A Complete Unknown
Directed by James Mangold
Written by James Mangold and Jay Cocks
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro
Rated R
Runtime: 2 hours, 21 minutes
In theaters December 25

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Website

“You just kinda wasted my precious time/But don't think twice, it's all right.” -Bob Dylan, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (1962)

I do not have it out for Timothée Chalamet. I promise. My dislike of Denis Villeueve’s Dune adaptations has little to do with Chalamet as a performer. I liked Bones and All, he’s a decent Laurie, and he’s quite good in The French Dispatch. There are only a few casting choices for Wonka that would have inspired any interest from me. Timothée innocent. He’s a perfectly good choice to play young Dylan, and Chalamet does a fine impression of the way the folk singer acted, performed, and sang from the years 1961-1965, which is the focus of A Complete Unknown. 

In addition to the perfectly fine performance from Chalamet, the technical elements of A Complete Unknown are dazzling. Mangold has made one of the best-looking films of the entire year. The lighting and cinematography are dazzling, almost Spielbergian in how flawlessly they are executed. In addition, the sound is also absolutely top notch, with all of the on-set recordings of the songs performed by Chalamet and others sounding like they stepped right out of the early ‘60s. If this movie were a virtual reality experience, it would be one worth completely disappearing into for extended periods of time. Sadly, these elements are deployed in service of a narrative thrust that is almost completely empty. 

So what makes A Complete Unknown a complete disaster? While being focused on just 4 years of Dylan’s life does allow it to escape most of the worst music biopic tropes–which were already tiresome before Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)–Mangold’s film wants to paint by the numbers so badly you can almost hear the dialogue before it is uttered. While I have a strong dislike of the genre, there have been some great music biopics recently. Love & Mercy (2014), Rocketman (2019), and this year’s Kneecap and Better Man  are all especially great because they focus on capturing the emotional and creative states of their chosen subjects. Rather than focusing on the time and place and public appearances of these artists, these films imagine what it feels like to be Brian Wilson, Elton John, etc. The emotional focus allows these movies to break free from the cage of facts and famous stories, meetings, and “firsts” in order to create a character study of the artist. 

Bob Dylan is likely best known for being extremely enigmatic. Mangold and his co-writer Jay Cocks preserve that aspect in their portrayal of him, but it means that there is a void at the center of the movie. There is nothing here to add to Dylan’s biography, his mythos, his history, or his legacy. The film might have been better served by being told entirely through the eyes of Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo, the woman walking alongside Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Or the story of Dylan’s rise could have been told from the perspective of Pete Seeger (Ed Norton), the nicest man in folk music. Or it could have been a Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) biopic, although the way A Complete Unknown treats Baez as a Dylan-hanger-on is perhaps the most unforgivable element of this misfire. Baez was already an established, well-selling artist before Dylan arrived in New York. She made Dylan popular, but the film strongly suggests her career turned a corner when she began to cover his songs. 

Even more damning is that there are several much more successful attempts at capturing Dylan’s early career on film. Legendary documentarian D.A. Pennebaker followed Dylan on his 1965 tour in England, putting out the highly entertaining film Don’t Look Back (1967). Martin Scorese also covered this time period extensively in his 3.5 hour documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005). Both documentaries feature Joan Baez prominently as well. These documentaries shed more light on Dylan than A Complete Unknown by their nature, but they are also more entertaining because they are so illuminating. The lack of point of view in A Complete Unknown is made up for in the documentaries in different ways. Don’t Look Back’s proximity to Dylan himself makes up for it, as well as the first hand point of view and Pennebaker’s keen eye. No Direction Home benefits from Dylan’s team and Scorsese taking a Robert Caro-like approach of turning as many pages as possible from the troubadour’s storied past. Both are well worth the time, even for those discovering Dylan through this film. 

And then there is what will likely always be the best Bob Dylan biopic:  I’m Not There (2007), directed by Todd Haynes. Composed of six sections with six different actors playing Dylan–Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw–it approaches its subject in a search for truth, not facts. Each section explores a different era or persona taken on by Dylan over the course of his lifetime in order to reveal the chameleon-like nature of the artist. It is the closest film to Rocketman or Better Man for Dylan, revealing more about how we understand him than anything that could be concerned about facts, given how Dylan has never revealed much of his past or committed to a single version of it.

Finally, Inside Llewyn Davis is also one of the best movies about Bob Dylan because he is barely in it. By exploring a fictionalized take on the career of Dave Van Ronk, the Coen brothers illuminate the pre-Dylan folk scene in New York City, which actually does a much better job of setting up the controversial electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival better than Mangold’s film. Llewyn Davis shows that scene already divided along the lines of success versus authenticity. Since Dylan is perhaps the least authentic folk singer of all time in terms of his relationship to an audience, he is both inherently anti-folk and the most primed for larger success. That scene had no hope of containing Dylan and breaking the electric barrier was either the best or worst thing he could have done for that scene, depending on your point of view. All of these works explore Dylan and his legacy through emotions and especially how he is perceived. Because without perception, Dylan would not be the iconic and iconoclastic figure he has become. 

When it comes to A Complete Unknown, the question to ask is: how does it feel? And it feels like a steady journey along the surface of a myth, not at all suited to the feline agent of chaos that is the figure at its center. The film better reflects the steady personality of Pete Seeger better than it does Dylan. While lush and beautiful, A Complete Unknown falls far short of capturing anything essential about its subject other than how fleeting his presence can be even to those who seem closest to him. His secrets are still concealed.