'A Complete Unknown', the 'Walk Hard' Test, and the traps of musician biopics
Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning in A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold. Inset: John C. Reilly in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
Hollywood never gets tired of the musician biopic. Each year brings us a collection of young Serious Actors™, aiming to bring beloved artists and their struggles to life, doing their best impressions of famous songs. It’s a pretty solid formula, akin to how the superhero factory at Marvel uses recognizable intellectual property to precondition audiences, who already like a given character, to buy a ticket.
To be fair, some of them, like James Mangold’s recent A Complete Unknown (about a young Bob Dylan), are good enough to merit Oscar contention. And you like [insert artist name here], it’s hard to pass up a chance to see their songs performed on the big screen and get swept up in their journey to fame.
But nearly every time I watch a musician biopic, I can’t help but apply a weird test to the movie that I’ve used for the last 18 years - what I like to call the Walk Hard Test. Because in 2007, star John C. Reilly and director Jake Kasdan released what I consider to be the definitive satire of the genre, a decades-spanning commentary on how the movie industry tells stories about performers and the tropes used to make their complicated lives more digestible. The Test goes like this: if Walk Hard can effectively satirize a new biopic, then the biopic probably isn’t very innovative. This doesn’t mean that a biopic can’t be an enjoyable watch, but it means that the filmmakers have missed an opportunity to explore other techniques to capture the life of the performer.
Chalamet as Bob Dylan during an early performance.
It might seem silly to use such a goofy movie as a measuring stick, especially since Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story bombed at the box office and perhaps doesn’t have the cultural impact that it deserves.
I’m always running into people who’ve never seen it, despite the wave of quotable scenes (“You don’t want no part of this shit”, “This is a dark fucking period!”, “Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life before he plays”...I could go on). It also helps that Walk Hard has Reilly in the lead, who happens to have a great singing voice, and the filmmakers composed an equal number of straight-up listenable songs for the soundtrack to balance out the comedic ones. With that solid foundation, Reilly and the Walk Hard team’s observations about the genre continue to connect. Here’s a few of the key ones:
An artist’s humble upbringing and estrangement from their family: The artist’s talent is discovered at a young age, but must work to be recognized by the world. Something drives him away from his family.
In Walk Hard, this is represented for comedy purposes as Dewey as a child, accidentally killing his brother with a machete. Later, he pours his grief into playing a blues song with the skill of a trained master, and then performs a Buddy Holly-esque concert that causes a riot. Meanwhile, in A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet’s 19 year-old Bob Dylan arrives in New York in 1961, showing off his preternatural skill with folk music. His past is a mystery and he never acknowledges it. A chance meeting with two of his heroes, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, sets him off on his path to stardom.
A lucky break and early success: The artist gets a chance to show off their skill for an audience and gets his first big hit recorded.
In Walk Hard, Dewey subs in for the singer of a nightclub band and impresses some record executives who happen to be in the audience. He’s invited to a recording session and almost magically conjures up a hit song on the spot, inspired by a conversation he had in an earlier scene. In A Complete Unknown, scenes like this happen several times, including the “Masters of War” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” performances.
Major fame: the artist releases his most well-known hits but starts to struggle against what the industry expects from him.
As Dewey’s career takes off in Walk Hard, he shifts through many artistic periods meant to reflect the music of well-known performers like Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Brian Wilson. But he constantly feels penned in by other people’s expectations of him, and doesn’t know how to cope with his trauma as a child. Meanwhile, in Unknown, Dylan is chased around by fans but chafes against the folk-music labels applied to him. He’s unable to form a real relationship with any of the women in his life and wants to pursue his musical ambitions at all costs.
A climactic performance: A big scene signalling a change in the artist’s approach to music and a revelation about themselves
As he nears the end of his life, Dewey still hasn’t composed his masterpiece, but when he finally achieves a sense of peace about where life has taken him, it gives him the inspiration he needs to compose the song and perform it at a lifetime achievement ceremony (before swiftly dying minutes later). In Unknown, this moment is represented by the infamous “Dylan going electric” performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan decides he needs to move on from his current material and challenge himself artistically, even if it means alienating everyone who helped him on his journey.
Reilly in one of Dewey Cox’s many eras, this time as a Roy Orbison-style act.
These are just a few of the most obvious ways that A Complete Unknown fails the Walk Hard Test. But what’s a recent example of a movie that passes? One of the most obvious ones is Rocketman, the Taron Egerton-starring biopic from 2019 about Elton John. While it still has to follow the recognizable peaks and valleys of a troubled artist’s life, the movie breaks away from the formula in its performances of John’s best songs, framing them more as musical-style departures from reality with choreographed dance numbers. The movie feels less like a “Greatest Hits” album with some acting padding it out, and it’s a stylistic choice that offers its own commentary on the personality of the subject.
The Walk Hard Test is by no means an objective or rigorous method of evaluating movies. It’s merely a way of recognizing that too many of the movies about musicians that get released are essentially the same story with different characters and songs subbed in. Maybe that’s an unavoidable problem with the genre, where the producers want to accurately cover a career and give audiences another chance to hear music they love. But after seeing this structure play out in so many films, I wonder whether we need to hear the hits at all. I’m reminded of what the late David Lynch said about his resistance to discussing his movies: “...the film is the talking.” Maybe in the case of movies about musicians, the performances can be trimmed out, the music should be left to talk for itself, and we should try to dig more into the minds of the people who made it.