Movie Review – A Complete Unknown
Director: James Mangold
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro
Year: 2024
Okay so. Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. That’s the pitch. That’s what the studio is selling. And look — I get it. Chalamet is the biggest young actor working right now and Dylan is maybe the most important American musician of the 20th century. Put them together and you’ve got yourself an Oscar campaign.
The problem is. How do I say this. The movie is fine. It’s FINE. It’s a perfectly competent music biopic that hits all the expected beats and never once surprised me.
James Mangold knows how to make these things. He did Walk the Line, which is basically the template for modern music biopics. Rise to fame, personal struggles, relationship drama, triumphant performance, roll credits. A Complete Unknown follows the same playbook almost exactly except now it’s Greenwich Village in the early 60s instead of country music and instead of Johnny Cash’s pill addiction we’ve got Dylan’s whole “going electric” controversy.
Chalamet is. He’s fine. He did his homework. He learned to play guitar, he got the voice down well enough, he’s got the restless energy that Dylan had in those early years. But here’s my problem — I never forgot I was watching Timothée Chalamet playing Bob Dylan. With Brody in The Brutalist I forgot the actor existed. With Chalamet I was always aware of the performance. Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe Dylan is just too iconic to disappear into. But I wanted to be transported and instead I was impressed by the craft. Those aren’t the same thing.
The movie covers Dylan’s arrival in New York through the infamous Newport Folk Festival performance where he went electric and pissed off all the folk purists. That’s a great story. That’s a pivotal moment in American music history. The movie depicts it accurately and respectfully and I just kind of. Sat there. Watching it happen.
Edward Norton shows up as Pete Seeger and he’s doing Edward Norton things. Fine. Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez and she’s probably the best part of the movie actually — there’s real chemistry between her and Chalamet and their scenes together have a spark that the rest of the film is missing. Elle Fanning is in here too as Sylvie Russo, who’s a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo, and she’s fine but underwritten.
I think my issue is that the movie is too reverent. It’s too careful. Dylan was a provocateur, a guy who actively resisted being understood or categorized, and this movie turns him into a conventional protagonist on a conventional journey. The real Dylan would probably hate this movie. Which is maybe the point? I don’t know.
The music scenes are good. Chalamet apparently did his own singing and playing and you can tell. That’s impressive. When the movie is just letting Dylan perform it comes alive in a way that the dramatic scenes don’t. There’s a sequence where he plays “Like a Rolling Stone” for the first time and I felt something. Not a lot. But something.
Look. If you don’t know much about Bob Dylan and you want a primer on his early years, this movie will do that job. It’s well-made. The period detail is excellent. The performances are professional. It’s the kind of movie your parents will watch on a streaming service and tell you they really enjoyed it.
But it’s also the kind of movie I’ll forget I saw by March. It’s competent. It’s safe. It’s respectable.
God I’m tired of respectable.
My rating: ★★★☆☆
A Complete Unknown on IMDb | A Complete Unknown on Rotten Tomatoes
