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

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

However, Dylan has a way of phrasing himself in a way that can be teasingly hard to pin down. Chalamet, he wrote, is “going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.” But why “going to be” instead of “is”? Because Dylan, in fact, hadn't seen the movie at the time he posted about it.

But perhaps there's no rush — this, after all, is the man who kept the Nobel Committee waiting for months before he finally arrived in Stockholm to accept his award for literature. You wonder whether the committee considered giving him the Peace Prize as a further inducement to show up.

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When Dylan gets around to seeing the completed film, at any rate, he'll find that his confidence in Chalamet was justified.

If Dune: Part Two suggested that Chalamet didn’t have the fire power to play a rising messiah refusing to have his will thwarted — he was more like a kid upset because he couldn't borrow his dad’s car — Unknown returns him to the kind of soft, poetic roles he does so well, even when playing a cannibal in 2022's Bones and All.

Ironically, I suppose, the young Dylan could also probably be described as a rising messiah of tremendous will, but that isn't what Chalamet, wearing an inconspicuous prosthetic nose, is up to here. What matters is his slight, slim build and his eyes, which can safely be described as moony and beautiful.

This, 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."

Over time, as the world knows, Dylan aged into a gnomic enigma who, more like the figure in the famous Stephen Crane poem "In the Desert," might perhaps be found alone, devouring his own heart: “It is bitter—bitter… But I like it / Because it is bitter / And because it is my heart.” Oh, wait — that's me. At any rate, that Dylan would make for a much different movie, perhaps something more like 1978's Renaldo and Clara, the inscrutable four-hour epic he himself directed and starred in.

I was going to add that Chalamet deserves credit for his expert mimicry of Dylan’s speaking and singing voices — but, on second thought, is it that hard to do a decent Dylan impersonation? Cate Blanchett's version in 2007's I'm Not There was just as good, and wittier, and Saturday Night Live star James Austin Johnson's impersonation is phenomenal. But this matters far less than Chalamet being presented to us as a vision of the loveliest of troubadours, a figure of pure romance.

If Chalamet earns an Oscar nomination, which seems guaranteed, it will be because of his own presence and not his invocation of boy Bob.

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

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

When someone in the audience shouts "Judas!" Dylan answers: "You're a liar. I don't believe you." (Note: That famous exchange took place not at Newport, but on an earlier British tour.) Going electric liberated Dylan to create one of the greatest, strangest bodies of original songs in the history of American music, combining together folk, rock, blues, Beat poetry, William Blake and tossed-off references to everyone from Omar Khayyám to Tennessee Williams to, for all we know, Schrödinger's cat.

But is there really any point expecting an audience to get whipped up over what happened at Newport more than half a century ago? It’s a critical point in Dylan’s career, yes indeed, but Unknown — directed by James Mangold with a surface blandness not nearly as vivid as the folk scene in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis — never makes you feel you’re watching history in the making, that times really are a-changin’.

Like the director’s Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, Unknown is solidly crafted, well-cast and conscientious about laying out the narrative — something like the way you might lay out what's necessary 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 the Band) about a family's humdrum domestic reality, comes with the surprise of a neighbor stopping by to announce: “The Vice President's gone mad." This leads to a snatch of dialogue: "Where?" "Downtown." "When?" "Last night." "Hmm, say, that's too bad." The hole has now been patched up by banality. It's not a movie, but it's an experience.

Unknown's drama is further hobbled by the hindsight that Dylan’s break with folk was inevitable. Wasn't it? Would a talent as richly varied as his ever have settled for a genre that, while it produced a wealth of influential music, was essentially just a sweet, budding twig that, having poked its head out in anticipation of spring, would be buried by the avalanche of rock 'n' roll?

Would Dylan have let himself stay tied to his mentor, folk icon Pete Seeger (played with understated conviction by Edward Norton, who also comes equipped with a prosthetic nose)? Would this great but eccentric artist, who in 2020 sold his catalog of 600 songs for an estimated $300 million, have spent too many more years singing duets with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro)?

This isn’t meant to denigrate Baez, an intelligent, exquisite artist whose relationship with Dylan might have made a more interesting film.

Dylan, she sings ruefully on "Diamonds and Rust," was "so good with words, and at keeping things vague." Unknown could use some of that vagueness. Why spend two hours and 20 minutes hoping to see Dylan's obscure genius clearly?

A Complete Unknown is in theaters now.

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