Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in New York at the start of A Complete Unknown in the back of a station wagon rather than on a horse. He might as well be a gunslinger showing up in a frontier town that needs his help. With just his bindle, guitar, and a cunning up-for-anything look, Dylan scans the Greenwich Village coffeehouse folk scene not like some rube from the sticks but rather a cool operator who knows virgin territory when he sees it.
From his first performance to the last, Bob Dylan is looking for angles and what he can learn. He’s skilled and impressive, but he does not want to help. In wandering hero terms, A Complete Unknown is less a George Stevens’ Western like Shane and more an Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo – with guitars.
This is not how a Bob Dylan story is supposed to be delivered. Recent artist-approved biopics have been risk-averse products. Dexter Fletcher’s Elton John docudrama Rocketman (2019) and Brian Singer’s Freddie Mercury-focused Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) packed the life’s work of contradictory artists into tidy rise-against-adversity arcs with neatly placed obstacles and epiphanies. However, while A Complete Unknown’s director and co-writer James Mangold has been knocked for a supposedly conventional approach, his perspective on Dylan is cannier than expected.
Certainly, the director of deft crowd-pleasers like 2019’s Ford v Ferrari was never going to deliver something like I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ 2007 cracked carnival of Bob Dylan doppelgangers and blurred identities. Mangold threads the needle by delivering a compact and finely etched origin story rather than a broadly sketched greatest hits biopic. He is also unafraid to show Dylan, as his sometimes girlfriend Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) puts it, as “kind of an asshole”.
Taking place from 1961 to 1965, A Complete Unknown starts with Bob Dylan as an unknown kid who seems like every other striving folkie in the Village. It ends with him having essentially invented the idea of the modern singer-songwriter and on the cusp of a previously unknown kind of stardom. A faker and a fabulist, he throws up smokescreens and builds mystique by alternating mumbling avoidance with cutting insults.
His girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning)—a gung-ho CORE activist whose sincerity clashes with his opportunism and seems based on Bob Dylan’s other girlfriend Suzie Rotolo, the woman hugging him on the cover of the 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan—knows he’s full of it, with all his stories of being in the carnival and pretending he wasn’t Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota. Unlike almost everybody else in A Complete Unknown, she lets it go because she understands that being around a genius means putting up with him.
At first, the audience might not get why she or anybody else bothers. However, James Mangold knows once we see Bob Dylan ripping out “Masters of War” with a clenched and incandescent fury before a rapt basement coffeehouse crowd while people on the streets above panic about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the audience is likely to forgive most anything. By the time Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), the only person in the film Bob Dylan seems to respect besides Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), tells Dylan in a tone of gravelly mischief to “track some mud on the carpet,” the audience has heard enough achingly gorgeous and keening music from him that they would let him tear the carpets out without complaint.
The same mix of artistic awe and personal disappointment projected at Bob Dylan by Sylvie Russo and Joan Baez is just as visible with Pete Seeger (Ed Norton). As dean of the folk scene, Seeger sees Dylan as a nascent star who could take the idealistic Americana music he loves to a broader audience. Seeger takes Dylan under his wing at first, presenting the kid from nowhere as someone to watch. Particularly in his scenes with Seeger, Chalamet’s Dylan is revelatory, canny, and sly but with a spiky charm.
This is probably Chalamet’s best work; his Paul Atreides in Dune Parts I and II is a simplistic dullard by comparison. Yet Norton’s Seeger might be the most fascinating character in A Complete Unknown. He’s kind and decent yet also nagging and a bit of a scold, a guy who doesn’t see himself above stacking chairs at a festival but also thinks it’s his place to lecture hungover musicians about what kind of music to play. Norton expertly channels Seeger’s blend of aw-shucks humility, steely resolve, and self-regard.
As a self-appointed father figure to Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger thinks he’s ushering a bright young thing into the ways of folk music. Instead, Seeger is giving the keys to a man who will take everything this small, insular subculture can offer and move on once it has served its purpose. In a film with relatively low stakes, Mangold and Norton juice an impressive amount of pathos from Seeger’s realization (unspoken yet clear on his stricken face) that Dylan’s ability to transmute folk into bestselling pop music means Seeger and those like him will be left behind.
Westerns need a showdown. For A Complete Unknown, Mangold creates one by elevating the slight contretemps that occurred when Dylan went electric at the staid and acoustic 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Folk purists like Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) certainly had the gatekeeper viewpoint that didn’t allow artists like Dylan to innovate and write new material rather than deliver the old standards, but it’s highly unlikely that they reacted with the thuggish violence that Mangold depicts.
Still, as one of the great Westerns advised, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.