Chalamet Goes Eclectic in Sparkling ‘A Complete Unknown’

Bob Dylan enters A Complete Unknown (opening Christmas Day) in a taxi — a Greyhound bus, actually, off-screen — and exits on a motorcycle. And that, my friends, is the sum and total arc of James Mangold’s miraculous movie.

Sure, the title slyly and wryly suggests a narrative through-line of a nobody blowing into town and blowing up (in the current lingo). If the conventions of musical biopics were to hold, breakthroughs and breakdowns would arrive on cue. (For a refresher, go back and listen to the amplified radio hit whose lyrics the title is quoting.)

And yes, there is a kerfuffle late in this extraordinary musical biopic (which spans 1961 to 1965) when Dylan “rejects” solo acoustic (folk) music and crosses over to the bass-drums-electric guitar of rock ‘n’ roll band-dom at the Newport Folk Festival. To some fans and early supporters, this was (though not anymore; lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff, too) an apostasy, a blasphemy, a betrayal on par with Judas’. But A Complete Unknown isn’t the story of an artist’s development or evolution or, for that matter, the creative process.

Since I’m finding it easier to catalog what A Complete Unknown is not, I’ll add that it isn’t a tale of sons impressing their fathers, then killing them. Woody Guthrie is the first singer we hear (on the soundtrack), and upon his arrival in New York City, Dylan immediately visits the terminally ill folksinger (wordlessly played by Scoot McNairy) in a hospital, where former Weaver Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, a likely Oscar nominee for Supporting Actor) is hanging out with him.

Seeger champions Dylan, listening to his in-progress songs, getting him onstage in front of an influential crowd and introducing him to producer John Hammond. By Newport ’65 Dylan has moved on from Seeger’s politely activist brand of folk music, but he doesn’t disrespect him.

While A Complete Unknown encompasses these events and so many more — familiar to you if you are a reader of a certain age or a latter-day Dylanologist — it resists every impulse to shape them into a simple, straightforward distillation. Remarkably and radically, the film doesn’t explain its subject, or presume to explain. It doesn’t underline and italicize turning-point moments, or the incidents that have passed into the mythic realm. It doesn’t overreach for grand statements about the era in which it takes place, or what’s around the corner.

Incredibly, A Complete Unknown doesn’t build to a moral or a resolution. The lengthy lead-up to and including Dylan’s third and final appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, which comprise a chunk of the film’s running time, doesn’t play as either a summation or a bookend (of the subject’s scruffy beginnings). It does feel like a climax, though, for a few brief moments until Mangold carefully turns it into an anti-climax, subverting the expectations of how an audience should feel when the credits roll.

And yet even without beat-and-repeat narrative imperatives, the movie keeps skipping forward, riding the restless energy of its chain-smoking, lyric-scribbling protagonist.

Timothée Chalamet, who gives the performance of his life in the central role, has said his character is not supposed to be Bob Dylan. OK, then. Let’s place A Complete Unknown alongside Inside Llewyn Davis (which the Coen Brothers steeped and filtered through Dylan and Dave Van Ronk (who turns up at the beginning and end of A Complete Unknown) and Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (“inspired by false stories,” the trailer declared), which employed six actors portraying various Dylans at different stages.

But Chalamet’s performance, operating at a much, much deeper level than impersonation (it doesn’t hurt that he’s a native New Yorker), also contains too many mannerisms and phrasings and trademarks (the sunglasses) to be anyone but Bob Dylan. For the record, Chalamet beautifully sings and plays a slew of Dylan songs.

Furthermore, the film recreates too many moments — from the photo with girlfriend Suze Rotolo (named Sylvie Russo here, played by Elle Fanning) for the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to Al Kooper wandering into the “Like a Rolling Stone” sessions, finding the guitar spot taken by Mike Bloomfield and winding up at the organ — to be anything but a rendition of Dylan.

So if A Complete Unknown doesn’t explain Dylan, or even interpret him, what is it about? It’s not about the ’60s, at least not in the way so many movies set in that period try to be, wallowing in the magic and the messiness and the idealism and offering a clarity that’s only visible in hindsight.

I’m tempted to call A Complete Unknown a portrait of an artist becoming an artist. (His debut album contained only two original songs out of 13, as dictated by the record company; the rest are covers of standards. His second LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, notably included just one cover.) Since the film doesn’t give us much insight into his creative process, however, it may be more accurate just to describe Dylan as a man on a mission.

Did Dylan secretly want fame and influence, then recoil when it wasn’t on his terms? Or did he realize — consciously or not — popularity’s adverse effects on an artist? A Complete Unknown never tells us what it thinks about these and other matters, leaving us to reach our own conclusions.

A Complete Unknown’s inspiration is to convey the world that coalesces around a driven, ambitious and fabulously talented person. Dylan is the willfully enigmatic maelstrom at the center of another maelstrom — ignited by celebrity, genius, money. It is easier for us to see the effect he has on everyone around him than to see him and the ways in which he changes.

For example, the movie conveys Dylan’s hatred for being recognized and mobbed in public, but is less direct about his reluctance to be adopted by everyone under the age of 30. Or as rocker Syd Straw, on her terrific 1996 album War and Peace, described that particular Dylan legacy, “I don’t want to be the voice of this or any generation.”

One of the benefits of Mangold and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks’ narrative and stylistic approach is the movie almost never feels contrived — you rarely sense that a given scene is included to pay off with a specific point, which is highly unusual for a biopic — and seems more accurate.

Accuracy is an illusion, of course, as with any film adapted from real life. A Complete Unknown curiously omits Dylan’s concerns about racial injustice, save for a brief visit to a street protest. His 1965 U.K. acoustic tour is completely absent. (Dont Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s record of that tour and a longtime documentary touchstone, is streaming for free through Jan. 1 on the Criterion Channel with or without a subscription.)

The depictions of Sylvie and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) — who Dylan bounces between — are uneven, though they do reveal a charming but self-obsessed young man more lovable than likable. Memorably, the film gives both Joan and Sylvie scenes where they declare their autonomy from Dylan and claim their own paths. Those moments are believable and effective, yet they do have a faint whiff of historical revisionism.

If there’s one thing I am sure of, it is that everything related to Dylan, every step of his life up to the present, is open to interpretation and debate. An unimaginably vast compendium of commentary exists. A Complete Unknown is a worthy, entertaining and wondrously alive addition.

‘A Complete Unknown’ opens in theaters on Dec. 25, 2024.