A Complete Unknown

Grade: A-

A fellow critic observed that A Complete Unknown’s director, James Mangold, seems to be creating a Music Cinematic Universe of sorts, as he also did Walk the Line. A Complete Unknown does feature Johnny Cash, but he’s played here by Boyd Holbrook (The Bikeriders, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Vengeance, Gone Girl) instead of Joaquin Phoenix. This particular film follows the journey of Bob Dylan from the early 1960s – when he was on his own, without a home, like a complete unknown – to a handful of years later when he upset the folk crowd by plugging in and going electric, shortly before the release of the Highway 61 Revisited album.

It’s 1961, and a 19-year-old Bobby Zimmerman has arrived in New York City to try his hand in the folk music scene. Security in hospitals is quite different in 2024. Bob is able to waltz right in and meet/visit with his hero, Woody Guthrie. It’s there that he meets Pete Seeger, who sees that young Bob has promise, and takes him under his wing. We track his rise in the business, we get to be privy to the writing process for several of his iconic early anthems, and meet a couple of women in his life: Sylvie, and some girl named Joan Baez. The former is not her real name. Dylan himself asked that the name be changed, as she was a private person. Even at 2 hours and 21 minutes, A Complete Unknown is a movie that moves.

It’s carried by two of the best performances of the year. I simultaneously forgot that I was watching Timothée Chalamet, AND momentarily forgot that Bob Dylan isn’t a fictional character. This isn’t a rote impression of a famous figure, or a typical biopic performance where I’m clocking how well an actor can keep up the impersonation. Chalamet successfully and consistently creates a character whose story I am all in on – and oh yeah, this is a real-life person who is still alive. The fact that, to my ears, Chalamet does all his own singing (never doing a sometimes Chalamet/sometimes Dylan/sometimes a fusion situation, a la Malek/Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody) helps make it authentic and uniform. He does his own playing, too. Everything his fingers were doing matched what I was hearing.

Working equally well is Edward Norton, who doesn’t play Pete Seeger, but becomes him. I would pay to see Norton do a live Pete Seeger concert, and I think he could. Monica Barbaro, who I singled out when writing about Top Gun: Maverick, brings just the right figurative and literal notes as Joan Baez. As Sylvie, Elle Fanning looks like she was plucked out of an early-1960s storybook, and is delightful. Dan Fogler, from the Fantastic Beasts series, is memorable as manager Albert Grossman – and it’s great to see Scoot McNairy (Nightbitch, Speak No Evil) as a hospitalized, unable-to-talk Woody Guthrie.

So many of the songs are allowed to play all the way through. There is more music here than you may realize. Hearing it all in a theater’s sound quality is like hearing it for the first time. It’s not just the few years depicted in A Complete Unknown; there are so many more chapters to Dylan’s life that would make for compelling cinema. I’d love to see one this good, where he’s tangled up in the hurricane and the big brass bed.

Grade: A-