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Timothée Chalamet Is Very Good At What He Does in the Dylan Biopic 'A Complete Unknown'

By Dustin Rowles | Film | December 27, 2024 |

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Header Image Source: Searchlight

For fans of Bob Dylan’s music, A Complete Unknown offers an exhilarating soundtrack-driven experience, showcasing Timothée Chalamet performing Dylan’s biggest hits from 1961 to 1965. Chalamet not only sings but also plays the guitar, and he’s outstanding—though it’s still an unexpected surprise to some, despite his stellar performances in two Dune movies and last Christmas’s Wonka. The man can act and sing, and he’s matched by the equally brilliant Monica Barbaro, who portrays Joan Baez (Barbaro is nearly unrecognizable out of context for those familiar with her roles in Top Gun: Maverick or Netflix’s FUBAR, where she played Arnold Schwarzenegger’s daughter). With a new song every five minutes, the music doesn’t just carry the film — it sends it soaring.

Outside of the music, however, James Mangold’s film has less to offer. To its credit, it’s not a traditional music biopic — it doesn’t follow the familiar trajectory of meteoric rise, precipitous fall, substance-abuse struggles, and eventual redemption. Instead, A Complete Unknown focuses on the years from 1961 to 1965, chronicling Dylan’s ascent to the top of the folk music world and culminating in his decision to go electric — a seismic cultural moment that rocked the music industry.

That said, the film may not resonate as well with casual Timothée Chalamet fans unfamiliar with Dylan’s music or the context surrounding his decision to plug in his guitar. Mangold attempts to frame this moment through the growing tension between Dylan and Ed Norton’s Pete Seeger, but Seeger’s heel turn is a hard pill to swallow.

Seeger is portrayed as a kind, supportive, and principled folk singer-activist for much of the film, making his eventual opposition harder to accept. Yet, both portrayals ring true: Seeger was a beloved and influential figure, but he was also a controlling purist who fiercely guarded the folk music tradition. Norton is flawless — delivering a performance worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination — bringing to life the only truly dynamic character in the film.

This starkly contrasts with Dylan, who — as is often the case in films about him — remains frustratingly enigmatic. That opacity is part of Dylan’s mystique: his music was undeniably genius, but the man behind it has never seemed particularly compelling. Barbaro’s Baez seems to sum him up perfectly when she quips, “You’re kind of an asshole, aren’t you, Bob?” While Dylan occasionally delivers a sharp one-liner, there’s little in the film to suggest there’s much depth beneath the Nobel Prize-worthy lyrics.

Mangold also does little to delve into the influence of Dylan’s mentors or the women in his life. Scoot McNairy’s Woody Guthrie is already confined to a hospital with Huntington’s disease, while Joe Tippett’s portrayal of Dave Van Ronk is relegated to a minor figure. Barbaro’s Baez shines but is mostly an on-again, off-again love interest with a gorgeous voice, and Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo (a stand-in for Dylan’s former girlfriend Suze Rotolo) spends most of her screen time either adoring Dylan or recoiling in dismay at his behavior (Fanning, terrific as always, does the best she can with the little she has to work with). Boyd Holbrook provides some fun comic relief as Johnny Cash, though Cash himself did not figure much in his early career. The film also ignores Dylan’s rivalry with Phil Ochs — a relationship that could have offered greater insight into his ambition and competitive drive beyond the fact that he often left his girlfriends’ beds to write music in the middle of the night.

And yet, despite my misgivings about A Complete Unknown as either a plot-driven movie or a character study, it’s still a terrifically entertaining, superbly acted, rousing film chock-full of amazing musical performances. Better still, instead of a film that basically tracks Dylan’s Wikipedia page, it may send the audience to Wikipedia to fill in a lot of unanswered questions — though viewers may run into the same problem Mangold did, which is that some of those questions simply do not have an answer.