A Complete Unknown Review
James Mangold’s second musical biopic has hit theaters. It’s not about Johnny Cash, it’s about Bob Dylan called A Complete Unknown. This movie wasn’t really on my radar but I was curious after all of the early Oscar talk for Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. How is the movie? Does Timothée Chalamet deserve an Oscar nomination for the movie? Let’s talk about it!
The Good
James Mangold does a great job of transporting the audience back to the 1960s. Through the music, production design, and costumes it feels like you’re going back to the 1960s to spend time with these people. The movie is about Bob Dylan, but it’s not a biopic in the typical sense. It’s about Bob Dylan’s impact on the folk music industry. This movie is mainly focused on the audience spending time with the characters. The movie wouldn’t work if you didn’t feel like you were in this world. When it comes to the characters in the movie, it’s focused on a lot of the big singers of this time period. Whether that’s Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, or many others it feels like you’re in this world with them. Even with how the movie looks with the production design is really interesting. A good portion of the movie takes place in New York City, the way the city looks like the 1960s. I don’t know what they did if that was CGI but it looks convincing. Throughout the movie historical events are mentioned like JFK’s assination and stuff like that makes you feel like you’re in the 1960s.
Related to that, one thing you have to talk about with this movie are the performances. Everybody in this movie is giving great performances of these real life people. The Oscar are adding a best cast ensemble award. I don’t know if this movie should win, but it should at least get a nomination. There’s not a weak link in this movie. Everybody in this movie from the leads to the side characters give it their all. The big one to talk about is Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of people are talking Oscar buzz for him. I’ve seen people call it a career best performance and he should win the Oscar. I think some of that is a bit overhyped. He’s great in the movie. He captures the mannerisms of Dylan and has great chemistry with the other characters in the movie. I knew he could sing from Wonka. But I wasn’t sure how well he’ll sing with Dylan's accent. It was very consistent from beginning to end, it shows that he’s talented and can sing. You also have Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. He’s playing a mentor figure in the movie and he’s just great. Norton has been as much in the Oscar conversation. After seeing this movie, I feel like he should be. He should get a supporting actor nomination. I think he’s able to transform into his character a bit more since Pete Seeger isn’t as popular of a figure as Bob Dylan. Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez is another standout. I didn’t know anything about Joan Baez’s story. Her performance gave me a flavor for what she was like. Her role in the movie is very interesting as they’re drawn to each other through their songs. But in their personal lives, they aren’t a couple that fully makes sense. Elle Fanning’s character is the one that makes sense for Bob Dylan to be with. But she’s not musically talented the way that Baez is. There’s just a lot of interesting dynamics between the characters and the performances that help make the performances work.
I appreciated that it’s a different take on a biopic. I expected the rise and fall of Bob Dylan. We’ll see Dylan as a kid through his adult life and his dying days. It’s focused on a window of his life. We see his rise in folk music and his transition to rock music. And how that affected the music industry, his fans, and the people around him. You see Bob Dylan from this very different perspective than you normally would if they told his story in the classic musical biopic formula. Bob Dylan is the star of the movie, we do spend the most time with him. But it’s also an ensemble movie. Where we do spend time with Norton and Barbaro seeing their careers and how they’re viewed by the general public. There’s several managers and business people that appear in the movie. There’s scenes that’s focused on them and how they respond to Bob Dylan’s decisions. That’s one of the more interesting aspects about the movie. We see how his choices and decisions affect people and how people would respond to it. Norton’s character has a very different response from how Barbaro’s character would respond. You even get a little bit of Johnny Cash in there, his perspective is different. It provides this interesting arc for Dylan as he grows and changes based on who he chooses to listen to or not listen to regarding his future and his career.
I also liked that this movie was soaked in the music culture from the 1960s. But it doesn’t feel like you need to be a fan of this era of music in order to understand who these people are. I have a friend who’s a big Timothée Chalamet fan. She asked would I like the movie if I didn’t know a thing about Bob Dylan? And I would say yes. I didn’t know Bob Dylan’s story. I couldn’t even tell you one of his songs, that’s just how unaware I was of this story. Johnny Cash was the only musician in this movie that I’d heard about prior to watching this movie. It doesn’t rely on the knowledge of Bob Dylan or Joan Baez in order to understand the movie. The movie is so interesting with how it tells its story and presents the characters. That it would be an interesting movie if this wasn’t based on a true story. And it was just about this guy transitioning from folk music to rock music and how that would affect the music industry. In a lot of ways, this is a good on-ramp for people who don’t know a lot about that side of music during that time period.
Finally, I want to mention, it has a nice sense of humor. It’s not over played, it’s not like an MCU movie where it’s a joke per minute. Every single five to ten minutes there’s a solid joke that had my audience laughing out loud. I laughed a couple of times in the movie. A lot of the humor comes from Chalamet’s performance. Where the movie presents Bob Dylan has this dry sense of humor about him. I’m not sure if that was added to lighten the movie. Or if Bob Dylan did have a sense of humor. His reactions to certain things. The way he says certain things. That’s where a lot of the laughs came from and it works.
The Bad
The run time being 2 hours and 20 minutes felt like the wrong amount. As I was watching it, I felt like this movie would have worked better as this HBO Max mini series. The movie covers I believe about four years of Bob Dylan’s life. But since it has a big supporting cast that all have a part to play in the movie. Some of it feels very rushed or maybe some of the structure of things is a bit weird. If you were to take this same creative team and cast and do an eight episode mini series about Bob Dylan. You focused each episode on a different character and their relationship to Bob Dylan all leading up to the final concert. I think that could have worked. On the flip side of this, as we moved into the back half of the movie. I felt like this movie could have been trimmed by 10-15 minutes. It’s the weird mix of being too short and too long. There’s not very many movies that I would criticize this for. But I think they needed to find a different way to format this movie and make it either longer or shorter.
Another thing here, while I praised Timothèe’s performance. I do feel at points I saw Timothée, I didn’t see Bob Dylan. It’s nothing that Timothée did wrong, he was great. I think the problem with this is that Timothée is already a movie star. We’ve been watching him in movies for years. 2024 has sort of been his year with Wonka having great legs going into 2024. Dune: Part II being a big hit film and then this movie. Since he’s been so prominent, it’s hard not to see Timothée when you watch this movie. I’ve seen people make the comparison to Austin Butler in Elvis. I think Butler’s performance is better. I thought he was able to disappear a bit more. That was helped because we hadn’t associated Butler with anything prior. This criticism of seeing Timothée in the movie more so then I see Bob Dylan, should be viewed as a positive that Timothée has had a solid career with great movies.
Final Thoughts: A Complete Unknown is a solid musical biopic from James Mangold. There’s a lot that this movie gets right. The big positive here is it takes you to a time and a place. Through the way the story is told, to the characters involved, the production design, and costumes it makes you feel like you’re going to the 1960s. The performances across the board are fantastic. A lot of people are saying this is the one of the best movies of the year. Timothée Chalamet should win the Oscar. I wouldn’t go that far. But I think it’s a really solid movie, if you’re a Bob Dylan fan this is one you should check out.
The Score: 8.7/10 (B+)
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