‘A Complete Unknown’ review: don’t think twice about seeing this brilliant Bob Dylan biopic

If you were choosing a music icon to make a big Hollywood film about, you wouldn’t pick Bob Dylan. He’s not sexy like Elvis. Or as charming as The Beatles. His mannerisms are awkward, his nasally voice impossible to imitate in a way that doesn’t sound terrible. Then there’s the simple fact that no one, except Robert Zimmerman himself, really knows the full story – and he’s definitely not telling (at least not reliably truthfully). To choose to make a Dylan film, you’d have to be a bit mad.

Step forward James Mangold, A Complete Unknown’s suitably nutty writer-director. His first move, surprisingly sensible given the decision to take on such a daunting project, was to chop down the timeline. A Complete Unknown doesn’t cover all of Dylan’s winding, stop-start journey. It smartly focuses on his early years: 1961-65. That’s from the budding troubadour’s quiet arrival in New York City, aged 19, right up to the infamous Newport Folk Festival set when acoustic pin-up Bob first played live with electric instruments and upset his whole fanbase.

In between those seismic events in pop history, we get some romance (a semi-fictionalised love triangle featuring singer Joan Baez and on-off girlfriend Sylvie), some politics (the Cuban Missile Crisis and Civil Rights Movement feature heavily), plus a lot of Timothée Chalamet looking unbelievably cool in dark sunglasses while riding a motorbike. It’s neatly framed by The Bard’s ongoing struggle to retain artistic freedom – whether from an increasingly commercialised record business or the stiff stars of yesterday, such as Edward Norton’s kindly folk-poet Pete Seeger, who want to keep him away from that “noisy”, newfangled rock ‘n’ roll.

Mangold’s partner-in-crime on A Complete Unknown is undoubtedly Chalamet. He was as committed as an actor can be, prepping for five years before cameras rolled with vocal, guitar and dialect coaches. He spent time at Bob tourist spots across America and, reportedly, refused to allow visitors on set so that he could stay in character without distraction. Luckily it paid off. Chalamet is undeniably brilliant – and you can see his dedication in every sardonic eyebrow raise, every careful pluck of a string.

His is one of many great performances in A Complete Unknown. We’ve already mentioned Norton’s Seeger, who meets Dylan on a chilly winter’s night and gives him a warm bed to kip on. But there’s also Monica Barbaro, fiery and funny as Baez; quirky manager Albert Grossman, played with comic gusto by Dan Fogler; and Boyd Holbrook’s perma-sauced version of country legend Johnny Cash, captured at a low point in his life. Perhaps best of all is Elle Fanning. She gives Sylvie, based on the late Suze Rotolo, a fragility that breaks in incredibly moving fashion when Bob treats her badly – which, spoiler, he does again and again.

It’s worth noting that Dylan is kind of an asshole in the film – something Baez often tells him to his face. He’s unfaithful, often rude and lies if asked about his past. This, as any Dylanologist will tell you, is historically accurate – but it does make him difficult to root for. It also means we don’t get much of a backstory – or ever learn why the mysterious wanderer is the way he is. That’s probably not what anyone wants from a Dylan biopic – his enigma is what makes him interesting – but the film is shallower for it.

This is, of course, very hard to care about when you’re watching Chalamet belt out ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ on stage at Newport – bottles whistling over his head, hurled with fury by disgruntled punters. So many of the performances in A Complete Unknown fizz with this kind of tense, gripping energy – whether it’s because Dylan and Baez are bickering through ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ or he’s managed to bottle the anxiety of an entire city awaiting nuclear armageddon in a Cold War protest song. The most important (and often trickiest) job of any music movie is to get the music right. And this nails that. If you’re a Bob newbie, you’ll leave the cinema ready to dive into his back catalogue. If you’re already a fan, the next few weeks will be spent making playlists of lesser-known B-sides or reading the lore around a scene you weren’t familiar with. And that’s why it was a good idea to make this film – a mad idea, but a good one.