I Contain Multitudes: How ‘I’m Not There’ complicates ‘A Complete Unknown’

Posted On July 29, 2024July 29, 2024

Making any biographical movie about a rock star is bound to be tricky. There’s always going to be a handful of scenes that need to be in the film, but there are also parts of people’s lives that they might not be comfortable sharing with the world to give the director a fully fleshed-out story. And while James Mangold seems to have the stage set for a great biopic with A Complete Unknown, telling the story of Bob Dylan is bound to get complicated after watching I’m Not There.

That is if you actually choose to see the film as a proper bio movie on Dylan. Because for a lot of artists in the film that look an awful lot like the folk-rock icon, none of them go by the name ‘Bob Dylan’. There are different facets of Dylan’s personality in the way that they talk or conduct themselves, but the entire film is meant to show what it’s like to live in Dylan’s headspace for a little bit.

For years, Dylan was one of the few years that was impossible to pin down. He usually had a few core genres that he would go back to throughout his career, but no one since David Bowie was able to truly capture what it meant to create mystery with their celebrity status, almost like they were daring the press to try to find the real person behind the disguise.

Those kinds of personas were what Dylan was all about. Even when giving interviews up until the present day, he talked about the importance of wearing a mask whenever someone performs, saying in Rolling Thunder Revue, “When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” So, let’s see what kind of masks these people are wearing.

Playing out across multiple actors, the story of I’m Not There is a great way for people to immerse themselves in what it means to be Bob Dylan. Marcus Carl Franklin might be the most engaging in the entire film, playing the role of Woody Guthrie. Though he’s not necessarily playing Dylan, per se, his speech cadence and backhanded attitude are reminiscent of the Dylan that people knew before the fame hit: the humble songwriter looking to bring folk to the masses.

As the film keeps changing perspective, we get to see what different eras of Dylan’s life look like through actors like Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett. Despite Bale’s portrayal looking the kind of thing that you would see out of a cheaply made Dylan cosplay, Blanchett’s portrayal is nailed down perfectly. Dylan was already known for being the definition of punk rock years before that genre had a name, and seeing her portray a version of him going against the grain and toying with journalists is probably more in line with what Timothee Chalamet is going to give us in a few months.

However, that version limits Dylan to just the cartoon version that we know from the 1960s. Dylan never stopped having more to say, and seeing actors like Heath Ledger portray him in the 1970s is closer to the raw pain Dylan felt trying to be a superstar and a family man at the same time on records like Blood on the Tracks.

If nothing else, I’m Not There probably deserves a sequel a lot more than A Complete Unknown does. We’ve already heard that part of Dylan, but just imagine what it would be like to see other actors portray him during his 1980s period as a born-again Christian or the moment that he put together The Traveling Wilburys with George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Tom Petty.

More than anything, the hardest part of A Complete Unknown succeeding is how much I’m Not There understands what it means to be Bob Dylan. Yes, there is a clear picture that many people have when looking at a photo of him or seeing one of his performances, but his is a story that is still being written every time he makes a record or goes on tour.

A Complete Unknown may do just fine at the box office and may even do a good job at capturing one moment in Dylan’s life, but we’ll have to wait and see whether it’s telling the full story. If they understand what it means to be someone like Bob Dylan, they’ll know that it’s best to show a reflection of him rather than try to figure out who the real Robert Zimmerman actually was. 

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