Director: James Mangold Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Joe Tippett, Scoot McNairy, Norbert Leo Butz, Boyd Holbrook Running Time: 140 minutes
Before a single shred of tangible information was available about James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, originally titled ‘Going Electric’, critics and film personalities online were already analysing and comparing it to three other films.
The first, naturally, was Todd Haynes’ highly stylised and beautifully shot 2007 Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, in which the famously mercurial and, as per Mangold’s title, unknowable Dylan was portrayed by six different actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw), each representing a different era of Dylan’s life, a different facet of his personality, or, for all intents and purposes, a different idea of who and what Bob Dylan is.
The second film was Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, also from 2007. With John C. Reilly starring as the eponymous Cox, a Johnny Cash-Elvis Presley hybrid character, Walk Hard is a hilarious send-up of the conventional music biopic, most notably James Mangold’s own Walk the Line, his Oscar-winning Johnny Cash film. Many critics and film fans felt and still feel that Walk Hard so thoroughly evinced the clichéd structure and storytelling of the modern music biopic, that subsequent attempts to create these films only embarrass themselves in how well Walk Hard has pre-emptively mocked them (unless, of course, they completely subvert our expectations, as in 2024’s Robbie Williams biopic, Better Man).
The final film that was frequently mentioned alongside A Complete Unknown was Joel & Ethan Coen’s 2013 masterpiece, Inside Llewyn Davis. Using a fictional lead character heavily based on the experiences of folk legend, Dave van Ronk (who appears in A Complete Unknown, played by Joe Tippett), the film examines the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, which Dylan arrives into at the beginning of Mangold’s film. Like young Dylan, Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, is an outsider, friendless and viewed suspiciously. Unlike Dylan, the powers-that-be in the music industry consider him talented, but unexceptional. And they’re both “kind of an asshole” to boot. The film portrays the search for musical greatness, for fame of any kind really, as a sad and desolate trek across a barren landscape, beset on all sides by pitfalls and disappointment. It famously ends with Llewyn arriving back to the Gaslight Café in New York, around which the folk scene grew, to see a young performer (whom we recognise as Bob Dylan) playing to the same crowd Llewyn had played to a week previously, though receiving a much more rapt reception, and Llewyn understands that whatever moment he had has already passed.
Each of these three films represented a facet of a ‘Bob Dylan Movie’ that (it was seemingly pre-decided) A Complete Unknown couldn’t possibly measure up to. It couldn’t possibly be a better exploration of Bob Dylan than I’m Not There. It couldn’t possibly avoid the clichés of the music biopic which Walk Hard had poked fun at. And it couldn’t possibly render the Greenwich Village folk scene, which defined Dylan’s early stardom and which would represent the majority of scenes in the first two acts of A Complete Unknown, better than Inside Llewyn Davis.
The first trailer only served to deepen cynicism towards the project. Chalamet’s look, gait, speaking voice and singing voice were all criticised. Side-by-side pictures of Edward Norton’s hair and Pete Seeger’s hair were shared widely. The verdict was in. Chalamet was too famous, Dylan too distinctive and mannered to be imitated. Mangold hadn’t learned any lessons in the twenty years since Walk the Line, and was proceeding to sleepwalk through the making of another hagiographical chore, something that couldn’t possibly capture the breadth of the artist he had chosen to depict. I fell victim to it as well; I believe I remarked to a good friend at one point: “How are we supposed to enjoy a movie that is 140 minutes of Bob Dylan not giving a shit about things and being vaguely irked all the time?”
Turns out, it was pretty easy to enjoy.

