1 month ago
25
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
The actor stars as a young Bob Dylan, who woos folk followers only to betray them later at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Dec. 25, 2024, 5:09 a.m. ET
Every so often in “A Complete Unknown,” an enjoyably easy-listening and -watching fiction about Bob Dylan’s early road to immortality, Timothée Chalamet lowers his gaze and sends a shiver up your spine. It’s as startling as it is welcome because Chalamet has never seemed especially threatening, even in his more darkly messianic moments in the “Dune” series. He seems too anodyne to play a disruptive trickster like Dylan, yet Chalamet proves an ideal conduit in “A Complete Unknown” because the music and its maker have such power. As with any great cover band, it’s the original material that carries you through the night.
There are so many Dylans — poet, prophet, lost-and-born-again genius — that choosing just one feels futile. True to its title, “A Complete Unknown” shrewdly doesn’t try. Instead, anchored by Chalamet, who like the other principals, does his own (fine) singing, it offers Bob the Enigma, a seer who’s mysteriously delivered from beyond, a.k.a. Minnesota, to a needy world. Awkwardly charming, sometimes cruel and altogether confounding, this Bob writes like an angel, with rhythms that move bodies, choruses that worm into ears and lyrics that seem like urgent questions. He becomes the rasp of a generation, but he isn’t “alright.”
Directed by James Mangold, the movie takes place over an eventful four years, culminating with him shocking the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by going electric, a seismic music event. In Dylan catalog terms, it begins around the time he writes “Song to Woody” (“Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”). It continues amid romances, drama, record deals and youth-quakers like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (“Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden”). Then the plugged-in Bob goes loud and hard at Newport with “Maggie’s Farm,” and that’s a wrap (“Well, I try my best/ To be just like I am/ But everybody wants you/ To be just like them”).
Dylan arrives in New York on a gray, wintry day, and is soon strolling through the bohemian fantasy known as Greenwich Village, that creative Valhalla where artists, dilettantes, tourists and would-be saviors are rubbing elbows. It’s an inauspicious introduction in part because the whole scene looks and feels overly tidy and art-directed. It gets worse when Bob passes a busker hitting a tambourine (hey, mister!), if only because the image evokes Twyla Tharpe’s 2006 Broadway fiasco “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which literalized Dylan lyrics with performers rolling, yes, stones. Hagiography can be perilous.
Things improve considerably once Bob starts finding his place in the city’s bustling folk scene, and he and the movie get into a fluid groove. He’s been traveling light for a future heavyweight, with just a rucksack and an acoustic guitar with a sticker that reads, “this machine kills fascists,” the same words that his idol, Woody Guthrie, had on his. Bob has come to New York, among other things, to visit a now-mute Woody (Scoot McNairy), who’s dying in a New Jersey hospital. There, Woody’s only other regular visitor is the saintly Pete, as in Seeger (Edward Norton), a true folk believer who takes an early shine to Bob.
