As this new biopic of Bob Dylan reaches its climax at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan, clad in a leather jacket, armed with a Fender Stratocaster and backed by a full band, controversially plays “electric” for a crowd for the very first time, infuriating festival organisers, including longtime supporters like his affable mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), and an audience of folk purists alike. Someone from the crowd shouts “Judas!” Dylan retorts “I don’t believe you!”, exhorting the band to play even louder. And American rock music shifts on its axis.
Ardent Dylanologists will, of course, waste no time in telling you that this didn’t actually happen; that the infamous cry of perceived betrayal comes a year later, at a Manchester Free Trade Hall concert. A cultural giant like Dylan, whose six-decades-plus career has been so thoroughly documented, interpreted and re-imagined from so many sides (not least by the artist himself), inevitably throws up this kind of factual nitpicking. A key strength of James Mangold’s film is its occasional attempt to nimbly navigate actuality, to get at a more impressionistic idea of the truth.
The “Judas” condemnation chimes with the spirit, the implications of the Newport gig’s reception, Dylan’s obvious outgrowing of the movement that first established him, and his own defiance at being pigeonholed. In its best moments, what A Complete Unknown aims for, to quote yet another key line from touchstone song ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is not to ask, “what really went down?”, but “how does it feel?”.
This tension between freewheeling artistic expression and the familiar notes of the musical biopic narrative fascinates. Perhaps it’s to be expected that the latter ultimately dominates, bringing Mangold’s film back home to genre conventions. Scenes where a flash of lyrical inspiration demands words hurriedly scribbled on a diner napkin, or an impromptu studio improvisation becomes a Eureka! moment, practically script themselves. A writer as mercurial as Dylan merits more than casual shorthand, or bizarre Now, Voyager (1942) quotation callbacks.
Still, the focus on his formative years, arriving in New York in January 1961 as a Woody Guthrie acolyte, through to his rewiring of American popular music a mere four years later, is a canny one. It allows the actor playing Dylan to fashion a less posterity-defined version of the character, similar to the way Dylan (re-)invented himself in that period. In terms of potential mass youthful audience appeal, Gen Z A-lister Chalamet is the obvious choice (a more daring one might’ve been, say, Dominic Sessa from 2023’s The Holdovers) though his lanky frame and doe-eyed features initially look askew compared to the artist’s compact angularity, even with a subtly modified prosthetic nose in place.
Chalamet plays and sings himself and there’s much to admire, even if he lacks Dylan’s plaintive, nasal tones for the more muted, acoustic-accompanied vocals and fares better with more strident, plugged-in performances. That level of dedication across the entire cast, from Norton’s Seeger on banjo, to Monica Barbaro’s seductively cool Joan Baez vocals, is impressive. The film is well aware of this, the end credits resembling album liner notes, each track carefully crediting which actor sang and played which instrument. But it’s entirely justified in keeping these iconic tracks living, breathing and bloody, rather than mounting a mere heritage tribute act.
It’s no hagiography, either. Dylan’s desire to follow his own path, no matter the emotional cost to collaborators or companions, is most potently depicted in his two central romances here, with Elle Fanning’s sunny, shut-out Sylvie Russo (a fictionalised version of Dylan’s one-time album cover co-star Suze Rotolo), and the excellent Barbaro’s Baez, wary, worldly-wise but unable to resist the sheer talent beside, bedside, and soon ahead of, her.
That’s the main takeaway here: just how incredible was the run of songs unleashed in these few scant years. If his music chronicles an era and beyond, Dylan himself has resisted definition all this time and it’s more than this heartfelt but dutiful biopic can handle. Even more daring films like the fragmented personas of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007) or the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) and their failed folkie’s tangential brush with him, only illuminate Dylan’s multitudes in flashes. How many films would be needed for a complete portrait? Is one even possible? The answer, my friend, is… well, you surely know the words.
► A Complete Unknown arrives in UK cinemas 17 January 2025.