Nineteen year old Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in Greenwich Village in the back of a station wagon in 1961, searching for his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), and finds him in a hospital bed, suffering from Huntington’s Disease. Also visiting is Guthrie’s great friend and folk legend, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). Dylan, who has travelled all the way from his home in Duluth, Minnesota, plays for the two men ‘Song for Woody’. The song is played in its entirety, with Chalamet demonstrating his accomplished guitar-playing and his Bob Dylan-voice proudly for all to hear. The actor goes for evocation rather than imitation; he avoids any of Dylan’s raspiness, instead focusing on his Midwest-inflected, reedy tone, and imbuing it with maybe a touch more melody than the man himself would. From the meeting at Greystone Hospital, Dylan becomes a guest of the Seeger family, and we see early signs from Norton’s character of how he believes that he may have found the Messiah to bring the Gospel of American Folk to the masses. Despite the music he writes and plays, Dylan is reluctant, even at this early stage, to refer to himself as a ‘folk singer’, and we see him somewhat frustrated by having to record an album of old folk standards for his first album release.
As he performs around Greenwich Village, he meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, based on Dylan’s real-life girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, with the name change being one of the few requests Dylan made of Mangold and co-writer, Jay Cocks), two women who would come to define his life and actions in the early part of his career. Sylvie attempts to gently influence his politics, showing him the link between folk music and the growing changes in America’s social and political landscape. Meanwhile, Joan, already a darling of the folk scene, teases out the dichotomy of the heart-swelling beauty and purity of his artistry (which seemingly re-ignites her own love of folk music) with the priggish and somewhat hostile manner of his off-stage personality.
In the aftermath of his masterpiece second album, ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’, Dylan’s popularity skyrockets. We see him play the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, appear at the March on Washington, and get chased down the street by crowds of fans. Chalamet carries all of this off with a well-honed ‘Dylan’ attitude. His expression almost never changes, other than an occasional curling of the lips, or a slightly harder-set frown. Far from a criticism, it’s a rather flawless performance, perfectly evoking the sort of ‘blank and bored, yet charismatic’ persona that made Dylan such an instant object of obsession in music, a country boy who dresses like a beatnik and acts like an alien. In short, a movie star performance.
By the time Newport Festival 1964 comes around, we see that the trappings of celebrity and the expectations of the elders of the folk scene have begun to weigh on Dylan. He no longer welcomes the presence of his old mentor, Pete Seeger, whose adherence to tradition and ideals of justice which once inspired Dylan now seem corny and uninteresting to him. All the same, he appears and begins his set with a performance of ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’. If the last time you saw this song in a film was when it scored the opening credits of Zack Snyder’s 2009 adaptation of Watchmen, you may have forgotten just how utterly brilliant a song it is, and the scene is one of the standouts of the film as the entire Newport crowd, primarily White and wholly pre-programmed to adore a song of social justice ideals such as this, quickly begins singing along with him. Pete Seeger and his wife, Toshi (Eriko Hatsune, in a role which may have been underwritten given Toshi’s historical importance to the scene), cry as they see the realisation of their dream of an America united for goodness by a beautiful song. It is not to last, however, and by the time the 1965 festival comes around, Dylan has fully committed to engaging with blues and rock music, and is determined to leave the folk scene behind, culminating in his legendarily-disastrous three-song electric set.
Mangold and Cocks’ screenplay for this film is fascinating in its desire to both be a biopic, but also utterly prioritise Dylan’s music over his story. I would daresay that though the film is 140 minutes in length, the screenplay may scarcely fill 80 pages as every third page will likely read ‘BOB PLAYS SONG _______ IN FULL’. There are brief attempts to unpack the ‘fact v. fiction’ of his persona, such as Sylvie and a friend discussing his change of name, and Joan calling him “so full of shit” when he attempts to tell one of his tales about learning guitar at a carnival, but mostly we are presented with Dylan as is, allowed to deduce what we can about him from Chalamet’s performance alone. There’s a refreshing honesty about this approach; Mangold doesn’t ask us to imagine the deep well of emotion within Dylan as he did with Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. There are no flashbacks to a difficult childhood, or phantoms telling him what he’s doing wrong, or even paranoia about those around him. Dylan has never been a ‘tortured’ artist, just one who never wants to rest. So rather than showing us scenes of Dylan drunkenly swilling liquor, collapsing at parties or ruminating over his newfound fame, we just see him perform, again and again, and when he’s not performing, he’s thinking about the next performance. The absence of real conflict, beyond his romantic indiscretions with Joan behind Sylvie’s back, surprisingly doesn’t hold the film back. In fact, it negates one of the more tiresome elements of the standard music biopic that doesn’t generally apply to Dylan’s life anyway. The directness of the approach may strike some, particularly fans of I’m Not There, as wrongheaded or a misunderstanding of Dylan’s story, but it’s hard to argue that the narrative we are presented with is unenjoyable.
