Movie Review: A Complete Unknown
A Complete Unknown is a good film and better than most music biographies. Director James Mangold, who also directed the excellent Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, has crafted an interesting biopic with great music and a sensational lead performance.
A Complete Unknown is about folk/rock legend Bob Dylan, played here by Timothee Chalamet. The film doesn’t show his entire career as an artist but focuses on his life from 1961, when Bob first arrived in New York City before he was a star, to 1965, when Dylan was one of the biggest artists on the planet and shook the music world by using an electric guitar in his performance at the Newport Folk Festival. Throughout this time, Dylan goes from performing at small nightclubs to huge festival crowds and becomes an icon for the social messaging in his songs.
If you’re going into A Complete Unknown expecting to learn about Bob Dylan’s life and career and what inspired him to write the songs that he did, you’re in the wrong movie. It skips every beat a by-the-numbers musical biopic usually hits. We learn barely anything about his life before he got to New York. There are no cheesy scenes where we see Dylan watch a rock roll down a hill and then proceed to watch him write and perform “Like a Rolling Stone”. And we don’t see scenes where Dylan is on top of the world juxtaposed with the lowest of lows. This is a movie about Dylan being a rockstar living in a folk world with the people around him never understanding him. The title, “A Complete Unknown” is a very fitting title for the film because, to the people in Dylan’s life and the audience watching this film, we never get a complete grasp of who he is or who he was.
Chalamet gives arguably the best performance of his career as Dylan. Completely embodying the musician, Chalamet conveys Dylan’s angst, arrogance, and genius effortlessly. He also did his own singing in the film and sounds remarkably close to Dylan. Mangold makes the bold choice to have Chalamet sing in the second scene of the film, truly announcing his presence and performance as Dylan. If you don’t like his singing the first time you hear it, you will not like this movie.
We also got several strong supporting performances in the film. Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro play the love interests in Dylan’s life. Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, the woman who the activist in Dylan loves, and Barbaro plays Joan Baez, the woman who the artist side of Dylan loves. Both give excellent performances and are given more to work with than just being love interests to Dylan. Edward Norton is quietly brilliant as Pete Seeger, the folk musician who introduces Dylan to the folk scene and struggles to comprehend his fame. And I loved Boyd Holbrook’s performance as Johnny Cash, who becomes Dylan’s friend as the two become famous around the same time. It’s a fun performance that shows how two musicians can be friends despite living two different lifestyles.
Todd Haynes’s 2007 I’m Not There was also a movie about Bob Dylan that told the story of Dylan through songs and stories in a non-linear structure with six different versions of Dylan played by six different actors. I find it interesting that neither that film nor A Complete Unknown truly tells us who Dylan is or was. It’s like Bob Dylan is a mythological being that nobody will ever fully understand and Haynes and Mangold both understand that and give us biopics that perfectly define the mysterious rock star.
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