‘A Complete Unknown’ Review: An Electric Timothée Chalamet Hoists James Mangold’s Bob Dylan Biopic Above Its Flaws

In Walk the Line, James Mangold’s entertaining 2005 account of how Johnny Cash found his sound and the love of his life in June Carter, first-rate actors and rousing musical interludes helped boost a conventional bio-drama approach that sanded down many of the complexities of the legendary Man in Black. Mangold’s new film, A Complete Unknown, follows a comparable path in examining the emergence of Bob Dylan from the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early ’60s. It has many similar strengths but different weaknesses, though Timothée Chalamet’s electrifying — in every sense — lead performance is not among the latter.

Any Dylan fan or indeed anyone with a fondness for the music coming out of New York City in the first half of that tumultuous decade will find ample pleasures in Mangold’s expertly crafted film. The period recreation is impeccable, and the many music performance sequences could not be more transporting, benefiting enormously from lead actors doing their own singing with estimable polish.

That includes Chalamet pouring himself into Dylan’s songs. His voice — raw, nasal, scratchy but full of passion, anger and wry wisdom — is near enough to the original to be unmistakable and yet colored by the actor’s persona to a degree that suggests something closer to symbiosis than impersonation.

Clearly, Chalamet has done a forensic probe to find his connection to the lyrics and the singer-songwriter’s state of mind when he was composing them. There are obvious parallels also to the rapid spiral of fame at a young age for both artists. It’s a transformative performance, arguably Chalamet’s best since Call Me by Your Name. Commendably, neither the movie nor the actor sugarcoat the abrasiveness of a creative genius whose insensitivity toward people close to him often stands in stark contrast to the humanity in his songs.

Edward Norton — reminding us what a consummate actor he is — works similar magic with the music of Pete Seeger. He plays the banjo-strumming folk pioneer with unflappable calm, avuncular warmth and generosity of spirit, all of which infuse his singing. That applies even when he breaks into an impromptu performance of his buddy Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” on the courthouse steps after being convicted in a contempt of Congress case following his refusal to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The centeredness of this man of conscience allows him to show genuine joy in the young Dylan’s success even as it quickly eclipses his own, and his mostly muted response to what many would perceive as a betrayal makes us share the sting with him.

In a smaller role, Boyd Holbrook nails Johnny Cash’s craggy bass-baritone during a period when his sound was as much rock ‘n’ roll as country. He also captures the rugged masculinity and outlaw essence of a man indelibly viewed through the self-mythologizing prism of his songs. Johnny’s friendship with Bob is sparked out of the latter’s admiration for him, a seasoned music artist in the spotlight since the late ’50s, whom he appears to view as a kindred rebel spirit.

The big surprise among the leads is the group’s relative newcomer, Monica Barbaro (Top Gun: Maverick), as Joan Baez. An established star before Dylan came along, Baez used her platform to help launch his career. Barbaro sings like an angel, her voice rich, clear and expressive. She gives the character the radiant self-possession of a woman who never loses sight of who she is, even — or maybe especially — when she falls into an unsatisfying relationship with Bob.

Barbaro and Chalamet’s duets on stage are among the movie’s standout musical moments, not least because Joan transmits such joy in her rapport with both Bob and the audience. By contrast, his participation becomes increasingly ungiving, testing her forbearance. Anyone who saw the intimate 2023 doc about Baez, I Am a Noise, will be familiar with the folk queen’s ambivalence about her time with Dylan, despite acknowledging that his songs gave her material new political focus.

It was an open question whether an authorized biopic on which Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s longtime professional representative, was part of the producing team would gloss over the subject’s spikier side. To the filmmakers’ credit, that’s not at all the case.

“You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” Joan tells him when he bluntly informs her that she tries too hard with her writing, dismissing her songs as “like an oil painting at the dentist’s office.” “Yeah, I guess,” he replies, with zero self-reproach. A later scene in which she kicks him out of her Chelsea Hotel room after he turns up unannounced and instantly disappears inside his head is a corker.

That detachment leaves something of a hole where the emotional center should be in the screenplay by Mangold and Jay Cocks. Making a film about an enigmatic subject is inherently challenging and the writers deserve credit for declining to try to solve the mystery of Bob Dylan, even if that also risks making them seem incurious.

He’s an angry young man who wears his sudden fame uneasily. “It snuck up on me and pulverized me,” Bob writes in a letter to Johnny. The film loses some steam and becomes slightly repetitive in the midsection as that scenario of adulation and surly resistance to it plays out over and over, with Bob tooling around the Village on a motorcycle, hiding behind sunglasses even at night and making a quick exit whenever he’s spotted by excitable fans.

All this makes the film’s title seem a double misnomer. For one thing, Bob is a complete unknown for only a short time after he shuffles into New York City with a guitar case in his hand and a rucksack on his back. That leaves two more hours in which he remains almost a complete unknowable, even if charisma and talent come off him in waves from Chalamet’s performance.

