A Complete Unknown Review: Timothée Chalamet Is Perfect as a Forever-Young Bob Dylan

In a Dec. 4 post on social media platform X, Bob Dylan expressed his admiration for “brilliant actor” Timothée Chalamet, who happens to star in Complete ignorance, a new film that follows the music legend’s career from 1961 to 1965 — a scorching period in which he went from establishing himself as the great hope of the American folk scene to breaking free and “getting going” at the Newport Folk Festival.

However, Dylan has a way of expressing himself in a way that can be tantalizingly hard to pin down. Chalamet, he wrote, “will be as completely believable as I am.” Or the younger me. Or some other me.” But why “will be” instead of “is”? Because Dylan hadn’t actually seen the movie at the time he posted about it.

But there may be no rush – this is, after all, the man who kept the Nobel committee waiting for months before he finally arrived in Stockholm to collect his prize for literature. Makes you wonder if the board thought giving him the peace prize was an extra incentive to show up.

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When Dylan gets to see the finished film, in any case, he will see that his trust in Chalamet was justified.

If Dina: The second part suggested Chalamet doesn’t have the firepower to play a rising messiah who refuses to let his will be thwarted — he was more like a kid upset because he couldn’t borrow his dad’s car — Unknown it puts him back in the soft, poetic roles he’s so good at, even when he’s playing a cannibal in 2022. Bones and all.

Ironically, I suppose young Dylan could also likely to be described as a rising messiah of immense will, but that’s not what Chalamet, who wears an inconspicuous prosthetic nose, is up to here. What is important is his slim, slender build and his eyes, which can safely be described as moon-like and beautiful.

This, let’s remember, is early Dylan, whose own eyes (as singer Joan Baez described them in “Diamonds and Rust,” her sad-nostalgic ballad from 1975) “were bluer than robin’s eggs.”

Timothee Chalamet in “A Complete Unknown”.

Macall Polay/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Over time, as the world knows, Dylan has aged into a gnomic enigma who, more like the figure in Stephen Crane’s famous poem “In the Desert,” might find himself alone, devouring his own heart: “It’s bitter—bitter… But it likes I like it / because it’s bitter / and because it’s my heart.” Oh wait – that’s me Anyway, that Dylan would be a much different movie, maybe a little more like 1978 Renaldo and Clara, an inscrutable four-hour epic that he directed and starred in himself. I was going to add that Chalamet deserves credit for his expert mimicry of Dylan’s speaking and singing voices – but, come to think of it, is that hard to do a decent dylan impersonation? The Cate Blanchett version from 2007 I’m not there was just as good, and wittier, and Saturday night live James Austin Johnson’s impersonation of the star is phenomenal. But that is much less important than Chalamet presenting us as a vision of the most beautiful of all troubadours, a figure of pure romance. If Chalamet earns an Oscar nomination, which seems guaranteed, it will be because of his own presence, not because of his Bob Boy invocation.

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Dylan in June 1965, weeks before his breakthrough at the Newport Folk Festival.

Val Wilmer/Redferns

But what about the rest Complete unknown? Well, to quote Dylan himself, “That’s not my cup of meat.”

The film’s dramatic backbone is that epic moment when Dylan, apparently insulting the sanctity of those who have lived to hear Baez sing “Barbara Allen” in her clear, ringing voice, opens his Newport set with a rocking, thin version of “Maggie’s Farm.”

When someone from the audience shouts “Judas!” Dylan replies, “You’re a liar. I don’t believe you.” (Note: That famous exchange did not take place in Newport, but on an earlier UK tour.) The switch to electric power freed Dylan to create one of the greatest, strangest compositions of original songs in the history of American music, combining folk, rock, blues, Beat poetry, William Blake and throwaway references to everything from Omar Khayyám to Tennessee Williams to, for all we know, Schrödinger’s Cat.

But does it really make sense to expect audiences to get excited about what happened in Newport more than half a century ago? It is a critical point in Dylan’s career, yes indeed, but Unknown — directed by James Mangold with a surface bliss that isn’t nearly as vivid as the folk scene in the Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis — you never feel like you’re watching history in the making, that the times are really changing.

Like the director’s Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, Unknown is solidly crafted, well laid out and conscientious in setting up the narrative – sort of like how you might set up what it takes to include your luggage. But nothing you watch here is as charged as listening to Dylan’s music.

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Even “Clothes Line Saga,” his sarcastically laconic little ballad (with a band) about a family’s ordinary domestic reality, comes with the surprise of a neighbor dropping by to announce, “The vice president’s gone crazy.” This leads to the bit Dialogue: “Where?” “Last night.” patched with banality It’s not a movie, but it’s an experience.

The unknown the drama is further compounded by the hindsight that Dylan’s break with folk was inevitable. isn’t it? Would a talent as diverse as his ever settle for a genre that, while producing a wealth of influential music, was essentially just a sweet, budding twig that, poking its head out in anticipation of spring, would be buried by an avalanche of rock ‘n’ roll?

Would Dylan allow himself to remain attached to his mentor, folk icon Pete Seeger (played with sly conviction by Edward Norton, who also comes equipped with a prosthetic nose)? Would this great but eccentric artist, who sold his 600-song catalog for an estimated $300 million in 2020, spend too many more years singing duets with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro)? This is not to denigrate Baez, an intelligent, exceptional artist whose relationship with Dylan could have made for a more interesting film.

Dylan, he sings ruefully in “Diamonds and Rust,” was “so good with words and keeping things vague.” Unknown could use some of that vagueness. Why spend two hours and 20 minutes hoping to get a clear glimpse of Dylan’s obscure genius?

Complete unknown it’s in theaters now.

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Source: HIS Education