Film Pick of the Week: A Complete Unknown - review by Yvette Huddleston
A Complete Unknown Prime Video, review by Yvette Huddleston
Timothee Chalamet absolutely inhabits the role of Bob Dylan in this classy biopic of the legendary American singer-songwriter. The film, directed and co-written by James Mangold, is based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald and focuses on a specific period in Dylan’s earlier career.
The movie opens in 1961 with the 19-year-old Dylan hitching to New York City from his home in Minnesota, in order to visit legendary folk musician Woody Guthrie (Scott McNairy), his hero, who is in hospital with Huntingdon’s Disease. In a very touching scene, he plays and sings for him. It is at the hospital that Dylan meets wise, gentle folk musician and social activist Pete Seeger (a lovely, perfectly-pitched performance from Edward Norton) who becomes his mentor. He invites Dylan to stay with him and his family and is a benign, nurturing influence on him.
We then see Dylan’s rise on the New York folk scene, where he meets talented young singer-songwriter Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), meeting and beginning an on-off relationship with the artist Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), his album successes and coping with newfound fame. It also covers Dylan’s controversial appearance at Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when he used electric guitar and rock music instruments upsetting the purists – which eventually led to Dylan breaking away from Seeger and others in order to forge his own, different path.
Anyone who attains the kind of success that Dylan has is necessarily driven and ambitious and while the film celebrates his talent and artistry, it doesn’t ignore some of the less attractive aspects of his character including his self-absorption and the fact that he doesn’t treat the women in his life particularly well. It also wittily explodes some of the mythology – in conversation with Baez, Dylan claims to have learnt to play guitar from cowboys at travelling carnivals, a story she dismisses in hilariously blunt fashion. One of the film’s highlights is the recreation of Dylan and Baez’s duet of It Ain’t Me Babe at Newport Folk Festival in 1964 – Chalamet and Barbaro perform it with gusto while conveying the electric chemistry between the two.
The movie was in the pipeline for several years – delayed by Covid and the Hollywood writers’ strike – which gave Chalamet the time to hone his guitar playing and singing. He performs all the familiar songs himself and does it exceptionally well, completely capturing the essence of Dylan’s idiosyncratic performance style.