Dylan Biopic ‘A Compete Unknown’ Is Lovable Mythology

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown. Photo by Macall Polay, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

While it tracks closely to events in Bob Dylan’s life from when he arrived in New York in 1961 until he turned to electric guitars four years later at a famous rowdy concert at the Newport Jazz Festival, A Complete Unknown is lovable mythology.

This was a prolific period for Dylan, who remains a vital force in 2025. Composers have bursts of creativity and this was one, somewhat compressed for filmic purposes, including songs like “Blowing in the Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “It’s All Over, Baby Blue,” and “Don’t Think Twice,” among others.

Dylan filled notebooks with his ideas. The film may speed the time frame, but it brings alive song after song from these early years  – along with the lovers and hangers on. Mythology or not, it is an unassailable tribute to his music and his perverse individuality.

Whether he cooperated or not, whether he told the filmmakers he had no trouble with flat-out invention, they freely analyzed his personality and impact to tell the story. Legends as well as truth affect the editing, the visual choices, the songs chosen and other methods by which we are manipulated.

This movie is thoroughly enjoyable, even romantic and expertly engineered by director James Mangold. No ground-breaking here, but solid film-making with a few hiccups, even making us think real rather than computer generated for those far-away rows at outdoor concerts.

It is also authentic in its feeling for the times, in the dress and storefronts in the Greenwich Village of the early 1960s. I can testify to that with authority, since I spent the same years right there as a folk singer performer in group sessions at the clubs and cafes of the era.

This is also the best work I have seen from Timothée Chalamet, star of another Oscar-nominated film, Dune: Part 2, and probably the hottest leading man right now in movieland. Not only does he become a believable Dylan imitator on guitar and harmonica, he sings much like Dylan, as he has proven on NBC’s “SNL.”

Interestingly, he has mastered the mumbled wry speech, inscrutable behavior and constant smoking of the real Dylan. But in singing, his enunciation is as clear as Frank Sinatra’s – something not always true about Dylan even though I love his lyrics. Director Mangold can also not resist thrusting the famous Chalamet face before the camera in scenes where we think of the actor first rather than Dylan.

The troubadour’s fan base is no longer as cleanly divided between his acoustic guitar time and electric surge but the acoustic civil rights anthem, “The Times They Are A-Changing,” is a big part of the movie.  It may not have galvanized as rapidly as the movie portrays (with audience singing it at first hearing), but it galvanized nonetheless. (If there still is a split in the public over his now-standard power electronics, it is mainly about being able to hear the lyrics at his concerts.)

Much of the movie is about camaraderie and duets among musicians, some of it true, some invented, including a moment when good friend Johnny Cash hands Dylan his acoustic guitar. There are great re-creations of Dylan harmonizing with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, Oscar nominated for best supporting actress, who has her own fine non-Baez voice and is appealing as she is attracted to and spars with Dylan).

Much of the script is fixated on the romantic triangle involving Elle Fanning as the fictionally created Sylvie Russo (Dylan’s now deceased girlfriend and cover album companion was the closely named Suze Rotolo). Fanning communicates the wistful and political effect the character has on Dylan, even as the director chooses to have her well up with tears each time she sees Dylan perform with Baez.

The prominent sub-protagonist is Pete Seeger, and the “Wimoweh” sequence confirms how brilliantly Ed Norton has captured the facial looks, walking style, singalong appeal and even the banjo picking of the late Seeger, who played a key role in Dylan’s explosion on the folk scene. Norton as Seeger also serves as the older generation folk purist finger-wagging at Dylan, again a slightly exaggerated version for dramatic purposes. Seeger himself in interviews denied that he took an ax to Dylan’s electric guitar cables. The movie compromises on the legend by showing him eying the ax and being stopped by his wife.

The film engages in some embellishment and some going over the same ground, such as Dylan getting away from entanglements on his motorcycle (a year before he actually had a crash). Dylan may not have exploded quite so amazingly on the folk scene as in the film, but within two years his ability to write modern songs in the vein of folk music indeed made him a force – the same force that makes him the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

You don’t have to love Bob Dylan to enjoy this film, though it sure helps – as long as Dylan purists don’t nitpick everything. Mangold has concocted events from his life to convey the original cultural sensation. In terms of best actor choice, Oscar will have a tough time choosing between Chalamet and Adrien Brody in The Brutalist.

A Complete Unknown is still playing at some movies theaters in town.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.