A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024)

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is a highly entertaining biopic of Bob Dylan’s rise to fame in the 1960’s, but it’s also a deliberate attempt to keep the mystery intact and let the music speak for itself.

Timothée Chalamet is terrific as the legendary singer-songwriter who revitalized the New York folkscene and went on to become a global superstar.

But Dylan also fell foul of that same folk scene and, perhaps more importantly, butted heads with his mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), when he decided to play electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, getting booed by the crowd and leaving the stage after only a handful of songs.

Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald, the adaptation by Jay Cocks and Mangold himself plays fast and loose with at least some of the facts, as pretty much all biopics do.

This happens, for instance, in the case of Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), who is based on real life artist/activist Suze Rutolo, who was pictured with Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), but who had broken up with him by the time Dylan played Newport in 1965.

By then Robert Allen Zimmerman (Duluth, 1941) was already in a relationship with his future first wife Sara Lownds, who would become the mother of four of his five children.

It is to the movie’s credit that details like that don’t really matter while you’re watching the movie, which is filled to the brim with music.

We don’t really need to know about Dylan’s family and upbringing, the movie delivers him pretty much fully formed - in 1961, age 19 - on the doorstep of the care center where his ailing musical hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is just being visited by his best friend Seeger.

Why is that? Well, it is written like that so that Dylan can almost immediately take out his guitar and play them a perfect version of his own Song For Woody.

Genius established, the rest of the movie coasts by on the brilliance of Dylan’s music, with Chalamet doing an excellent job of both impersonating Dylan and carrying a tune almost better than the man himself.

(I’m kidding, but not really, I love Dylan’s songs, but I generally prefer them being sung by others like The Byrds, and Chalamet really does a wonderful job here).

Dylan also strikes up a somewhat turbulent relationship with fellow folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who inspires him both onstage and off.

It eventually leads to a most funny scene, with Joan kicking him out of her hotel room in the middle of the night when he can’t quite figure out the line ‘he not busy being born is busy dying’ from It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).

There is also Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), who comes across as Dylan’s biggest fan and motivates him to keep cultivating his rebellious streak.

In the end, though, A Complete Unknown doesn’t go very deep. Dylan preferred his anonymity and began to feel alienated early on when fans started chasing him down the street.

Dylan also wanted his music to keep forever changing and felt constrained by pressure from people who expected him to always stay the same.

At the end of the movie, Dylan rides off on his motorcycle. A year later he would crash, the injuries giving him an excuse to cancel a planned world tour and stay out of the spotlight for the next couple of years, giving him the chance to settle down with his family.

I’m sure there is a lot more to Dylan than meets the eye in A Complete Unknown, but it’s also clear that Mangold doesn’t want to over analyze his subject, which makes for an entertaining but also slightly frustrating experience.

Visually, though, the movie looks resplendent, particularly in its depiction of the Greenwich Village scene of the sixties.

So here’s a thought: if you want to make a double bill out of it, you could first screen Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) by The Coen Brothers, which pictures the Village scene right up to Dylan’s arrival at the end of the movie. And then follow it up with A Complete Unknown. Because the two movies really complement each other.

Note: A Complete Unknown is still in theaters in some parts of the world, in the US it’s streaming on Hulu, while in other parts of the world it’s available through Prime Video.