The New Bob Dylan Biopic Has Serious ‘Dewey Cox Vibes’
A new trailer just dropped for A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold’s highly anticipated biopic about the legendary Bob Dylan starring Timothée Chalamet. The story ends around 1965, meaning that we won’t get a scene in which Chalamet bangs a tiny Ikea wrench against a microphone while wearing old age makeup.
A Complete Unknown looks like a boilerplate Hollywood music biopic, full of eye-rollingly obvious moments. And it’s nearly impossible to accept these types of formulaic music biopics, not just because Hollywood has practically run the genre into the ground at this point, but because they were so perfectly parodied in 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
Mangold has admitted to enjoying Walk Hard, which was primarily a send-up of his previous music biopic effort, Walk the Line. But for some reason, he seems to be leaning into those Dewey Cox-esque elements again, rather than avoiding them. Overdramatic statements as Dylan steps into a recording studio? Check. Conspicuously name-checking famous musicians we otherwise wouldn’t recognize? Check. Dylan being grilled by his live-in girlfriend while secretly having an affair? Check.
Not surprisingly, a number of folks on social media had the exact same reaction, and just couldn’t help but see more Dewey Cox than Bob Dylan in the trailer.
It probably doesn’t help that Dewey Cox had a Dylan phase in Walk Hard. Dewey’s goofy, pseudo-profound back talk is not so different from what we hear from A Complete Unknown’s Dylan (he wants to be “whatever it is they don’t want me to be”), and to be honest, John C. Reilly arguably does a better impression of Dylan’s speaking voice. Chalamet kind of sounds like Steven Wright to my ears.
It’s also worth noting that Dylan himself seems like a shaky subject for this type of conventional biopic. Dylan’s penchant for self-mythologizing and autobiographical mischief-making basically render any of his firsthand accounts wholly unreliable. And capping his story in 1965 offers up such a slim view of his shapeshifting personality, perhaps his defining artistic characteristic, that one wonders what the point of this movie even is.
Coincidentally, Walk Hard came out the very same year as the last narrative film about Dylan, I’m Not There, which took an experimental approach to the story. It featured a variety of actors as its subject, each representing a different aspect of Dylan, real or imagined. Walk Hard director Jake Kasdan noted at the time that his film and I’m Not There were both “deconstructionist biopics.”
Even though it seemed like these two movies, coming out so close together, may have represented the death knell for formulaic biopics, studios just kept churning them out.
We’ll have to wait and see if A Complete Unknown features a framing device in which Bob Dylan has to think about his whole life before playing.
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