I will preface this by saying that I have always been a casual fan of Bob Dylan. I’ve never owned any of his albums, but I likewise never change the radio station when one of his songs comes on, and I never skip a song of his if it comes up on my Spotify playlist. There are a few songs he’s written that could find their way into my personal top 50 favorite songs, like Tangled Up in Blue, The Times They Are a-Changing, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, and Blowing in the Wind. He’s one of the greatest songwriters in the history of pop and folk music, so it would be impossible to name all the great songs he’s responsible for and keep this blog to a reasonable length.

I was looking forward to seeing A Complete Unknown because it was directed by James Mangold, who also directed Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic, which was one of my favorite films of 2005. I was a fan of Walk the Line because it took a deep dive into not only Cash’s music but the trauma he experienced that led to drug and alcohol abuse that nearly destroyed him. It also was a poignant love story about his relationship with June Carter. It was a deep film with conflict, drama, and an emotionally satisfying ending.

There was very little of any of that in A Complete Unknown. Drugs and alcohol didn’t play a huge role in defining Dylan’s career, although he claims to have been addicted to heroin for a brief time in the 60s. He did, however, have a tumultuous relationship with Joan Baez that inspired her to write the powerful song Diamonds and Rust after their breakup. In fact, the first half of the film felt like an extended concert movie. It was entertaining. There was a lot of great music. But there wasn’t a ton of drama or great storytelling.

That changed about halfway through the movie.

One thing that started to create drama in the first half of the second act was when Dylan started to achieve fame that he wasn’t prepared for. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Timothèe Chalamet here, who delivers an amazing performance as Bob Dylan. He nails Dylan’s soft-spoken, almost slurry syntax, as well as his pitchy singing style. He also nailed Dylan’s contrarian attitude as he devised to break cultural norms of everything from politics to how people view folk music. He was especially effective in showing the internal struggle Dylan had in coming to grips with his fame and how it was changing his world in ways that weren’t always for the better.

A Complete Unknown became an actual movie about halfway through. The love triangle between Dylan, Baez (Monica Barbaro), and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) comes to a head, but not in the emotionally satisfying way that it should have because Mangold didn’t take the time needed in the first half of the movie like he did in the first half of Walk the Line.

What makes the second half of the film the most dramatic is Dylan’s embracing of electric guitar when his fans, especially folk fan,s believe the acoustic guitar is the only way to play music. He wants to play new electric songs at the upcoming Newport Folk Festival, but the concert organizers and his mentor, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) pressure him to only play on the acoustic. This is the only real drama in the story, and it is paper thin.

Mangold also wrote the screenplay along with James Cocks, and it’s based on the book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. I have not read the book, but the title implies it’s about Dylan, already one of the great folk singers of his time, embracing the electric guitar, which would have been seen by his contemporaries as the most unholy of acts possible. I hate to second guess a great filmmaker like Mangold, but I can’t help but wonder if this wouldn’t have been a much more dramatic film if he had focused the script on that idea and coincided it with his relationship with Joan Baez. I feel like Mangold’s mistake in this film was biting off more than he could chew. In trying to show as much as possible of Dylan’s life leading up to him going electric, he couldn’t dive deeply enough into any of it, leaving us with a broad but flat story that was begging for depth.

That said, it’s an entertaining film. Fans of Bob Dylan will likely love this film, as there is a whole lotta music in it. The story essentially serves as a vehicle to get us from one musical number to another. I will say that my favorite moment in the film was when he first sang The Times They Are a-Changing at the Newport Folk Festival. The crowd slowly gets into it as he sings it, and that moment catapults him to superstardom in the film.

I enjoyed A Complete Unknown, but it, unfortunately, left some plays on the field due to the surface-level nature of the storytelling. It had some great moments, and I would certainly watch it again. But it’s a tick below the best films of this year. It will get some Oscar recognition in the form of nominations, but it’s not likely to take home many, if any, awards. It’s one of those films that could have and probably should have been better. But it’s worth seeing as it is.