A Complete Unknown

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN   **1/2

James Mangold

2024

IDEA:  Emerging on the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, Bob Dylan negotiates his relationships with women, mentors, and the shifting cultural landscape.

BLURB:  A Complete Unknown is predicated on a basically impossible proposition: getting to the heart of someone as notoriously enigmatic and (self)-mythologized as Bob Dylan within the relatively prosaic framework of a Hollywood biopic. The person bearing the greatest burden of this challenge is, of course, Timothée Chalamet, who seems to tackle the role with less than full certainty as to what, or whom, he’s really portraying. While the actor is remarkably adept at channeling Dylan’s vocal stylings and musicianship, he is less convincing during non-musical scenes, where he tends to fall back on a baseline of impassive, sulky insouciance that grows monotonous. It’s fortunate that A Complete Unknown is unusually rife with music, and that Chalamet is surrounded by a squad of talented performers playing figures as integral to the story as Dylan himself. It is through such acquaintances and influences as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Suze Rotolo’s stand-in Sylvie Russo that Mangold and Jay Cocks reveal their Dylan, not as the cryptic shapeshifter of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There but as a tragically human figure who had to cast off the ones he loved - and the past they represented - in order to become what he felt the times demanded. It’s as solid and valid an interpretation as one could create from this story, even if it’s not quite reconciled with the film’s admirable impulse to preserve its hero’s inscrutability.