A Complete Unknown (2024)
Bob Dylan is famously enigmatic. He seems to reinvent himself constantly while still somehow remaining Bob Dylan. Plenty of people, even those close to him, have tried to make sense of him, and A Complete Unknown, which covers Dylan’s very early days in the limelight, is the latest attempt.
I’ll be honest, I did not have Timothee Chalamet playing Bob Dylan on my bingo card, or Edward Norton playing Pete Seeger, yet here we are.
The film starts in 1961, when Dylan first arrives in New York City and ends around 1965 or 1966. At first he’s a fresh-faced kid who just wants to play whenever he can, but he especially wants to play for Woody Guthrie, who’s in a hospital in New Jersey. He not only gets his shot, but Pete Seeger happens to be there as well, and he takes Dylan in.
Dylan’s rise to fame is kind of a blur, and the next thing we know, he’s playing clubs around New York, he has a girlfriend named Sylvie, and he’s suddenly bored. He’s been mentored and promoted by Pete, but he wants to break out of the folk music mold a bit and explore new styles and instruments. The public loves it, at least the public who aren’t expecting him to play folk music, and the idea of Dylan going electric is met with shock and horror.
It leaves Dylan with a choice: Does he play whatever he wants to whomever he wants, or does he cater to the expectations of the people who helped him get where he is?
This film doesn’t make any kind of attempt to whitewash Dylan. We see people who should be close to him put off by him and baffled by what he does, and he can definitely be a thoughtless jerk. Timothee Chalamet makes an attempt at Dylan’s twangy style and clenched jaw delivery, and while he might be a little stiff and hard to read, that works in favor of the character.
However, it can also be a detriment. Sylvie is one of the people who gets fed up with Dylan’s reticence, and when she goes to Rome for twelve weeks, she tells Dylan she wants to get to know the real him when she gets back.
Does she get her wish? No, not a bit, and neither do we. It’s hard to feel sympathy for the supposedly tortured artist when the supposedly tortured artist brings a lot of his trouble on himself. We’re not the only ones to get shut out, either. I don’t see Dylan taking Seeger’s mentorship and help into consideration when he goes electric; he just does it because he wants to. From a musical standpoint changing directions makes sense, but Dylan sucks at reading the room.
Ed Norton’s Pete Seeger is wonderful. He’s kind, almost unfailingly calm and genuinely enjoys music and life as much as he can. I’ve known artists like this and they’re an absolute joy because they’re the definition of well-rounded. Not perfect, certainly, but they have the backs of their friends and family. I wish more could have been made of the relationship between Seeger and Dylan in A Complete Unknown because the contrast between these two artists is really striking.
James Mangold’s quiet directorial style suits the film well. I think a Baz Luhrmann or a Rob Marshall would probably make everything too frenetic for its own good, and neither folk music nor Bob Dylan lend themselves to wild and crazy. Thoughtful and easy are the ticket.
What also makes the movie worth it is the music, and I was probably the youngest audience member at my showing of A Complete Unknown. Seriously. There wasn’t a single person in that screening room under the age of sixty-five. Every time a song came on they hummed and sang along and in the end they all walked out with big smiles on their faces.
Maybe we didn’t come away knowing more about Bob Dylan than when we went in, but we had a good time, anyway.
A Complete Unknown is currently in theaters. Rated R.
My grade: B
Principal Cast: Timothee Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Joe Tippett, Eriko Hatsune, Peter Gray Lewis, Peter Gerety, Leonard Grossman, David Wenzel, Scoot McNairy, Riley Hashimoto, Eloise Peyrot, Maya Feldman, Dan Fogler, Reza Salazar, David Alan Basche, James Austin Johnson
Directed by James Mangold.
Written by James Mangold, Jay Cocks, and Elijah Wald.
“Maybe we didn’t come away knowing more about Bob Dylan than when we went in, but we had a good time, anyway.”
That’s such a great way to summarize this film. Couldn’t agree more!