A Complete Unknown (2024) Disney Official Bob Dylan Trailer Reaction Review Longplay

The trailer for A Complete Unknown came out this morning and I didn’t want to think about it, but it was either think about it or do the laundry so here I am, thinking about it. I’m aware of exactly how useless that is, but the exercise is interesting because it’s really hard to do. This is not an easy thing to care about or even pretend to care about.

Seems like it should be easy. I am staring at a Bob Dylan poster right now. The sun is catching it just right and it draws the eye. I check his setlists after every single show. Just two nights ago, in Prague, he opened with All Along The Watchtower. He’s putting Desolation Row and It’s All Over Now Baby Blue in regular rotation after a long layoff. The incomparable Jim Keltner is still on the kit but I miss Charlie Sexton. I just put Tempest on in the background, which I do most mornings. His dying lunatic schtick on that album is really funny and it wakes me up. But this movie profoundly resists my attention. I would rather watch an industrial film about sawmill safety. 

I mean, I know why, and without seeing it. It’s directed by James Mangold, who made Walk the Line. I saw that thing opening night because it was new Johnny Cash content and everybody was buzzing about it and I was getting paid as many as fifty dollars to write about it for a paper. My whole family saw it. One of the few new releases my Arkie grandpa watched (his correct review was that Reese Witherspoon was cute and it would be better on mute). Awful movie. Hagiography. Totally on rails, every idiot moment profound and inevitable. The ultimate “this is the part of the movie where this happens” bore. Such uninteresting product you could see the Walmart DVD endcap display before you bought the ticket. The work of a director incapable of being anything but what the studio release calendar needed him to be.

So a Bob Dylan biopic by the same guy has no chance. I’m 100% sure that if I burrowed into my nihilism, I could try to write its script by guessing and match it page for page a couple times. Bob goes electric. The ‘60s are an exciting and important time. What is identity? What does it mean to shape-shift? I just learned what “enigmatic” means. Play it fucking loud.

This is true: I watched the trailer four times before I sat down to write this. Here’s what I remember. It stars a guy named Tim who spells his name wrong. Ed Norton plays Pete Seeger. Bob rides a motorcycle. Drinks a beer in a shitty apartment. Writes some lyrics on the floor of the shitty apartment. Commits implied sexual intercourse with a woman and she finds him difficult because of all that art he’s doing. He’s famous but he doesn’t like it. Rides a motorcycle. Where’s he really from? He cuts Like A Rolling Stone. I wonder who they’ll get to play the guy who plays the organ on that. He’s a buddy of mine’s neighbor, is why I’m curious. How’s that actually work? Does his agent call him and then he goes to the dude’s office on Wilshire or whatever to sign some paperwork? Does he get any mailbox money off it?

Johnny Cash is in this one too, so Mangold has a bit of a cinematic universe happening. He needs to hurry up and make a Red Hot Chili Peppers biopic so we can see Old Johnny. Joaquin “Leaf” Phoenix can play Rick Rubin, as a clever little nod to the fans.

Anyway it’s swill and you know that already. Bob Dylan as a tortured God figure, all that Joseph Campbell stuff about guys with too many faces. Designed to employ people who work on award campaigns. Tim spelled wrong will probably get an Oscar for it.

It’s clearly something you see when you’re visiting your family for Christmas and it’s the only thing playing that knows some of its audience went to college. We all have better things to do, up to and including laundry. But the fact is, this is the only major studio production that hovers anywhere near my interests, the only thing that markets to me. So it’s almost funny, threatens to be interesting, that it’s terrible at it. This exact template for exactly this movie is now more than 20 years old and they obviously haven’t updated it at all. An industrial film about sawmill safety would actually be more compelling. At least that might have some gory reenactments.