Director James Mangold has made a Bob Dylan biopic that unfolds like an Oscar-bait bingo card, with Timothée Chalamet performing a functionally-solid impression of the icon as a rising teen star. Ultimately, "A Complete Unknown" provides no more thought on Dylan than a Wikipedia article. by Dom Sinacola “A complete unknown” is a lyric plucked from Bob Dylan’s 1965 single “Like a Rolling Stone,” a song that could be used as a major signpost to mark Dylan’s mid-’60s ascent from popular musician to genre-shattering voice of a generation. Instead, writer-director James Mangold treats the line like a sufficient answer to a question that’s barely asked. “How does it feel?” Dylan wails in the chorus. A Complete Unknown just points to itself.  If you’ve seen Walk the Line (2005), Mangold’s Johnny Cash biopic, then you likely know what you'll get with A Complete Unknown, Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic. What may surprise you is the extent to which you know exactly what you will get, and then do get, like filling up an Oscar-bait bingo card.  In other words, you can look forward to: a consolidated chunk of the subject’s life structured around some sort of culturally-seismic event; a lived-in lead performance that also whiffs of impersonation; a palatable struggle with the subject’s demons (always to the detriment to an important relationship, often romantic), a few frames of on-screen text at the end of the movie to reaffirm the hagiographic legacy of the subject by telling you widely-acknowledged facts about the subject’s accomplishments, and, most importantly, an unspoken agreement amongst all concerned (filmmaker, audience, characters in the movie) that the subject’s genius is never under question. That culturally seismic event is the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Bob first “went electric,” to use a phrase culled from our cliched cultural lexicon. That lived-in lead performance is Timothée Chalamet’s, a functionally-solid impression that treats Dylan like a rising teen star, a situation to which Chalamet can probably relate, having his big blockbuster debut in Interstellar at only 17.  And so, Dylan’s demons are the trappings of being so young and having no real boundaries, though he doesn’t really struggle with addiction or mental health so much as he’s just an emotionally withholding asshole. That saint-like legacy and assumed genius is supposedly part of the vague pop-cultural awareness a human being obtains almost by default of being born.   For some viewers, A Complete Unknown could be a straightforward synopsis of a critical time in the lifespan of an American figure who, though still alive, has already become myth. Even if the 1965 Newport Folk Festival means nothing to you—even if you aren’t particularly drawn to Dylan’s music—when every character in A Complete Unknown immediately acknowledges that this young man they’re hearing play guitar is a once-in-a-generation talent, the film assumes that you walked into the theater (or, let’s be honest, sat on your couch) with the appropriate appreciation for Bob Dylan, recent Nobel Prize winner, ready to go. Other viewers may remember Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a 2007 satire of 2000s award-headed musician biopics so fixated on Walk the Line that Mangold’s film has become a kind of avatar for a very recognizable timbre of biographical film. Of course, all of the above-listed tropes and narrative techniques—the culturally seismic event, the lived-in impersonation, the purging of personal problems, the unquestioned genius—are the conventions most useful in consolidating a life that can’t really be consolidated. Walk Hard just laid these contrivances bare, crafting a comedy from the shorthand that Walk the Line codified. The world laughed, but rather than respond with something new, Mangold has come back after all this time—after an Indiana Jones movie, two increasingly dark and violent Wolverine movies, and such refined uncle-fare as Ford v Ferrari and 3:10 to Yuma—with so little perspective on his subject that he’s assembled a biopic completely from shorthand.    We first join a 19-year-old Bob Dylan in 1961 when he hitches to New York City to visit an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in an upstate hospital. There he also meets Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who introduces him to Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) and other folk luminaries, which sets him on a relatively smooth rise to fame. Bob must also navigate his relationship with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who first sparks an activist passion in his music, and his affair with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), with whom he shares both an artistic symbiosis and exhausting tour schedule.  All of this time passing is conveyed with the delicacy of a Saturday Night Live sketch, several semi-recognizable names emerging like synecdoche from the painterly NYC landscape to orient the viewer. Al Kooper (Charlie Tahan), the musician and producer who first came up with the organ riff for “Like a Rolling Stone," enters A Complete Unknown in the studio as Bob’s putting together the band who’d soon rock Newport. Unable to find an available guitar, Kooper hops on the Hammond as the next best choice, immediately cranks out that infamous introductory snippet, and Chalamet-as-Dylan nods knowingly, the song fully written before it’s even started. As A Complete Unknown proceeds workmanlike toward the big performance, the aforementioned folk luminaries Lomax and Seeger become increasingly incensed with Dylan’s flaunting of tradition. In turn, Dylan mostly floats through the film unperturbed. Which may be much of the point—that this well-known persona is so, um, completely unknown—but Mangold seems to have no perspective on Dylan besides that, so Chalamet is a vaguely charming cutout in the middle of an early ’60s montage of Stuff You Should Know, surrounded by wonderful character actors inhabiting historical placeholders with no discernible inner lives. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael too walks the line, in cahoots with Mangold to offer no viable visual take on this era except for that which can be found on record covers and in archival footage. Together they are complicit in providing nothing—not even an obligatory flashback structure or thoughtful time skip or interesting camera angle—with any more thoughtfulness than a Wikipedia article. For some viewers, this could be enough. For others, A Complete Unknown is beyond parody. A Complete Unknown opens wide on December 25.