‘A Complete Unknown’ Review: Critics Praise Timothée Chalamet’s Stunning Portrayal of Bob Dylan and the Film’s Powerful Take on a Musical Icon’s Rise

A Complete Unknown is a drama directed by James Mangold, co-written with Jay Cocks. This film is based on Elijah Wald's book Dylan Goes Electric!, and revolves around Bob Dylan's early rise in folk music, the buzz and backlash when he embraced electric instruments at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Timothée  Chalamet portrays the role of Dylan, doubling as a producer. With stars like Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, and Monica Barbaro, the cast brings Dylan’s world to life. The title nods to his iconic 1965 hit, Like a Rolling Stone. ‘A Complete Unknown’: Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan Biopic To Hit Theatres on December 25.

Vulture: The wonder of A Complete Unknown isn’t just that it manages to be good anyway but that it finds an angle on Dylan as unexpectedly electric as that amplified Newport set. The film works its way through plenty of expected biopic beats, but Mangold’s epiphany is that he doesn’t need to come up with a set of hackneyed explanations for why Dylan is the way he is — the reliable bane of this subgenre — to show what it was like in the Greenwich Village folk scene when Dylan landed like an asteroid out of space. Instead of treating him like a protagonist, A Complete Unknown approaches the musician like a force. Its best sequences aren’t about Dylan so much as they are about what it was like to be in his orbit when it felt like he could remake the universe. I’m not talking about the escalating audiences he plays in front of, most notably the riled-up crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which ends the film. (The script, which Mangold wrote with frequent Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks, is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!) It’s the faces of those more intimate with Dylan that carry the film — the collaborators, colleagues, and lovers around him as he makes the ascent from gifted upstart to rock star.

Guardian: To impersonate Dylan is a near-impossible job, and this movie itself risks the “Judas!” response from the connoisseur-fanbase. In 2007, Todd Haynes in I’m Not There split it into a number of enigmatic personae featuring Cate Blanchett’s hilarious turn; the Coens tackled Dylan in their own indirect way with Inside Llewyn Davis from 2014, with Oscar Isaac as the failing not-Dylan folk musician in the same period, doomed to obscurity. No fictionalised Dylan is going to match the real thing from documentarist DA Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back. Chalamet is more approachable and simply more present than the real thing. Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance. A Complete Unknown: Timothée Chalamet’s Astonishing Transformation into Legendary Bob Dylan Will Leave Fans Impressed (View Pics).

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Rock Cellar Magazine:  In all, A Complete Unknown crafts the story of Bob Dylan as best is probably possible at this time, carried out with precision from Mangold, his production team and a standout cast of actors that really carry the film from start to finish. While it may not expose the innerworkings of Bob Dylan, The Man, it might be for the best … because the conflicts and inconsistency of his persona have helped make Dylan the understated musical genius and magnetic cultural icon he’s always been.

Roger Ebert: “A Complete Unknown” opens and closes with not Dylan, but Guthrie, a recording of his classic “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.” Not only does it connect Dylan to a folk music tradition that he would forever reshape, but it’s also got the same dark sense of humor and topicality that would often define his music. “We talked of the end of the world, and then we’d sing a song and then sing it again.” It’s a line reflective of the protest music like “Masters of War” that Dylan sings against a backdrop of the end of the world. And its last line channels the freewheelin’ spirit of Dylan and the easygoing charm of the film about him: “This dusty old dust is a-gettin’ my home, and I got to be driftin’ along.” Dylan drifted along into New York in 1961 and changed music forever. And we’re just driftin’ along with him still.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Dec 19, 2024 03:36 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).