Searchlight Pictures

Starring Timothée Chalamet as the legendary folk singer, ‘A Complete Unknown’ explores the early days of Bob Dylan’s career.

The highly anticipated Bob Dyan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” directed by James Mangold and starring Timothée Chalamet, was released on Dec. 25, 2024 to crowded Christmas Day theaters across the country.

Though Dylan’s legendary career spans over six decades, the film only covers about four years of his life. In 1961, nineteen-year-old Robert Zimmerman — who quickly changed his name to “Bob Dylan” — arrived in New York City after hitchhiking from Minnesota. He quickly gets involved in the city’s folk music scene and seeks out his ailing music hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) at a New Jersey hospital, where Dylan meets another folk icon: Pete Seeger (Ed Norton). Seeger takes Dylan under his wing and mentors him throughout the first few years of his career as he quickly rises to prominence in the New York music scene as a singer-songwriter amidst growing political tensions in the early sixties.

As Dylan’s career explodes and he begins to push the boundaries of genre, people start recognizing him in public places and even chasing him down on the street. Much to the chagrin of Seeger and the other staples of the folk industry, Dylan begins to incorporate electric elements into his music. At the notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he controversially performs three electric songs, eliciting boos, jeers and even an accusatory cry of “Judas!” from the crowd, but — as present-day audiences now know with the hindsight of Dylan’s iconic career — it marked a new era for Dylan and for the music industry as a whole.

Like any musical biopic, director James Mangold (who co-wrote the script with Jay Cocks) takes creative liberties, and certain parts of Dylan’s life are truncated for the sake of the story. Dylan did not meet Pete Seeger at Woody Guthrie’s hospital bedside; it is more likely that Seeger simply caught a Dylan performance somewhere in Greenwich Village. While the 1965 electric set was wildly controversial, no audience member cried out “Judas!” at the Newport Folk Festival; that particular indictment was directed at Dylan nearly ten months later at an equally infamous performance in Manchester, England. The minutiae of these details is, ultimately, not important. What is important is the story that it effectively conveys: even from his late teens, Bob Dylan had a one-of-a-kind career.

The standout of “A Complete Unknown” is, without a doubt, the masterful Bob Dylan portrayal given by Chalamet. Sure, some hardcore Dylan fans have critiqued Chalamet’s performance as not being perfectly accurate, but as any amateur impressionist could tell you, it’s hard to exactly nail the idiosyncratic, nasal tone of early Dylan. In Chalamet’s defense, Dylan himself never even sings a song the same way twice!

Chalamet, who recently starred in such blockbusters as the “Dune” franchise and “Wonka,” is usually a pretty easy-to-read actor who effortlessly invites audiences into the inner life of his characters. In “A Complete Unknown,” however, Chalamet’s Bob Dylan remains an enigma. His behavior is at times, confusing; his expressions are rather unreadable; and his dialogue is often mumbled, sparse and vague. In other words, he is very much like the real Bob Dylan.

Because Dylan’s life and career have been the subject of countless books, articles and documentaries, “A Complete Unknown” may not have much to reveal about Bob Dylan that has not already been said in such acclaimed Dylan-related works as Martin Scorsese’s 2005 “No Direction Home” or D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 “Don’t Look Back” (both are excellent documentaries that are a must-watch for any Dylan fan). 

Audiences — especially seasoned Dylan fans — may not know Bob Dylan any more than they did before watching “A Complete Unknown,” but the truth about Bob Dylan is that it feels like no one really knows him. In fact, Bob Dylan may not even really know Bob Dylan.: “I’m inconsistent, even to myself,” he said in a 1997 interview for The New York Times. In a 1978 Playboy interview, reacting to the countless inquiries he received about the meaning of his songs, he quipped, “Listen, if I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.”