Okay. Hi, everyone. Drythony Drytano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you're doing well. It is time for a review.

I'm going to give an assessment here of the new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unkown, featuring Timothée Chalamet, and directed by James Mangold. A film that I was pretty excited to see, certainly the most talked about movie this month in the music scene. I had a few reasons to be excited going into this film despite some skepticism.

One, James, in my opinion, directed one of the better and more solid music biopics to come out in recent years. That would be Walk the Line. And also, I personally am a big, big, big, big Dylan fan. I used to analyze this guy's records back in college. It was an interesting time to be getting into his work because this is also around when he came out with the first edition of that Autobiography Chronicles series that he never followed up on. We only have volume one.

Yeah, I don't think we're getting any more of Bob Dylan Chronicles, honestly. I believe the last major Hollywood depiction of Dylan was that I'm Not There movie, which featured multiple different actors playing him. Obviously, a very interesting and unorthodox approach, but maybe a film that's more straightforward, narratively speaking, could potentially be more digestible for your average moviegoer and maybe turn some people on to Dylan's music in the process. I feel like that's the hope for most biopics, generally.

However, I had higher expectations going into this thing. But after having seen it in retrospect, I really struggled to put into words who the hell this movie is even for. To be completely honest, I don't think it's for actual Dylan heads, and I will get into why in a second. If there's any demographic of people who I think will get something out of this movie, it's Timothée Chalamet fans who may, as a result of seeing this, get into some Dylan tracks, and that's it. Because if you're looking to glean anything from this film outside of that, I think you're going to be left high and dry, frankly.

Let's start off with maybe the first aspect of this film that falters but is still commendable, the performances, the musical performances. A Complete Unkown, unfortunately, commits one of the greatest that you can as a music biopic, in my opinion. That's just basically presenting long strands of the artist's music to the audience with no real narrative purpose or significance.

Now, look, it's a music biopic. The artist's music is going to be in the movie. I expect that. But to just throw it in there in a way that doesn't really add that much to the value of the film narratively, to me, is just subpar filmmaking. At that point, you're just putting together a super-long music video. But look, considering the musical performances in this movie are supposed to be like the big selling point, and Timothée Chalamet, he was really getting down the vocals and the guitars and so on and so forth.

Considering all of that, the performances could be better. I think the Dylan/Baez performances throughout the movie are really good, and Tim's voice lends itself a bit better to the electric era than it does Bob's earliest material. But for the most part, the musical performances in this movie are sometimes great, mostly just okay on average.

And look, if the music is all a biopic is going to offer me, I can just go listen to the music. I could go listen to Bob's music on my own. I don't have to go to the movies. Which brings me to the next aspect of this movie that I think falls flat on its face, and that's the storyline.

There are two key reasons, one being if you were at all a Bob Dylan fan, even a casual one, I think very quickly you'll recognize that there are multiple things in this movie that historically never, ever happened or maybe happened in different times and places. And it's to the point where it's distracting.

Like the opening scenes where Bob meets Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie for the first time and plays them songs for Woody and so on and so forth. This never happened. Bob Dylan never met Pete Seeger in this way. He also never made an appearance Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest television show to do a live impromptu performance with a totally made up blues musician.

Another big spoiler alert here. The film essentially ends at the point that Bob Dylan goes electric, and you have that infamous Newport Folk Festival performance that had some notably negative reactions. However, to this day, the nature of that reaction from even people who were there at the festival is debated. It could be because they didn't like the direction Bob was going in. It could be that the sound was fucked up and sounding terrible. Also, it could have been that the performance itself was so short.

Regardless, the way the movie portrays it is just that everybody around Bob, except for pretty much Johnny Cash and his band – yeah, Johnny Cash is in this movie, too – everyone's against Bob going electric. They don't want him to go electric. Please don't. Please don't do it, Bob. Please. Everyone's going to hate it, man. Don't do it. But yeah, the way the film portrays it is he does this performance. The whole audience just hates it and thinks it's garbage. Joan Baez is pretty bitter about it like, "Oh, you think you're too cool for us now?" Are you happy to be leaving our shitty little shitty folk scene?

I love how the film inadvertently portrays the Newport Folk Festival and the festival goers and the artist there as being stuck in the past and wrongheaded and part of some red herring in musical history, like some cultural dead end. Meanwhile, the Newport Folk Festival is still going today, and thousands and thousands and thousands of people go every year. Joni Mitchell just played there, And yeah, some artists who play there today perform with electric instruments, too.

