Director James Mangold’s latest movie, “A Complete Unknown,” simultaneously highlights the genius of Bob Dylan and the genuine rudeness of his character. Mangold does a fantastic job at nailing the nuance of Dylan’s personality in the film, which was released Dec. 25.
The movie juggles whether Dylan was or was not likable. It balances Dylan’s electric ability to create poetry out of nothing with his egotistical and selfish viewpoint, which focuses on him and his desires. The movie paints him as a genius who doesn’t want to be held back by anybody else.
Timothée Chalamet does a fantastic job of showing these nuances in his performance as Dylan through the way he talked to others and his agitation when others expected something of him.
Chalamet is entirely unrecognizable. It feels like Dylan is on the screen as opposed to the actor himself, which can often get difficult the more famous an actor becomes. Chalamet’s performance immerses the viewers with his slouched posture, mumbling voice and stoic attitude.
Chalamet’s acting perfectly captures Dylan’s spirit. Although the character didn’t say what he often wanted, Chalamet’s delivery painted Dylan as a free-spirited yet self-centered creative with a genius talent for writing songs.
The vocals in the movie are also on point, closely matching the original songs and giving insight into how Dylan progressed as a musical artist.
“A Complete Unknown” closely follows Dylan’s musical progression rather than his personal life and does not dig deep into his character. Instead, it shows how his music changed from folk to folk-rock throughout his early career.
The movie only focuses on the years when Dylan arrived in New York before he slowly climbed to fame in the folk scene. The limited period helped and hurt the movie.
The time frame gives many details into Dylan’s life without jumping through time or cutting to random events. The story feels slow-paced and consistent, which helps build the immersion.
However, Dylan feels like a stranger by the end of the movie. The film’s focus on these four years of Dylan’s life gives no insight into his past or future besides a random mention of him joining a carnival in his past (to which someone claims he’s lying) and a blurb at the end credits stating he went on to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.
The insights into Dylan’s character are written better than the women’s rather surface-level insights in the film. Even though the biopic centers on Dylan, his on-and-off girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) does little in the movie but cry and stare at him because she is heartbroken that Dylan is a star.
Russo has few lines in the film, and the audience learns little about her. Once she and Dylan become official, she is reduced to long close-up shots of her tearfully staring at Dylan and not doing anything else for the rest of the movie.
Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), another famous person in the early 1960s folk scene, has more personality and relevance than Russo. The relationship between Baez and Dylan is tumultuous, and Mangold does a fantastic job of showing Dylan’s desire, jealousy and lack of respect for her in the movie.
Although “A Complete Unknown” could have dug deeper into the motivations and pasts of these characters, it still makes for a fantastic picture featuring some of Chalamet’s best acting to date. The movie sheds an interesting light on the complicated personality of Dylan and how he rose to fame.
