The people that know me well, know that I am very boomer-coded. Not in the old man yelling at clouds type of way, but more in the vein of I AM OBSESSED with old timers like Van Morrison, Neil Young and Paul McCartney. I once tricked myself into a Randy Newman fandom, resulting in me being in the top 0.01 percent listener of the singer-songwriter and Pixar composer in my Spotify wrapped. Currently I am reading a book about all the studio sessions Paul McCartney did in his solo career after his split with the Beatles. For a millennial on the verge of boomer-dom like me, this can’t be more exciting.
So naturally I am also the ideal target audience of A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chamalet as the folk poet who became a rock n roll Judas when he swapped his acoustic guitar for an electric set during the Newport Folk Festival of 1965. Electrifying stuff indeed, and yet James Mangold’s newest musical biography left me cold. Here you have one of the most influential and enigmatic artists of the 20th century, in a surface level film that never gets to the heart of what makes Dylan so fascinating. It’s not his musical genius — which he obviously has — but his unwillingness to be labelled or categorized that has made him such a compelling figure for over 6 decades.
It’s for good reasons Todd Haynes made a Dylan biopic in 2007 called I’m Not There that uses SIX different narratives and lead actors to try to get to the core of the ungraspable and ever shifting identities of the musical enigma. That film also lowkey sucks btw, and again reinforces how hard it is to make a proper biographical film about the people that are larger than life. Recent biopics like the insufferable Freddie Mercury flick Bohemian Rhapsody and the turgid drag of an Elton John film Rocketman confirm that most people are in it for a cheap dose of nostalgia shot straight into our veins. It’s the cinema equivalent of buying the “best of” album on vinyl: all the familiar hits, without any interesting angle or artistic risk.
That’s why the fictional music biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was such an apt satire of this genre of films, that is so aggressively formulaic it makes me want to scratch my eyes out and pierce my eardrums with a pencil. Dewey Cox showed us that we can literally think of any incredible artist and make a by the numbers film about them. Is that really what we need time and time again? While saying this, I am reminding you all that a Bruce Springsteen film starring Jeremy Allen White (AKA the guy from the Bear) is also coming up soon.
When I think of good biopics, I think of films that somehow capture the internal energy of the people they cinematically evoke. The first 30 minutes of Michael Mann’s Ali for instance, convey the inner-turmoil of the iconic boxer that finds himself caught in the crazy politics of America. Somewhat similarly, Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine managed to evoke an entire era of glamrock in what is not an official, but secretly a kind of biopic about David Bowie. This film is on purpose anti-nostalgia: it examines the strange relationship we have with music throughout our life, as we get older and the relentless passing of time gets the best of us. It’s a film about where we put music deep inside our soul, instead of just fetishizing all the cool tunes some genius has churned out.
Bringing it all together, I want to raise the questions: how can the frames of the camera capture something so mystical and profound about the creative geniuses of our time? And why is it so hard to make a musical biopic that’s actually good? As our friend Bob Dylan would sing: the answer is blowing in the wind.