But yeah, during the performance, somebody even shouts, "Judas!", which is obviously something that if you know your Dylan history happened at a performance in the UK, but they collapse it into the Newport thing. Again, if you are at all aware of Dylan's progression and how his career went, there's just a lot of stuff that is going to just hit you as like, 'That's fake. That's fake. Why is this other fake thing in here? '

And that leads me to the other main reason this storyline sucks. What we're essentially watching here is like a Wikipedia movie. And I get partially why that is. Dylan is a difficult figure to do a biopic on because to his credit, he is a very tight-lipped when it comes to a lot of the personal and intimate details of his life. There's a lot of stuff about a lot of these things that we don't know about because Bob Dylan doesn't talk about it. So if we are going to tell a story about this man's life, we have to rely on what little we know is just out there in the public eye.

But as we know, especially when it comes to the task of telling the story of an artist, of a public figure, a lot of that formative stuff, a lot of that significant stuff is what is happening off camera outside of the public view. But again, in regards to Dylan, he's always been careful about how much of that gets out. As a result, what you see on the screen is pretty much what you've already seen, at least some variation of if you follow Dylan's music at all.

We get a lot of actions, we get a lot of occurrences, but the movie and its writers and its director seem completely unable to do or say anything with this film that essentially explains any of Dylan's motivations in regards to anything. We just see him doing stuff, but we don't really know why.

I feel like the closest thing we get to any of this in the film is one idol and a weirdly passive-aggressive moment when he is arguing with his girlfriend, artist Susan Rottolo, who dated Bob Dylan for quite a while, was known to have inspired some of his songs, his artistic moves during this time period. There's a point when she's about to go on a trip and she's unhappy with Bob because he more or less seems just ambivalent that she's going to be gone for such a long period of time. And while this is happening, he's just mindlessly playing, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", on the guitar – and this is before the song has been released to the world – so they're arguing, and he's just playing the guitar thinking, 'Damn, bitch, don't think twice, it's all right. Get the hell out of here.'

Again, it's funny because clearly these two were in love for some period of time, and she, again, inspired Bob's artistry and progression and career in a significant and profound way. But the movie portrays them as barely even liking each other's company, even being annoyed with each other much of the time. So when they get back together for a moment later in the film, which is also another narrative fucking fabrication. Yeah, when their paths cross again for a spare movement in the third act of the film, you don't even know why. Because again, for 30 straight minutes, I just watched you guys not even give a fuck about each other. And now you want me to believe that there was just some lost potential there that wasn't capitalized on?

So, yeah, again, because the movie has so little to go on as far as finer details, what we end up getting is a Wikipedia movie, a movie based on a bunch of historical events that are flipped upside down, and a lot of focus on Bob's relationships with Susan and also with Joan Baez in order to pad the arc of the film out.

One final thing before I close this out, and I think it's the worst thing about A Complete Unknown, and that's the film's portrayal of Bob himself. I don't know if this is just merely because of the writers or the director or Timmy, maybe a combination of the three, but I feel like this portrayal of Bob is not only inaccurate, but horrible and unflattering, really insulting on some level. Because A Complete Unknown makes Bob Dylan seem like some antisocial prick, idiot savant asshole who's just a jerk to everybody. And while for sure he was an imperfect man who had his flaws, this portrayal of him from Timmy just seems so made up.

For one, I hate the way that Timothée is talking, doing this weird made-up Dylan impression that he's concocted. I feel like the way he delivers lines in this film is based off some character of Dylan that we all have in our head, something based on the very wild, eccentric way that he used to sing in the mid-'60s around Blonde on Blonde and the motorcycle crash era, where he's really "stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again", where his vowels are really extended and his voice is nasally and throaty, which for sure, during an era of his career, that is how he sang. But that is how he sang. When you look at interviews of this man, especially during the early years of his career, that is not how he talked. Dylan's speaking voice in comparison with his singing voice is actually quite unremarkable.

"Seriously, if I want to find out anything, I'm not going to read Time magazine. I'm not going to read Newsweek. I'm not going to read any of these magazines. Because they just got too much to lose by printing the truth." - Bob Dylan

It's just very normal. It's very average. There's nothing all that weird or stand out about it. Like, Timothée could have easily acted as Bob just talking in his normal fucking voice, but instead, he talks like this. He's like talking through his nose. It's weird. He's like halfway to a Cartman impression.

