A Complete Unknown

by Chris Stewart 04.2025

There's no right way to do a Dylan flick. Just ask him. Less of a hermit than legend would have it, he has his own charmingly unaccomplished career as an actor, from 1987's musical Hearts of Fire to 2003's post-apocalyptic Masked and Anonymous (his character? Jack Fate). He even played himself on the sitcom Dharma and Greg. Robert Zimmerman of Duluth has spent decades telling us it isn't all that serious, okay? He's also the most seriously-taken American songwriter in history. So what gives?

James Mangold's A Complete Unknown walks that line, if you will, presenting us a Dylan worth caring about but who resists being possessed so naturally that people don't know whether to dote on him or kick him to the curb. The Dylan of this film is always teetering between one outcome or the other, finding the poetry in the margins. The film gives us a terrifically engaging look at his journey from a nobody to the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when he plugged in, made some noise, and seemed – to some – to betray his folk roots.

We first meet him spending his last few bucks to visit a dying Woody Guthrie. There, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, enormously appealing) lets the kid play a song for his hero. He's a student at heart. His early days are spent strumming away in basement bars and romancing Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning). Days when a sandwich and time to eat it while contemplating Jesus are plenty. Would he have been happier forever the unknown favorite singer of the acts that made it big? Perhaps. But that was never going to happen. He's pitching nothing but undying, downright salvational love with his songs from day one; to Silvie, to Joan Baez (a deservingly Oscar-nominated Monica Barbaro), to all humankind. And it comes off sincerely. Maybe.

At day's end, in A Complete Unknown, Dylan's worldview is inherently romantic, falling back on archetypes: the joker, the saint, the naif, and most importantly: the sinner. If Mae Jemison was right (hint: she was) and the business of science is drawing from the specific to define the universal, whereas art draws on the universal to describe the specific; Dylan draws from the much-told to express the still-unresolved.

As for the spell he (and this film) weaves, It helps that he lived when and where he did. 1960's New York is evoked gorgeously by François Audouy's art direction and Arianne Phillips' costuming. Timothée Chalamet's stellar performance somehow takes exactly the tack you'd expect while not doing so at all. You don't want to look away. This is a young man so self-serious that it's easy to miss the fact that he's just as often workshopping a joke as he is a song. 

A year before it all hit the fan, introducing Dylan at Newport '64, Ronnie Gilbert of The Weavers told the crowd “And here he is...Take him, you know him, he's yours." But of course, he never was.

A Complete Unknown

Run Time: 140 minutes

Director: James Mangold