Review: A Complete Unknown (and Some Thoughts on Timothee Chalamet)

The Bob Dylan biopic is… a biopic.

It’s awards season, which can only mean one thing: time for another biopic of a genius musician! 2024 had a few examples of this tedious yet ever-popular genre that were dead on arrival, most notably Bob Marley: One Love (boring) and Back to Black (insulting.) I’ve not been subtle about my disdain for this genre and its painfully safe approach to telling fascinating stories with no greater ambition than to sell best-of records. Really, the biopic concept as a whole is one that does not invite a ton of experimentation, especially when the subject or their estate is involved with the production. Consider Bohemian Rhapsody, a morally repugnant hagiography of everyone but Freddie Mercury that wanted the world to know that the surviving members of Queen were the real heroes. But biopics win awards and make money, so here they come, and now, it’s Bob Dylan’s turn.

(Image via Searchlight.)

Directed by James Mangold (who knows a thing or two about a musical biopic), A Complete Unknown treks the rise of Dylan from newbie in New York to folk music hero to the controversy of him “going electric.” Things happen in between these beats but that’s the gist of it. This is a movie on rails, with frequent gaps for some of the most iconic songwriting of the 1960s. It’s solid but unspectacular. So, a typical musical biopic.

Timothee Chalamet does his own guitar playing and singing as the young Dylan. Frizzy-haired and with grand ambitions, he manages to impress both Woody Guthrie, incapacitated by Huntington’s Disease, and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), one of the most prominent figures in the era’s folk scene. A proud activist who truly believes that music can change the world, Seeger takes Dylan under his wing. It doesn’t take long for the prodigious talent to become the hottest thing in folk. But soon, fame and the demands of record executives begin to weigh on Bob, and the allure of the electric guitar is mighty.

Chalamet is good here, although I must admit that the endless “transformation” narratives surrounding performances in this genre leave me with a higher threshold of success in my judgments. He seems a little too fresh-faced, even for young Dylan, but is good at conveying the assholish tedium of a guy who knows how boring it’s become to get whatever he wants. Mangold spends a lot of time lingering on close-ups of Chalamet as he performs, just to remind the audience (and Academy voters) that he’s not lip-syncing. He did this before with Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash and June Carter biopic that, while also a very formulaic biopic, benefitted from fiery lead performances and their intense chemistry.

His attempt to recreate that here is through Dylan’s collaborations with Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro. Baez is beautiful, deeply serious, and not especially concerned with fame. After negging her over her "too pretty" voice, they eventually fall into one another's arms (hilariously, while Baez is panicking over the Cuban Missile Crisis, giving the scene the sense that she wanted one final f*ck before the world ended.) Their creative squabbles could have been interesting but the film has no real interest in making Baez as crucial to the conversation as Dylan. Fair enough, for it’s his biopic, not hers. But in a film where all of the women are treated as nothing but extensions of men, it’s disappointing to see the legendary Joan Baez be reduced to just another girl in Bob’s life. Still, she fares better than poor Elle Fanning, who plays Bob's girlfriend Sylvie (who is Suze Rotolo in all but name) and is given nothing to do but inspire him then cry (Sara Dylan, his first wife, isn’t mentioned at all.) Seeing the legendary filmmaker and activist Toshi Seeger (Erika Hatsune) be boiled down to a silent Asian lady on the sidelines was just offensive.

Biopics are hard to make special because the genre and audience demands on them are pretty rigid. We want information and we want easy answers to complicated questions. Art is not made in a binary and it’s tough to convey the sheer magic of one’s inspiration taking tangible form in a song, story, film, etc. That’s how we end up with a lot of movies where someone says something unsubtle as a set-up then we cut to a scene of someone singing, say, “Ring of Fire.” Dylan’s social consciousness goes from watching the news to writing “Blowin’ in the Wind” with not much else in-between. There’s no true sense of the joy or labour of music. It just seems to come to easily to him. We get some moments of Dylan kicking back and enjoying the chance to just play, free of expectations or demands. But when your movie is largely a set-up for Chala-Bob solos that are all conveniently available to stream on Spotify, the intent feels shallow.

(Image via Searchlight.)

And, of course, there’s the shadow looming overhead A Complete Unknown, which is that we already have an amazing Bob Dylan movie that offered a unique and daring examination of the man, his self-created myth, and his process: Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. How do you encompass a life as well-lived and deliberately obfuscated as Dylan’s, one where the music was meant to do the talking more than the man? You cast six different actors, play around with styles and genres, and admit that there’s no real way to know someone this mythic. There are no easy answers in Haynes’ film, which is perhaps why it wasn’t a mega-hit. Biopics that don’t offer easily digested bites of information and realization aren’t even biopics, one could argue. A Complete Unknown brings in those elements of genre purity and the pushback Dylan faced from his friends and contemporaries (poor Alan Lomax, the legendary ethnomusicologist, is left with the villain role here.) The stakes don’t feel tactile. There’s also no real examination of how American folk became gentrified and dominated by white dudes with acoustic guitars while its roots are thoroughly Black.

It's not hard to see why Chalamet wanted to do this, or why Mangold wanted Timmy for the part. The Oscar nominee is naturally charming and easy going, with a face that feels like it could have been seen in the crowds of the Newport Folk Festival. He’s carved out a strong niche for himself as our generation’s “thinking man’s leading man.” That in and of itself is very funny since Timmy is a proud rap-loving theatre kid who has gained this reputation as a grand artiste intellectual because he’s got curly hair and knows who Bergman is. He has this kind of petulance to his presence that is at its most effective with films like Lady Bird and Little Women, where he’s playing men who haven’t quite stopped being boys yet. It makes sense why he’s the new Paul Atreides, the original space white saviour who is both charismatic and utterly out of his depth.

Dylan’s more in control but no less immature at times. He is only 19 when we first meet him, barely out of school and eager to impress his musical heroes. When he becomes ridiculously famous, he responds to the attention like a sunglasses-wearing toddler who just wants to be left alone but not really. The glint of mischief in his eye when the Newport crowd revolts at his new electric sound is infectious. You can’t fault those live performances, which capture how thrilling it must have been to have witnessed musical history in the making. Someone gave the toddler the matches.

A Complete Unknown will probably get a few Oscar nominations, including one for Chalamet (it’s a quiet year for Best Actor but I’d still rather that fifth spot go to Sebastian Stan for A Different Man.) The film kept it safe, ticked off all its boxes, and accomplished the mission it set out to achieve. You can’t really get mad at something so proudly middlebrow, although it will always feel like a disheartening route for a story this fascinating.

A Complete Unknown is in cinemas now.