Movie Review | A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown (Photo – Searchlight Pictures)

A Complete Unknown, the new bio about Bob Dylan’s rise to fame, skillfully recreates the look of New York in the early sixties, and Dylan, as portrayed by Timothee Chalamet, has the slouch, voice, and evasive demeanor of Dylan down pat; he even plays his own guitar.

A Complete Unknown
Directed by James Mangold – 2024
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan

Why, then, did I leave the theater feeling little more than that I had just seen another bioflick?

It comes back, I think, to the backhand compliment Dylan makes to Joan Baez, as played by Monica Barbano, to the effect that her singing is pretty, “maybe too pretty.”

Something to this effect can be said about the movie, the sense that it was somehow too spot on, that the portrait of Dylan and of the times was like a hothouse flower, perfect in its way but lacking some authenticating blemish or ambiguity.

It could be just that it’s something I’ve seen before, the paint-by-numbers progression of timeline events (Cuban missile crisis, JFK assassination, Vietnam); the mentor (Edward Norton as Pete Seeger in a pullover sweater a la Perry Como) who must in the end be forsaken, Falstaff-like; and the aha! moment when Dylan scratches out the first note of what is to become a classic, or at least a hit, giving us in the audience the ersatz thrill of being present when history is made.

Even Chalamet with his Brillo pad hair and sunglasses seems at times to verge on being a parody of Dylan. Mobbed by fans and moping, motorcycle-riding, he runs from the popularity he seemed to seek at the film’s beginning.

All this ends at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric to the dismay of the untrendy audience who only wanted the feel-good harmony of folk and not the dissonance in word and sound of his new phase.

They say about the sixties: if you can remember it you weren’t there. Well, for those who weren’t or those who were, but who had the experience but missed the meaning, A Complete Unknown might bring it all back home.

> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regal Paseo, IPIC Theaters, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Santa Anita 16, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Regal UA La Canada, and Laemmle Glendale.