#review: Timothée Chalamet gives his best Bob Dylan impression in A Complete Unknown
Feb 12, 2025
David Ho checks out the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown
Released stateside at the end of 2024, A Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet as the legendary American music singer Bob Dylan is finally hitting the silver screen in Asia (Feb 20 in Hong Kong). The release is likely due to buzz about the film, which has already notched up an impressive eight Oscar nominations.
The events in A Complete Unknown are based on the the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald. It charts a young Dylan’s rise to fame from 1961, when he first arrives in New York City to see his recently hospitalized idol, Woody Guthrie, who is tended to by his friend and fellow folk singer Pete Seeger.
The film doesn’t dawdle. It moves quickly through Dylan’s early years, his dalliances with Sylvie (a film character based on his late girlfriend Suze Rotolo) and singer Joan Baez, and culminates in his controversial and defiant use of electric instruments as the finale act at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
The main cast are outstanding, performing all the songs live while filming and there are a ton of songs to go through in this film. A particular standout is Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, whose performance and ethereal vocals makes us want a whole biopic about Baez instead. If she ends up picking up Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards, it will be a worthwhile win.
While the real life Dylan is known to be quite a curmudgeon, Chalamet’s take is bit monotonous. When not singing, his Dylan impression is mainly petulant, with Chalamet staring moodily at whoever he is sharing a scene with. While credits needs to be given to director and co-writer James Mangold not sanitizing their depiction of Dylan and show him up as quite a difficult character to like at times, he is sadly the least interesting character in this project.
Fortunately, the rest of the cast are more dynamic and give the movie a bit more of an emotional pendulum. But what A Complete Unknown lacks is the emotional gut punch that other musical biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman had in their portrayal of Freddie Mercury and Elton John’s lives.
Dylan’s discography is also much less popular and sing-along than the aforementioned acts, so general audiences are less likely to be able to lose themselves in the folk music that fill the film. The closest it gets to that here is when Dylan and Baez duet on “It Ain't Me Babe”, watched by the long-suffering Sylvie (Elle Fanning) who comes to an epiphany during the performance.
There is very precious little we actually learn about Dylan as a person, other than his struggles with fame, his fight for artistic freedom, and attempts to not be beholden to folk music expectations. The film skims through the first half of the 60s on a superficial level, ticking boxes off a list of events in Dylan’s life for that period. So in a way, you’ll leave A Complete Unknown knowing not much more about the man than if you had read his Wikipedia bio.
Verdict: This one is really for fans of Bob Dylan and folk music. The cast do a great job with the music but if this genre isn’t your cup of tea, this is unlikely to hold your attention for long.