If the strength of the script proves suspect to some, the performances will not displease anyone. Norton is well-cast as Pete Seeger, and plays him as an “aw, shucks” idealist with dreams of a better tomorrow through music that he desperately wants to saddle Dylan with, only to heartbreakingly realise that the man himself has other plans. Similarly great in his role is Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, who’s quickly making a name for himself as one of the best character actors in Hollywood. The best supporting work is done by the outstanding Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, who commands the screen completely from the first moment she appears. Bringing all of the grace and delicacy of Baez’s artistry (Barbaro reportedly taught herself how to sing specifically for the role) and marrying it with the wiliness that made Baez and Dylan such an excellent pairing, this is a real level-up for her after her supporting work in Top Gun: Maverick, and is leading to very well-deserved awards recognition. Unsurprisingly, Elle Fanning’s role is the least effective, primarily as it represents the ‘mistreated girlfriend/spouse of the Great Man’ trope of the biopic. To Fanning’s credit, she plays Sylvie well, and Mangold’s script at least allows her some nuanced moments, but it’s more functional than anything.
After an excellent turn as Laurie in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women, Timothée Chalamet’s trio of roles in 2021 in Dune, The French Dispatch and Don’t Look Up made him one of the most sought-after young stars in Hollywood. As impressive as those three performances are, it’s his most recent three roles (as the title character in Wonka, returning as Paul Atreides in Dune: Part Two, and now, as Bob Dylan) which represent a more formal announcement of his talents. This man is not just a wiry, theatre kid, or Adam Sandler’s basketball buddy, or a Kardashian boyfriend who sometimes acts. He is, unquestionably, a bona fide movie star, and regardless of what the movie is he’s appearing in, his performances are consistently excellent. It’s hard to compare Chalamet’s performance of Dylan to any of the sextet of performers in the Todd Haynes film. Ostensibly, the era he’s covering is mostly represented by Christian Bale and Heath Ledger’s characters, with the end of the film verging into the period of transition memorably portrayed by Cate Blanchett, but all six of these actors are asked to play only an element of the enigma of Bob Dylan so that their combination can be more than the sum of its parts.
Chalamet’s performance, by contrast, with his fluffed hair, awkward shuffling walk, and precisely-nasalled Minnesotan twang is giving us the same thing the real Bob Dylan gave to the Greenwich folk scene, the Newport festival committee, Pete Seeger, and every admirer, lover, hater and hanger-on he ever encountered: a kind of unbothered, pretentious kid who just so happened to write some of the greatest songs of the twentieth century. It’s a well-studied performance, born of a thorough understanding of who Dylan presented himself as at this time, if not who he actually was. His singing and guitar-playing are excellent, and Mangold and Cocks’ script being so full of songs is of huge benefit to the film because of how well Chalamet (and Barbaro and Holbrook) carries off these performances, which almost wholly justifies the movie’s existence and runtime.
The irony of it all is that the pre-emptive critiques of A Complete Unknown using I’m Not There, Walk Hard and Inside Llewyn Davis were not unfounded. Haynes’ film is unquestionably a better character study of the who and why of Bob Dylan, Walk Hard certainly has some jokes that would make scenes of this film unintentionally funny when compared, and Inside Llewyn Davis is wholeheartedly a more beautiful exploration of the desire to be an artist in the era of the 60s folk movement. What makes this film a success is not that it overcomes those comparisons, it just acknowledges them, nods and then presents you with two movie stars performing a gorgeous duet of ‘Girl From the North Country’.
How does it feel? It may not be the best, but it’s pretty damn good.
