Eye For Film >> Movies >> A Complete Unknown (2024) Film Review
A Complete Unknown
Reviewed by: Amber Wilkinson

Given how fond Bob Dylan has always been of cultivating his own sense of mystery, perpetually dodging definition, does it really matter if James Mangold’s polished run at the early part of his career is exhaustively accurate? The answer to that question is likely to vary greatly depending on how much of a fan of the man you are but I suspect that, for the average person, with an average knowledge of this far less than average star, it won’t matter too much.
While it may only be a single chapter of Dylan’s life - stretching from his arrival in New York in 1961 to the electric shock he gave everyone at Newport Folk Festival in 1965 - it holds plenty of verse. And no matter how much the times change, those tunes still have power and are served up in decent style by Timothée Chalamet. He, thanks to Covid, various strikes and, presumably, the inspiration of director James Mangold - who already led Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix to autoharp and guitar playing with Walk The Line - learned the guitar for the role. In profile, you can definitely see the resemblance too and if he could have used a little more edge, perhaps that’s as much the fault of a script that generally stays clear of sharp corners in favour of safer ground.

For all that those who love Dylan marvel at his innovation, watching this you have to tip your hat to the traditional beats served up by Mangold and his co-writer Jay Cock (adapting the book by Elijah Wald). They craft this four-year journey via his relationships with others, showing how they react to him, often quite literally, and avoid getting caught up in any sort of attempt to dispel the enigma. Dylan says: “There are 200 people in that room and each one wants me to be somebody else” - Mangold says to us, “Take your pick.”
Dylan has come to New York to see his idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who is in serious decline in hospital. That’s where he encounters Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, seeming to generate wholesomeness from his very bones), who becomes his mentor. Meanwhile, Dylan begins to take steps on to the folk scene. It is here that he meets Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) - a role surely based on Dylan’s genuine girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Presumably there are legal reasons for this name switch and, I wonder if the knock-on effect of them being worried about those is the reason why Russo is so poorly drawn. There are indications she is a firebrand activist and a sharp cookie all round, so it seems a shame she is relegated to largely mooning about the place, worshipping Dylan mostly from afar as he also enters into a relationship with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, smouldering impressively).
The characterisation of the women is pretty thin but Mangold keeps things moving for the most part and lets the music do the heavy lifting, so that the duet It Ain’t You Babe becomes a cauldron of emotion - watched by afar from Russo, naturally. The world Dylan and the others inhabit also feels properly lived in. The apartments we see have a cluttered, slightly scuzzy edge, the storefronts mucky enough that they don’t feel recently painted by a set decorator - in contrast, for example, to the weirdly fake world of this year’s Queer. Water splashes from puddles on these streets, motel rooms are reassuringly scuffed up.
Facts are massaged in the search of a good story - and if you want a more accurate chain of events from the era, Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home is probably the place to start. But, if massaging has occurred, it is in the service of making the audience feel good and you can still feel the contours of Dylan’s enigma rippling underneath.
Reviewed on: 16 Jan 2025