Director: James Mangold

Writers: James Mangold and Jay Cocks

Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, and Monica Barbaro

Running Time: 140 minutes

Please note there may be spoilers below

Since James Mangold’s conventional and sincere Walk the Line graced cinemas in 2005, and the appropriately insincere spoof of the same, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, released 2 years later, it’s a wonder Mangold still has the confidence in 2025 to serve similar biographical mush in his new Bob Dylan picture. Whilst Bob Dylan’s talent is worthy of investigation, his story is one of a man mired with the same awkward mix of ingenuity and conceit we’ve seen many times before, again told within conventional limitations.

Many of the requirements of famous male musicians of the mid-20th Century are present here; they all make terrible romantic partners, routinely inflicting heartbreak on those they love by following their carnal instincts without thought to the consequences; they smoke cigarettes continuously and, by my count, A Complete Unknown might have the record for the most cigarettes smoked in a single feature; they often have trauma from childhood that haunts their career or carry an insecurity that only the trappings of infamy can cure. Too often their cinematic depiction becomes an act of self-aggrandizement, full of moments showing how these great artists simply can’t help but trip over their own genius.

The good news is A Complete Unknown is not interested in the entire Bob Dylan story, and we are kindly spared a lifelong lesson in how to grow old when you’re rich and famous. Instead we get 1961 to 1965, with a climax focusing on the fabled and contested events of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the one where Dylan plugs in his electric guitar and plays alongside a full band, supposedly to the deep ire of the folk-music loving crowd and music legend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) throughout, just as in life, is a mysterious figure. To his early muse, Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning), he reveals little of his youth, preferring to weave romantic and untrue tales of carnival work and natural born talent, all of it self-taught. He’s a bit of a slob, unkempt, unable to make a cup of coffee, a pure fantasist who, from the moment of waking up, would prefer to pick his guitar than eat food.

After hitchhiking his way to New York City with only a guitar and a notebook full of lyrics, Dylan tracks down his hero, Woody Guthrie, in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. Suffering from Huntington’s disease and unable to speak, Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and his friend Pete Seeger eek a performance out of Dylan (who’s always in close proximity to a guitar), and it doesn’t disappoint. As Seeger sets Dylan’s career in motion by curating some performances, Dylan is refreshingly uninterested by the normal trappings of drugs or alcohol; in many ways his only addiction is solipsism. It’s brave for Mangold to leave Dylan frozen as a selfish and sullen prodigious brat. For a while, the film isn’t so much about the life of Bob Dylan as it is about the times of Bob Dylan. The Cuban Missile Crises, the Civil Rights Movement, and the JFK assassination are used as background fodder through televised images and radio broadcasts. Dylan is depicted as the daring young writer living in a dangerous present. From his rickety windowsill he hears the public screams in Greenwich Village as a nuclear missile attack becomes all too likely in October 1962.

Chalamet is certainly refined as Dylan, performing with his striking alto tones and speaking with a believable variation of Dylan’s counterculture nasal-whine. Embodying a man who’s more entrancing on stage than he is off stage, he embraces the role of a distant personality, quietly defiant, politically astute and nonchalant in the face of enormous success. Like Guthrie, his commitment to the woes of working class people is his genius but the reasons behind his commitment are kept shrouded. Suggesting much, A Complete Unknown is heavily stitched together with electrifying music performance scenes of Chalamet who is utterly believable and lacking self-conciousness. Dylan is so charismatic on stage that his lack of charisma off-stage is noticeable in a movie almost frustrated that it can’t move beyond the boundaries of its central figure. Often Mangold hooks his story together with the strong personalities of Seeger, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Hallbrook) alongside Dylan, and the scenes really sparkle when these strong personalities collide together backstage in moments of jealousy, rage, and friendship, often shifting these statuesque figures into relatable, flawed territory. Yet understandably Dylan is the odd-ball central genius we love to hear but ultimately fail to relate to – his mystery is, by design, not relatable beyond the music.

It’s one of the reasons Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical Almost Famous, about a journalist covering musicians, remains enchanting. When it comes to depicting obtuse personalities, it’s almost better looking from the outside-in instead of the inside-out. By the climatic 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan’s scant introspection is abandoned for the legendary, but largely exaggerated or wholly invented, Newport 1965 set where Dylan played with a full electric rock band during an era where audiences adored to see him alone with an acoustic guitar. Even now, it’s debated how many of the crowd where actually appalled at the event – whatever the truth, A Complete Unknown shamelessly enjoys dramatic license by depicting the drama backstage with Pete Seeger attempting to cut the sound cables with an axe. The altercation may be a myth, but Mangold seems somewhat relieved to be able to inject some genuine drama beyond of the sulky Dylan. He may be a musical giant, but in cinema Dylan casts a frustrating spell.