It’s hard to know how audiences not already invested in Dylan’s music and willing to accept his closed-off nature as part of the “difficult genius” package will respond to a movie with such a distant protagonist.

This is a drama in which much of the conflict remains internal, locked up in the vault of a broodingly private man. The screenplay is based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric! That means the culture clash with organizers of the Newport Folk Festival, including Seeger, when Bob ignores their wish to stick to acoustic guitars on stage in 1965, might appear to be the driving conflict. But it comes so late in the narrative it’s almost a coda, too hurriedly explored to give the ambling movie much heft. The emotional charge comes more readily from the music, notably when he plugs in and performs “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone” as fights break out among the folkie Newport crowd.

As magnetic as Chalamet is in the role, much of what we learn about Dylan comes through his lack of accountability with the two remarkable women who try to get close to him even though he does little to deserve them.

That includes Joan but even more so Sylvie Russo, beautifully played by Elle Fanning with the tremulous fragility of a woman who knows she’s going to get her heart broken pretty much from the start. Even once she’s living with him, Sylvie expresses her frustration that she doesn’t know Bob at all because he tells her nothing about his life before he came to New York.

Based on activist and artist Suze Rotolo, Sylvie is a freedom fighter involved with the civil rights movement when they meet, and her political convictions fire up that aspect of his songwriting.

Up until that point, Bob is still stuck recording traditional folk songs that don’t sell for a label uninterested in his original material. But Sylvie uncorks something in him, triggering a period of astonishing creativity that yields classics — “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “The Times They Are a-Changin’” — that made him the torchbearer of a generation.  

Whether there was ever any acknowledgement of the influence of either Suze/Sylvia or Joan is unclear in A Complete Unknown. Bob’s mixed feelings about relationships at that time can perhaps be discerned in the divide between the wistful romantic sentiment of “Girl From the North Country” and the unapologetic leave-taking of “It Ain’t Me Babe” or the remorseless kiss-off of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” But the filmmakers’ compassion for Sylvie in a final scene, played by Fanning with shattering emotional transparency, provides some balance.

There’s tenderness also in Bob’s visits to his trailblazing hero Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), by 1961 hospitalized with Huntington’s disease and nonverbal. In one of the most moving scenes, Woody indicates that he’d like to hear something from the aspiring young folk singer and a faint smile of pleasure illuminates his gaunt face as Bob eases into the sincere tribute of “Song for Woody.”

During a later, equally poignant scene, he plays “Blowin’ in the Wind” for Guthrie. And toward the end of the film, he sings Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” which serves as a goodbye to his ailing friend and a rejection of his folk roots.

That definitive break with his musical past is implicit also when Bob closes out his defiantly electric Newport set with an acoustic performance of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

There’s no shortage of movies that have looked at Dylan’s music and his uneasy relationship to fame. Among them are documentaries like D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back; Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home and the docu-fiction hybrid Rolling Thunder Revue; Dylan’s own abstract self-reflection, Renaldo and Clara; or Todd Haynes’ experimental multi-portrait, I’m Not There. It’s no surprise that even a straight-up biopic, like so many films before it, leaves the mystery intact.

What A Complete Unknown does do with resounding success, however, is take a deep dive into the music and the milieu from which it sprang. The Village folk scene is no less alive and inhabited than it was in the Coen brothers’ fictional Inside Llewyn Davis, which depicts a Dylan performance toward the end. The dimly lit basement venues, the coffeehouses, record stores and student hangouts on and around MacDougal Street — lovingly recreated in Jersey City — pulse with the vitality of a youth culture claiming space and pushing for change at a faster pace than the Eisenhower era had allowed. That neo-Bohemian spirit of progressivism found its voice through folk music.

Shooting on digital with vintage anamorphic lenses, Mangold’s longtime cinematographer Phedon Papamichael captures the textures, the light and Kodachrome colors of the era. The work of Columbia Records staff photographer Don Hunstein was influential in the look of the movie, and there are scenes in which his iconic cover shot for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan could conceivably come to life.

Production designer François Audouy’s sets are packed with the layered detail of a pre-gentrification hipster neighborhood, notably Dylan’s messy 4th Street apartment and, a little further uptown, Baez’s boho-chic room at the Chelsea Hotel. There’s also an evocative sense of history in the recreation of the studio at Columbia where Dylan recorded many of the songs that defined him, and the outdoor festival scenes are vibrant gathering places with very little separating the artists from the audiences, utterly unlike the commercialized Coachellas of today. Arianne Phillips’ costumes are a significant contribution to the period authenticity, never drawing attention to themselves in any kitschy way.

Whatever script flaws there are in terms of structure, plot momentum and an opaque central character, A Complete Unknown offers rewards in its lived-in performances and in the exhilarating music sequences that propel it forward. For many audiences with an affection for Dylan’s music and the era in general, that will be enough.