Dylan Goes Aseptic

James Mangold, an IP strip-miner with auteurist airs—he described 2017’s Logan as an attempt to “make an Ozu film with mutants”—has, with A Complete Unknown, made a Marvel movie with Bob Dylan: a hero’s journey propelled by daddy issues, festooned with product placement plus some Easter eggs thrown in for the realheads. It feels right that the words that knocked about in my mind after watching ACU weren’t “How many seas must a white dove sail?” or “Crimson flames tied through my ears” but a throwaway line delivered to Dylan by Boyd Holbrook’s campy, crapulous Johnny Cash at a motel parking lot before heading to the fateful 1965 Newport Folk Festival: “Want a Bugle?” Cash wasn’t at the festival that year, and General Mills’ beloved conoid snack didn’t even hit the national market until 1966, but no matter: Mangold’s authorized biopic is a MacDougal Street fairytale (shot in Jersey), a rags-to-rock farrago of contrivance and cliché that, like nearly all of Dylan’s exercises in brand extension, slips rather brilliantly outside the bounds of authenticity and artifice. Ti…