Biographical films are a minefield, but A Complete Unknown dodges every trap and emerges as my favorite movie of 2024. No one is more surprised than I, because I’ve never been a Bob Dylan fan… but Timothée Chalamet delivers a compelling and convincing performance as the singular troubadour-poet. By not imitating Dylan’s distinctively whiny voice he even improves on some of the songs. Naturally, I am drawn to this film because I lived through the period it depicts, but I credit solid storytelling for its success; even at two hours and twenty-one minutes it doesn’t seem long.
Dylan’s saga is the stuff of legend, from the moment he arrived in New York City from Minnesota in 1961. Director James Mangold and his co-writer Jay Cocks lay out the narrative in linear fashion (what a novelty!) without taking needless detours…from his first encounter with Woody Guthrie in a sanitarium through his budding friendship with Pete Seeger. Having grown up watching Seeger I wouldn’t have cited Edward Norton as a surefire choice to play him but he is terrific, fully inhabiting the straight-arrow man who was synonymous with folk music for at least two generations. Monica Barbaro is equally good as Joan Baez, whose fortunes rise alongside Dylan’s and the always-welcome Elle Fanning is heartbreakingly good as the iconoclast’s girlfriend.
Dylan was always an individualist and fought the trappings of fame even as he became a household name and a symbol of youthful protest in the 1960s and 70s. A Complete Unknown doesn’t attempt to explain its protagonist or the motivations for some of his more erratic behavior. It invites us to interpret him as we choose to, building toward a breaking point at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 when he chose to “go electric.”
The stars’ singing voices aren’t slavish copies; after all, nobody sounds like Joan Baez but Joan Baez. But as in Mangold’s Johnny Cash film Walk the Line, his actors sound just enough like the stars they portray to win us over. A more deliberate attempt to imitate them might be off-putting.
Will younger people relate to this picture or even care about its central figures? I can’t predict that, but I know when I’ve watched a beautifully-crafted period piece and this is it. Kudos to all involved.
