Timothée Chalamet soars as an enigmatic Bob Dylan in 'A Complete Unknown'
In 1961, a 19-year-old Bob Dylan stepped out of a car in New York City and changed music forever.
James Mangold’s film tracks Dylan’s career from that point, when Dylan (no longer Robert Zimmerman) visits his hero Woody Guthrie’s hospital room, to the moment he went electric, plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, betraying one audience (or so they thought) and showing another what was possible.
I really liked it. It’s no hero story; Mangold shows Dylan’s selfish, arrogant, stubborn side as well, and often. (The movie would last about five minutes if he didn’t.) And Timothée Chalamet captures all of that perfectly, as well as the sheer genius, the bolt-from-the-heavens inspiration and the hard work that went into reinventing folk and rock music.
What is 'A Complete Unknown' about?
Chalamet looks like Dylan, he sounds like Dylan and he sings like Dylan. But, importantly, he is not Dylan. It’s not mimicry. It’s performance, and it is utterly brilliant. Count me as one of the people who wondered if he could pull it off. He does, and how.
Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who has Huntington’s Disease, is unable to talk when Dylan visits him. Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), a folkie of the first order, is also there. Dylan has his guitar, naturally, and Seeger beseeches him to play something for Guthrie. Dylan steps forward and plays “Song to Woody.” The older men clearly see something in Dylan.
Soon, Dylan is living in Seeger’s home with his family, working out songs like “Girl from the North Country” while Seeger, his wife and kids eat breakfast. Seeger and his wife, Toshi (Eriko Hatsune), see Dylan as a kind of Chosen One, the folk artist who will finally bring the music to a new, more expansive audience.
They’re right, but the consequences will be great.
As Dylan rises up through the ranks in the Greenwich Village folk scene, he meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, stunning). She’s more famous than he is, but she, too, sees something in him. She has hits with his material and they start an on-again, off-again romantic relationship, as well as a contentious professional one. When they perform together, he refuses to play “Blowin’ in the Wind” with her — because it’s what the audience wants. He wants to play new stuff and new stuff only. So Baez, no pushover, just plays it solo.
Meanwhile, Dylan is living with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who is basically a version of Suze Rotolo, the woman with Dylan on the cover of the 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Yet, as she tells him, she knows almost nothing about him. Neither does anyone else.
This is, of course, by design. Enigmatic as a matter of strategy, Dylan lies about himself and his past to his friends, his lovers, and an eager press, keeping a distance between the art and the artist. It’s intriguing as biography, infuriating to the people who lived through it.
Dylan’s most important relationship is with himself. He remains a mystery, one that Mangold doesn’t try to crack. This means that the subject of the movie sometimes seems like a ghost or a supporting player in his own story. He is an observer, using everything as material, furiously typing on his typewriter as he channels whatever thoughts and lyrics are moving through him. Songs seem to spring forth fully grown and fully armed, like Athena from Zeus’ skull.
Timothée Chalamet is great as Bob Dylan
The performances are fantastic, all of them. Norton is never not good, and if his sweetness as Seeger occasionally lapses into a little bit of a Mr. Rogers kind of thing, it’s no less powerful for it. Fanning brings the perplexed heartbreak to Sylvie that the role requires. And Barbaro is just amazing as Baez, singing like an angel while keeping her interactions with Dylan a little more down to earth. When Dylan and Baez duet at Newport on “It Ain’t Me Babe,” they’re at each other hammer and tongs. But when they sing, it’s magical — so much so that Sylvie leaves in tears.
It’s all leading to the moment that Seeger has tried so hard to avoid: Dylan and his backing band plugging in and playing loud. (A bemused Johnny Cash, played with dissipated charm by Boyd Holbrook, spurs him on.) Purists will be appalled that Mangold conflates another seminal moment into the Newport show. But if Dylan was making it all up as he went along, looking for some deeper truth, why shouldn’t Mangold? (That said, it’s a pretty big change.)
“A Complete Unknown” doesn’t have the dramatic payoff of Martin Scorsese’s documentary “No Direction Home” — when I heard the drum shot that kicks off “Like a Rolling Stone” in that film I wanted to leap from my seat and cheer — and it doesn’t boast the truly impressionistic brilliance of Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There,” in which Dylan is played by several actors, including Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett. But it stands on its own as another in a long line of attempted explanations of what made Dylan Dylan. The more the merrier.
'A Complete Unknown' 4.5 stars
Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★
Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★
Director: James Mangold.
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro.
Rating: R for language.
How to watch: In theaters Wednesday, Dec. 25.
Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. X: @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly WatchList newsletter.