Timothée Chalamet is no stranger to playing misunderstood saviour figures, having portrayed Frank Herbert’s interstellar boy-prince Paul Atreides in Dune: Parts One and Two and Roald Dahl’s chocolate messiah Willy Wonka in Wonka. With a CV like that, you can see why the director James Mangold would cast the actor as a baby-faced Robert Zimmerman in the rock biopic A Complete Unknown. Once you’ve danced with the Oompa Loompas, negotiating Subterranean Homesick Blues should be a cinch.
So complete was his commitment to Mangold’s Bob Dylan movie (which opens in cinemas on Friday, January 17th) that Chalamet learned more than 30 Dylan originals, 17 of which are gathered for the official movie soundtrack. All are played and performed by Chalamet. Another six tracks feature Monica Barbaro as Dylan’s muse and rival Joan Baez, Edward Norton as the folk firebrand Pete Seeger and Boyd Holbrook as the country rebel Johnny Cash.
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Rock’n’roll biopics are a hit-and-miss genre, their soundtracks even more so. Some shine a light on unjustly overlooked music. Todd Haynes’s back-door David Bowie tribute, Velvet Goldmine, for instance, doubled as a celebration of Brian Eno’s glam masterpiece Here Come the Warm Jets (the Bowie catalogue being off limits to Haynes). But then there’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which lazily hopscotched through Queen’s greatest hits (with a few new outtakes chucked in for the benefit of hardcore fans).
A Complete Unknown is something else entirely – and represents a trip into uncharted territory. It is a Dylan album without any Bob Dylan, Chalamet doing his best to channel the singer’s gruff romantic spirit. He attempts this while being at pains not to tip into caricature. As he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe recently, “It’s not the impression Olympics.”
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Chalamet deserves a gold medal for effort. Yet, for all his commitment, A Complete Unknown’s soundtrack makes for uncanny listening. You suspect that this will be especially true for Dylan fans, many of whom have spent their entire adult lives wishing the now veteran artist would go back to performing the material as he originally set it down in the 1960s (an indulgence he refuses to grant his long-suffering audience).
Both movie and soundtrack take issue with the idea of Dylan as more myth than man. He is presented as a genius with feet of clay – a conscious creative decision on the part of Mangold, as he recently told Variety. “How much of an enigma can a man be who’s released 55 records? How much more do you want? He has given us more personal output than almost any artist in history. There’s so much personal poetry that we’ve been exposed to that it’s hard to understand what more he’s supposed to give us that will somehow close the circle for someone.”
Whatever about Mangold’s logic, how odd it is to encounter these songs in this new setting. Chalamet doesn’t sound like Dylan – but he doesn’t not sound like him, either. The 23-track LP opens with Highway 61 Revisited, which Chalamet imbues with a boyish lilt. (For a moment I almost imagine I’m listening to Willy Wonka in his pre-chocolatier, folk-club period.) Thereafter it’s mostly hits. A grainy Mr Tambourine Man is followed by a wistful Girl from the North Country, while “peak Dylan” is achieved with an epic Blowin’ in the Wind.
On the screen that song is presented as a millstone around the neck of the singer, who wants to follow his inner artistic voice and not be co-opted into the folk protest movement: he’s a songwriter, not a full-time advocate for societal justice. You can only imagine the abuse he would receive were he a young artist coming of age in the social-media era.
He does finally turn his back on the reactionary left by picking up an electric guitar. It is a switcheroo that is here manifested by Chalamet’s bristling take on Like a Rolling Stone, which arrives with that familiar plugged-in rumble and fluttering harmonica. Here is a classic moment of transition for both Dylan and the singer-songwriter milieu – but also a clarion cry for musical freedom and an argument that artists should be allowed to live by their creative instincts rather than cleave to someone else’s agenda.
It’s all wonderfully done but slightly ersatz, and you can only wonder about the target audience. Dylan fans may well be horrified to find Chalamet scribbling all over the singer’s sacred texts. But if you’re a newcomer, why aren’t you listening to the originals instead? Kudos to Chalamet for squaring off against the Dylan songbook with the appropriate mix of reverence and fervour – but this record ultimately makes about as much sense as scarfing a melting Wonka Bar on a broodingly hot day.