So there's the talking, there's the line delivery. But most importantly, there is the way Dylan's personality is portrayed during this time period that I feel like is actually horrendous. They just make him come off as really cagey and paranoid and a really big prick and asshole.

I mean, it is true that Dylan had a reputation for playing it super guarded, especially when he was doing an interview or some media thing in the '70s and '80s and '90s. But that is not how he was all the time, even when it came to doing interviews. There's a pretty famous, very lengthy interview that he did back in the '60s where he's talking to a whole gaggle of journalists. He doesn't come across as weird or painfully awkward or scared or like he's going to go postal in the fucking room.

Q: How wasted is really wasted, and do you foresee it?

"No, I don't foresee it, but it's more or less like a ruthless type of feeling." - Bob Dylan

I mean, he may not be giving the lengthiest responses, but he's smiling much of the time and telling jokes and actually being interesting and charismatic.

Bob: "Do I prefer that to what?"

Q: I don't know, but your songs are supposed to have a subtle message.

Bob: "A subtle message?"

Q: Well, they're supposed to.

"Where'd you hear that?"

Q: In a movie magazine.

"Oh, my God."

Meanwhile, A Complete Unknown's portrayal of him makes him seem like this evil, devious, silent, creepy guy. And you're just making him seem like a fucking jerk. And for what? God forbid, a successful male artist be portrayed as having feelings and vulnerable moments and, I don't know, being jovial.

No, instead, they all have to be sad and brooding. Like, even during that opening scene that I referenced earlier, featuring Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, where Bob plays them "Song to Woody". If the film was going to fabricate a situation this hard, could it not have at least been genuinely heartwarming swarming.

I mean, on some level, it's clear that that's what A Complete Unknown is going for, because as Guthrie and Pete, played by Edward Norton, are looking at Timothée Chalmet playing, "Song to Woody", they're like, very touched, and they're taking it back. They're like, 'Wow!' Meanwhile, cut back to Timmy, and he's playing the guitar with this totally dead-eyed fucking stare. Like when he's done with the song, he's going to pull out a gun and shoot him.

I'm sorry. Bob Dylan, for sure, is a bit of a weird guy and a character, but he's not an antisocial fucking psychopath. And again, I feel like portraying him as such just comes across as weird. And again, there's so much they could have done in terms of filling in the gaps when it comes to what his motivations were, why he did certain things.

For example, when he makes the move to start writing more overtly political songs, they make it seem like he just does it because he sees some racism and politics on the TV and just soaks it in by osmosis. Meanwhile, in reality, at the time, his girlfriend, back in the day, had very strong political opinions. The Greenwich folk music scene itself was a political entity in many ways, but I feel like that aspect of it is just whitewashed in favor making it seem like Bob was just coming up with this singular idea on his own.

He's like, 'Yeah, I'm going to speak truth to power.' There's so many cool associations he had with other artists in this music scene at the time, even Dave Van Ronk, for example, who is portrayed in the movie at a couple of points, but him and Bob don't even exchange more than a sentence or two in the film. Dave is just portrayed as this total jerk who doesn't even look Bob in the eyes and just tells him a thing or two in passing. Meanwhile, these were guys who actually knew each other and influenced each other.

Unfortunately, I feel like if you're a music fan, a fan of music history and the music itself, A Complete Unknown is not really for you. Again, maybe it's more for the Chalamet heads or the uninitiated listeners who haven't really gotten into Dylan's work and are looking for a gateway. But outside of that, as a film, it's quite silly, not only because the writing and the storyline are weak. The Bob Dylan portrayal itself, in my opinion, is bad. The musical performances that fill up so much run time of the movie are inconsistent.

Finally, Dylan is just a very difficult person to tell this type of typical music biopic story about because, as I've said, his music career doesn't really follow that typical crash and burn, rise to fame pattern that a lot of artists do. So as a result, we're not really able to fit things into that format. And the only real negative peak that we can bring things to or end on is that festival performance. And honestly, I feel like that's just a very weak way to leave such a story off.

So, yeah, A Complete Unknown, unfortunately, not impressed. Thought it was mid. And If you do end up seeing this movie, maybe do it in the cheapest way possible. I don't want you to waste your money on this thing.

Anthony Fantano. A Complete Unknown. Forever.