Boyd Holbrook

In A Complete Unknown (2024), Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash strolls in a couple of times to encourage trouble. James Mangold’s Dylan film is better at songs than drama, and Holbrook brings some welcome amusement to it. He needs little screen time to make Cash seem like someone worth following, if perhaps not obeying. We enjoyed his Cash because the pleasure he takes in being a bad influence is so apparent. It is a modest reason to watch a film we find decent, and a good example of what makes his supporting work worth noticing.

His film debut, as Denton Smith in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008), preceded his breakthrough lead as DEA agent Steve Murphy in Narcos (2015–2016). The subsequent run of supporting and villain roles can obscure the fact that he has carried a television programme. As Donald Pierce in Logan (2017), he uses natural delivery and physical presence to make an antagonist convincing without apparent strain. His Southern drawl and unassuming swagger make the casting understandable. But we would like more parts that give him something to do with the humour that accompanies the threat.

Mangold also directed him as Klaber in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), with much less rewarding results. Holbrook does the hitting while Mads Mikkelsen’s Voller supplies the glowering. Our problem there is the film’s appetite for chases, not any failure by Holbrook to look capable of causing injury. Even so, physical assurance cannot turn the henchman into much of a character. Set beside Cash, Klaber suggests that Mangold gets more out of him when he has something to enjoy beyond the next confrontation.

He need not become the lead in everything to find better parts. Cash allows him to be funny and faintly troublesome in the space of a few appearances. That seems a more promising use of his abilities than another assignment as the man who hurts people. Start with A Complete Unknown, provided a few enjoyable interruptions are enough reason to watch a Dylan film whose songs do most of the work.