‘A Complete Unknown’ review: Timothée Chalamet is an electrifying Bob Dylan
James Mangold’s film tells the story of Dylan getting big, then going electric, with Elle Fanning, Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro blowing in Chalamet’s wind
“Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me,” Bob Dylan recently wrote on X as his first public recognition of new biopic A Complete Unknown, which stars Timothée Chalamet as the folk icon.
In A Complete Unknown, Chalamet is closest to the last of these three potential versions of Dylan. The film tells the story of his move to New York City at the top of the 1960s, through his discovery by Pete Seeger, instant star-making turns in the Greenwich Village folk scene and ending with the infamous ‘Dylan goes electric’ performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
It’s a story well-worn and universally known among ardent music fans, making it ripe for picking apart. While the story told and songs sung are indeed Dylan’s, Chamalet’s commitment to training his voice and learning the guitar so intently takes his performance beyond impersonation and towards something far more unique.
“I had to push the preparation, the bounds, almost to psychologically know I had pushed it,” he told Rolling Stone in a new cover feature, admitting that he was unversed in Dylan’s music before taking the role, now considering himself a “devoted disciple in the Church of Bob”. As such, his performance is reverent but not paralysingly so, with moments where he drifts off to a slightly different vocal melody or finger-picks a guitar line in his own way proving some of the most satisfying of the film.
Alongside him, Edward Norton – drafted in for Benedict Cumberbatch at the last minute – plays a convincingly sweet and fatherly (but slightly hapless) Pete Seeger, who begins as Dylan’s mentor and ends up as the symbolic figure holding him back. Elle Fanning is also an excellent Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvia Russo here), Dylan’s first girlfriend, subject on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and the first real victim of his lightning-fast ascent to fame. Elsewhere, the singer’s relationship with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is a tense and captivating one carried brilliantly by Chalamet and Barbaro.
With Dylan’s music so inextricably tied to the politics of the time, it’s sensible and impactful to also have it weaved into the film. One particularly strong scene sees Dylan in bed with Russo expecting the end of the world at the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. When they wake up though, he shrugs, and Chalamet portrays a man that seems wary and a little weary of the idea of holding a generation’s hopes for revolution on his back. He’s keener instead to hop on his motorbike, sunglasses on, and race through Greenwich Village away from whichever industry function his label have dragged him to.
It all ends at Newport with a stunning and lengthy scene that sees the stars of the old folk world (Seeger, the festival organisers) desperately trying to stop Dylan from evolving into the next state of his artistic being. In his tweet about the film, Dylan called Newport ’65 a “fiasco” and the fantastic Chalamet somehow manages to treat the scene with the landscape-changing gravitas it deserves, while portraying the perfect amount of nonchalance and indifference that emanated from Dylan on stage that night. Though the actor was a Dylan agnostic until very recently, you leave believing that no-one else could have pulled it off.
‘A Complete Unknown’ hits UK cinemas on January 17.