashionable black girl with an English accent and after they hit the sidewalk, he leaves her there as he walks off. She's befuddled and says, "But, I love you," to which he replies, "I don't even know you." Who is she, where'd they meet, why'd he take her to the party, and why did she feel more of a connection to him than vice versa? No idea to all of the above. Bob's just a ladies man, we suppose.
So we're left with the lead actors very impressive performances where they do all their own playing and singing with the performances recorded live, not pre-taped, AutoTuned, then played back to lip-sync along to. Chalamet says it was a 5-1/2 year process to create his performance, learning to play guitar - he recently hosted Saturday Night Live and served as the musical guess as well, performing obscure Dylan tunes - and how you imagine a grumpy, introverted, young Bob Dylan would behave is precisely what Chalamet delivers. Norton and Barbero similarly nail their mimicry duties with the latter displaying an amazing simulation of Baez's crystal clear soprano. Imitating Dylan is always fun because no matter how caricatured you go, it's still in the ballpark. To his credit, Chalamet doesn't overdo it, but that's also the problem.
I have a MAJOR problem with how many Oscars have been won by actors doing what I've termed "imitation performances" where they have a huge leg up on crafting their performances by having massive amounts of reference footage to study and then are graded by how good an imitation they've done.
found an out-of-date list at IMDB that listed 29 winners since 2000 and omitted recent winners such as Renee Zelwegger (as Judy Garland in Judy), Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody), and Jessica Chastain (Tammy Faye Baker, The Eyes of Tammy Faye).
There have been 100 acting nominees since the turn of the millennium and one-third have won and many more have been nominated as with the three nominees. In 2015, the only Best Actor nominee who had to create an original character was Michael Keaton in Birdman. All the rest were imitations of Stephen Hawking, Chris Kyle, Alan Turing, and John du Pont. Of course, Eddie Redmayne won for sitting in a wheelchair with a frozen grin in The Theory of Everything, which I hated.
In a year where category fraud (putting actors playing lead roles in the supporting fields to boost victory chances) was rampant when they weren't flat out denying legitimate females a chance in order to virtue signal wokeness with a man in Best Actress, the Actor's Branch added to their shame by favoring Barbero's imitation over Fanning's subtle aching soulfulness which made her Sylvie the most human performance in a Madame Tussaud's wax museum. I've been a fan of hers since Super 8 - if he haven't seen it, watch it and keep in mind that she was only 12 when it was filmed - and here's to hoping she gets more showcases for her gifts and some acclaim.
Director/co-writer Mangold has done the biopic thing before with 2005's Johnny Cash story, Walk The Line - which won Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for imitating June Carter Cash and Joaquin Phoenix a nomination for imitation Johnny Cash - and directed the two good solo Wolverine movies with The Wolverine and Logan, but here it's flat and uninspired work, relying on the imitations to elevate the whole shebang.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.
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