This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“Most of what follows is true.” The opening words of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid remain the best promise of cinematic non-fiction: you’re getting truth, but not always accuracy. Outside a screening of A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s telling of Bob Dylan’s journey from college dropout to rock star, there was discussion about the extent to which we were getting either.
We’re definitely getting a belter of a film. Not every film Mangold has made has been brilliant, but he knows how to get the best out of what he’s got: whenever I hear someone sneer at Sylvester Stallone’s talents, I point them to his performance in 1997’s superlative Cop Land. This time the director is working with the hottest young actor in the world, Timothée Chalamet, and some of the greatest songs ever written.
It is partly an exercise in borrowed nostalgia. There are fewer and fewer who can remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, or who know where they were when they learned that Kennedy had been shot, but we who heard about these moments from our parents feel like we knew how it felt, and this film is a wonderful evocation of that time as we’d like to think we remember it.
If you want to experience the sensation of sitting in a Greenwich Village bar when a young man with an unconventionally appealing voice pulls out a guitar and begins denouncing the masters of war, this is the film to watch.
Chalamet does a decent job not simply of impersonating the various iterations of Dylan over those years, but of portraying a man on a journey from obscurity to stardom who resents all the people trying to make him into the thing they want him to be. His singing is plausible, and it would be interesting to do a blind trial of the soundtrack album, which has his voice, not Dylan’s.
Monica Barbaro, playing Joan Baez, has the harder job: she may be less famous these days, but Baez’s voice is amazing, and anyone who could really sing like her would be wasting their time making films.
The weak point may be the precise subject of the story. At the risk of offending the priesthood at the Church of the Sacred Mouth Organ, the row about Dylan going electric may have been huge in 1965, but six decades later it has distinct storm-teacup qualities. Try spending a few minutes trying to explain the fight to a teenager.
But any story can seem important if told in the right way, and Mangold does a decent job of making us feel that plugging in an electric guitar might be a heroic act. Is this really how it happened? It may at least be how Dylan now feels it happened.
The obvious audience for this film is men who own 20 different recordings of “Mr Tambourine Man”, and I think most of us will be grateful. But the presence of Chalamet may help us to persuade others to join us. Afterwards, if they’re lucky, we can explain to them why it’s got all the details completely wrong.
Another new film is based on what is indisputably a more heroic story: Bonhoeffer tells the story of the theologian and key figure in what German church resistance there was to Adolf Hitler. Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood the Nazis for what they were, and the necessity of Christians standing against them. He would be killed for it.
The movie is written and directed by Todd Komarnicki, who wrote Sully, a model in how to tell someone’s story through a single moment. Here though he gives us the biopic treatment, as Bonhoeffer, heading to his death, recalls the whole span of his life.
It’s an approach that inevitably means a film becomes a series of greatest hits: see Bonhoeffer enjoying gospel music in Harlem; see him dislike racism; see him run a seminary. See Martin Niemoeller mount the pulpit. Is he going to? Yes he is! “First they came for the Communists … ”
Moving at such speed, there’s little time for anything to be experienced. Nazi Germany seems unpleasant, rather than terrifying. Whilst it zooms through the history, it is simultaneously bafflingly ahistorical.
Young men fear being sent to the Eastern Front in 1935. Scenes from 1943 are edited into 1939 to give us a universe in which Germany has overrun Europe two years early, but where Winston Churchill, already prime minister, is worried that supporting an attempt on Hitler’s life might provoke him to attack Britain. This is what happens when people who are hazy about events before Pearl Harbor make movies about 1930s Europe.
Komarnicki is similarly conflicted in his treatment of his hero. At one level there’s excessive reverence: Bonhoeffer experiences little in the way of conventional character development or internal conflict.
But then that caution is thrown overboard as he’s shown renouncing non-violence to take a direct role in a plot to kill Hitler. If you weren’t sure before whether the film had crossed the line from inaccurate to untruthful, you are now.
The film has been criticised in the US for giving succour to the idea that Christians should use violence against governments they don’t like. Komarnicki rejects this, but I think his film fails another test: this was neither how it was, nor how it felt.
