As its title promises, the film perpetuates a messianic-like mystery about the troubadour, but if you want to see an actor at the top of his game you are in for a treat
January 16, 2025 12:14
By John Nathan
A Complete Unknown
15 | ★★★★✩
If you are hoping this biopic about Bob Dylan will reveal the source of his songwriting genius you will be disappointed. But if you want to see Timothée Chalamet at the top his game and inhabiting what on paper has to be one of the most inscrutable of real-life roles, you are in for a treat.
Director James Mangold picks up the story as Chalamet’s Bob arrives in down-at-heel New York in 1961 with little more than the guitar strapped to his back. He is an a mission to visit his inspiration Woody Guthrie, who is being cared for in a tatty hospital ward no longer able to talk let alone sing. His long-time friend and fellow folk star Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) is making one of his regular visits when Dylan turns up to pay homage and is invited to sing.
“Do you get nervous?” asks Seeger. “Not, usually,” replies Dylan before stunning his audience of two with Song to Woody. This is the first encounter with the way Chalamet does justice to Dylan’s music – not by miming but by playing and singing, guitar, harmonica and all.
Dylan devotees might pick holes. But the decision to sing in front of camera is what gives this movie its authenticity and gripping musicality. The promising start fully blossoms in the scenes where Bob and Joan Baez (a superb Monica Barbaro) share a bed and, more satisfyingly for us and it seems them too, a mic.
Monica Barbaro as Joan BaezMacall Polay
Never depicted as in love there is something undeniably eternal about the way they sing the anti-love song It Ain’t Me Babe at the Newport Folk Festival. Their connection is too much for Dylan’s on/off girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) to bear as she watches with chin trembling from the wings.
The only genuine tension in the film arrives when the Newport director forbids Dylan from betraying the festival’s folk ethos by picking up an electric guitar. Egged on by Johnny Cash (a superb cameo by Boyd Holbrook) Dylan’s famously controversial decision is depicted as a spur-of-the-moment thing when both acoustic and electric instruments are held out for him as he steps onto the stage.
As in the previous moments of performance it is the breathtaking ease with which Dylan steps up and plays that is so memorable. The on-stage charisma as portrayed by Chalamet is constructed out of a troubadour’s common touch and virtuosic musicianship. What inspired the poetry of his lyrics however is frustratingly unaddressed by Mangold’s film, perhaps because Dylan himself had oversight of the script.
Only a parcel addressed to Zimmerman [Dylan’s real name] suggests any kind of past. The glimpsed photo album of a childhood with some Hebrew text pasted into one of the pages is the only acknowledgment of a Jewish history. Chalamet glides through the scenes with a knowing air that suggests a closely held secret. Perhaps that is what talent is.
The film prefers to perpetuate a messianic-like mystery about the man. This climaxes back in the hospital where Dylan literally lays a hand on Guthrie’s fevered head. Miraculously Guthrie is then seen walking for the first time to a window to watch Dylan ride off on his motorbike, free of every societal and musical convention that sought to box him in.
By Joy Sable
