Don't think twice, A Complete Unknown is more than all right

On a chilly January day in 1961, a boy with tousled hair and a beloved guitar case arrives in New York. He is surrounded by the city’s vibrant, bustling downtown—cafes, shops, and rough-around-the-edges drinking holes across the Village. He is Bob Dylan, setting foot on one of the world’s most consequential islands, at a consequential time in America, with winds of change in the air. That momentous arrival is what sets off James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, charged and alive from the start, wearing François Audouy’s intricate production design on its sleeve with a lived-in sense of ease, looking as certain as the thick layer of cigarette smoke that envelops every bar of the era. The Coen brothers’ exquisite Inside Llewyn Davis provided the perfect B-side of this story, following the crushing odyssey of a character who wasn’t destined to become Dylan. Now, with his signature Hollywood touch—a brainy story, accessibly, rousingly, and energetically told—Walk The Line and Ford V Ferrari director Mangold offers the astonishing A-side through the life and times of a generational talent, over the course of the first four years of his (soon-to-be) electric journey as a professional musician.

If A Complete Unknown doesn’t conjure Llewyn Davis-level melancholy, that’s by design—following a real-life artist who’s meant to soar (and who’s still very much around and touring) can never rattle the soul in the same way. But that doesn’t mean Mangold’s film lacks those aching qualities. Here, Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks (adapting Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, And The Night That Split The Sixties) give the heart a tight squeeze through different means, telling a deeply American tale of triumph, floating over a thousand guitar string cuts.

Playing Dylan is another generational talent: Timothée Chalamet, portraying the body, soul, voice, and prickliness of the folk singer, bones and all, donned in Arianne Phillips’ pitch-perfect period costuming. (Having recently picked up an Oscar nom for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, nobody does the ‘60s like Phillips.) While Chalamet is blessed with the right hair, somehow actually sings like Dylan—really, he sings and talks like him, with that raspy slur and nasal nonchalance—and nails his one-of-a-kind intonation, this is no traditional biopic performance where an actor disappears into the role. Instead, Chalamet goes to a place several octaves deeper. His performance is both startlingly accurate, and something playfully off-kilter and of his own, as a young artist himself shot to stardom so rapidly that he almost yearns to reactivate those freewheeling and melancholic Miss Stevens and Call Me By Your Name muscles.

And there’s the sense of that in Chalamet’s Dylan. He feels scarred on the inside—not on his studiously stark and unoccupied face, but in the way that he talks and moves, like it’s not a guitar he’s carrying on his shoulders, but the weight of the world. Even when he visits his hospitalized musical hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), playing the song he wrote for him while the kindly musician and activist Pete Seeger (a wonderful Edward Norton) listens, awe-struck, there is a certain iciness in Dylan’s eyes—eyes which often refuse to make direct contact. Chalamet navigates this nuanced performance with otherworldly command, like his Dylan is an alien in human form, arrived from outer space to lead the folk music movement.

As dispassionately detached as Dylan is, Seeger—fresh off battling the conservative courts defending Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land”—is a serene picture of gentle, big-hearted grace, qualities that Norton accentuates through one of this year’s most generous and beautiful performances. Rapidly, he becomes Dylan’s greatest champion, introducing him to the circuits where the already famed Joan Baez (a brilliant Monica Barbaro) also plays. “She is pretty, and she sings pretty,” Dylan says during one of the first times he steps in front of a New York audience. “Maybe a little too pretty,” he sarcastically adds regarding Baez’s angelic soprano vibrato.

That arrogance defines much of Dylan’s relationship with women, who both help shape and accompany his endeavors as an artist and activist in the socially turbulent and transitionary times of the Vietnam War and Cuban Missile Crisis. (The midpoint performance of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is A Complete Unknown’s finest and most tear-jerking sequence.) One of those women is Baez, a crowd-pleasing performer compared to the stubborn Dylan—she’d happily sing “Blowin’ In The Wind” while Dylan refuses to be known only through his most populist output. Baez and her thorny relationship with Dylan are the stuff of legends, and A Complete Unknown does justice to the duo’s complex ups and downs. Dylan’s other female counterpart is Sylvie Russo (a stand-in for Suze Rotolo), an artist and activist played heartbreakingly by Elle Fanning. Hers is an observant performance defined by passion, sorrow, and strength—the strength to remain in the orbit of someone with a wandering heart, and the strength to eventually let him go when his fame doesn’t meet her grounded needs and expectations. But the pain of letting Dylan go—knowing what she’s lost—is everywhere in Fanning’s delicate performance, which, along with Norton’s, forms the quiet backbone of A Complete Unknown. The scene where she watches, in tears, as Baez and Dylan sing “It Ain’t Me Babe” is especially magnificent.

A Complete Unknown also depicts Dylan’s friendship and creative partnership with Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), culminating (across many concerts and folk fests) with the eventful Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Dylan’s blending of genres caused much controversy, yet gifted the world the iconic “Like A Rolling Stone” before the release of Highway 61 Revisited later that year. But Mangold knows where and how to end his film. A Complete Unknown is not a typical musical biopic, propping up its hero with his likable traits only. A Complete Unknown is an honest film that wants to get close to an enigma, maybe even unlock his mystery a little. After the film, Dylan might not be any less of an unknown, but it’s the film’s breathtaking pursuit that counts.

Director: James Mangold
Writer: James Mangold, Jay Cocks
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz, Eriko Hatsune, Big Bill Morganfield, Will Harrison, Scoot McNairy
Release Date: December 25, 2024