Review: Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown a 'frustratingly basic' offering

A Complete Unknown (15) ★★

Emmanuelle (18) ★★

William Tell (15) ★★

“Judas!” as no one cried when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. That doesn’t stop Walk the Line director James Mangold from using the slur — originally shouted at Dylan when he played Manchester Free Trade Hall a year later — in the climax of his early years Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Its inclusion, though, turns out to be oddly appropriate given the extent to which the film betrays Dylan’s artistic legacy. Starring Timothée Chalamet as a 20-something Dylan navigating his rapid ascent towards voice-of-a-generation superstardom, it’s a movie that celebrates his determination to escape the straightjacket of conventionality while, ironically, straightjacketing this most enigmatic of artists by forcing his life to conform to the beats of a conventional biopic, the sort that commodifies rebellion and dumbs down complexity.

That it’s very watchable isn't in doubt, but the saccharine view of the 1960s on offer detracts from Chalamet’s committed performance, turning this bitter pill — who lies, cheats and frequently acts like an asshole to those around him — into something a little easier to swallow. That’s too bad because Chalamet approximates Dylan’s mumbling diction and croaky singing voice without slipping into parody, and he puts his own movie star charisma to good use capturing the uber-cool appeal Dylan held for a generation desperate for its own heroes.

The film itself starts with Dylan making a pilgrimage to meet his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who’s chronically ill in hospital, but cognisant enough to offer the young upstart his approbation when he plays him Song to Woody. He also wins the admiration and patronage of veteran folk star Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who tells Dylan that “a really good song can get the job done without the frills.” It’s a piece of advice that comes to fruition when Dylan later plays The Times They Are A-Changin’ to a rapturous Newport crowd in 1964, though it also signifies an ideological difference that seeds Dylan’s subsequent split from the folk purists when he starts tinkering around with an electric guitar on his next album.

That evolutionary musical journey is the driving force of the film, but there’s a love triangle to contend with too as Dylan’s mutual love/hate relationship with folk queen Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) wrecks his relationship with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a New York artist whom Mangold and screenwriter Jay Cocks have invented as a proxy for Dylan’s girlfriend of the time, Suze Rotolo.

It’s the politically engaged Sylvie who encourages Dylan to reject the folk establishment and engage with the world around him in his songs, yet the film is devoid of the messy realities of that world, with Mangold preferring to bluntly outline his themes in declarative dialogue or on-the-nose performance scenes in which Dylan’s lyrics can do some of the heavy lifting. It’s a frustratingly basic and sanitised approach, a film about Bob Dylan made with the traditionalist sensibility of Pete Seeger.

Noémie Merlant in Emanuelle | Manuel Moutier

Another week, another throwback to the erotic cinema of yesteryear. After Babygirl put a feminist twist on the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s, Emmanuelle finds acclaimed French filmmaker Audrey Diwan rebooting the notorious 1974 soft porn hit of the same name. That film, starring Sylvia Kristel, was a titillating slice of exploitation cinema that crossed over into the mainstream; the new version aspires to what might be termed “elevated eroticism”, though in fancifully going back to the film’s literary source material (it’s based on a pseudonymously penned novel credited to Emmanuelle Arsan) Diwan hasn’t quite managed to transcend the clunky dialogue and ropey performances that have given the original some enduring camp appeal.

In this iteration, the titular temptress (played by Noémie Merlant) is no longer a diplomat’s wife on a journey of sexual self-discovery, but a quality control inspector for a luxury hotel chain who’s been flown out to Hong Kong to find out why their flagship building is slipping down the rankings of frequent international travellers. The boringness of her career is quickly reflected in the tedium of the movie, with the film’s opening scenes a perfume ad-style redo of the original’s mile-high-club opening and Diwan’s soft-focus camera swooning over the luxurious interiors of her hotel setting almost as much as her lead’s frequently disrobed body.

William Tell gives the Swiss folk hero who shot an apple from his son’s head with a crossbow the Braveheart/Gladiator treatment in this ripe, would-be franchise starter from British writer/director Nick Hamm. Although Danish actor Claes Bang makes for a compelling enough lead as Tell, it’s a pretty formulaic historical epic, with a decent cast of mostly Brit actors (among them Rafe Spall, Solly McLeod, Connor Swindells, Emily Beecham and Ben Kingsley) adopting RSC accents to deliver the sort of cod Shakespearean dialogue that may torture thine ears.

All films in cinemas from 17 January