On the heels of a massive Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City, an event so popular that even the actor showed up, audiences are tasked with what is now the impossible: believing that he is a virtually obscure artist with a complex relationship with fame.
That’s what writer-director James Mangold’s new film “A Complete Unknown” banks on. In it, Chalamet portrays a 20-something-year-old Bob Dylan beginning in the early 1960s, a time when the musician was performing small, folky gigs at pubs in The Big Apple simultaneously with his guitar and harmonica — just a few short years before he became a legend.
It sort of makes sense that Chalamet would play this role. Despite being only 28 years old, he hasn’t gone 12 months in the last decade without starring in a movie, achieving multiple Oscar nominations and obviously building a rabid, largely Gen Z fanbase in the process. But he hasn’t actually won an Oscar. And save for one or two films such as 2018’s “Beautiful Boy,” he hasn’t much portrayed real-life people, which has historically been like catnip for award voters.
With “A Complete Unknown,” he does a few things the Academy just loves — portray an actual person, cater to an older audience that more closely resembles the voters and engage with the (particularly white) Dylan obsessives. Whether awards motivate the actor or not, it’s acutely clear from the media frenzy around this movie (more on that in a bit) that that is what the studio is interested in and what so much of the press around it help validate.
That seems to be working so far by the looks of the multiple nominations from committees including the Golden Globes. But that isn’t always a good indicator of the quality of the performance. In the case of “A Complete Unknown,” Chalamet has gotten so famous at this point in his career that that overshadows any potential he might have in it.
It’s difficult to even pay attention to his performance because at almost every turn it looks like Chalamet as Dylan; not just … Dylan, as it should be. From the schlocky, boyishly disheveled wig he dons, only vaguely similar to the real-life Dylan’s hair then, and even now to his awkward charm, so much about the performance feels like an act. The same goes for the many scenes (most of the movie, really) of Chalamet performing Dylan’s music acoustically.
Much has been made about the actor learning to sing and play the guitar for the role, so that actually comes off believable in the movie. And it deserves some credit for that, for sure. It speaks to his commitment to the role and his approach to authenticating it.
Still, a larger issue hinges upon the fact that Chalamet’s performance feels way too contemporary for the era. Sure, the costuming and hair may generally fit for the period. But it never fails to look and feel like a Gen Z celebrity wearing a mask — and one that is so paper thin that you can see right through it.
That brings up a difficult question that the film, its performances (Elle Fanning as one of Dylan’s sweethearts suffers from the same issues as her co-star’s) and its publicity raises. Is the movie, which Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks adapted from Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties,” good or is it just a way to promote a now 83-year-old Dylan to a younger audience that might be unfamiliar with his work?
To hear the resounding praise and publicity narrative tell it, Chalamet’s performance is “transformative.” To boot, a widely circulated social media post from the real-life Dylan feels like an additional attempt to affirm his work in the film:
“There’s a movie about me opening soon called ‘A Complete Unknown’ (what a title!),” the musician posted on X. “Timothée Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor, so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me….It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ’60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie, read the book.”
For whatever it’s worth, two things are true there. The movie is called “A Complete Unknown” and Chalamet is a terrific actor, in other films, but you probably wouldn’t be able to tell by “A Complete Unknown.” The film does him no favors.
Its lead performance is just one of its many issues, though.
The drama traces Dylan’s path to the aforementioned Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where he caused an uproar among the audience and his team, including musician and festival board member Peter Seeger (Edward Norton), because he decided to perform electric. That controversy clearly meant something at the time and certainly to Dylan devotees still, but in the film it comes off melodramatic, chaotic and empty.
That’s because, like its title alludes, the nearly 2 1/2 hours of “A Complete Unknown” is far more interested in the legend of Dylan than examining the actual person — or even the musician. How can you portray an obviously monumental controversy about the title subject as a culminating plotline when you haven’t built the character or his story well enough for the audience to even discern it as controversial?
It’s impossible. Dylan the character moves throughout the film mostly as a shadow. When the audience meets him, he is slinking through the streets of New York City with his guitar on his back. A moment when he meets and befriends his idol Woody Guthrie should probably give audiences a sense of who he is or even what he’s trying to say in his music. But it doesn’t.
All we get is a stiff admission from the character that he’s uncharacteristically nervous meeting and playing for Guthrie, who by this point in his life was hospitalized for Huntington’s Disease. It would otherwise be a throwaway line, but since “A Complete Unknown” offers no actual reflection of Dylan’s humanity, the audience is forced to hang on to every moment of self-awareness.
But there’s barely any in the movie. Is Dylan usually a calm or confident person outside of being introduced to his musical hero? The movie seems wholly incurious in what kind of person he is. Instead, it glides through his romantic relationships with Fanning’s character Sylvie, who the story presents as Dylan’s true love, and folk star Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), whose well-documented and tumultuous affair with Dylan is reduced to a thinly plotted bullet point.
In one scene in the film, an aggravated Sylvie laments to Dylan that it’s odd that he doesn’t talk about who he is, where he comes from, what he stands for or what his music is about. That’s true. While time is a bit blurry throughout the film (time stamps are sparse), the two are together for a substantial period of time, even living together by some point, and they don’t seem to really know who the other person is — and neither does the audience. That’s just lazy storytelling.
Even the transitions throughout this short era of Dylan’s career, like when he’s at an industry party and complains that everyone in the room wants a different thing from him, are so quick and poorly constructed that the film leaves the audience with more questions than answers.
It’s wild that a movie with such a long runtime could fill up its minutes with such thin characterization and story that Mangold and Cocks try in vain to compensate with one recreated live music performance after another. “A Complete Unknown” never feels like much of a movie and certainly not a biopic. Rather, it comes across as subpar, reality-adjacent fan fiction.
Because it’s too focused on superficially baiting fans — of both Dylan and Chalamet — with numerous musical performances and romantic interludes than telling a more complicated story that actually explores the facts, including the few that actually manage to land in the movie.
There’s an opportunity to do so with Barbaro’s role. This is the actor’s most prominent film performance to date, and her relative anonymity helps boost her performance. Not only can she at least somewhat disappear in the role and let Baez’s character shine in it, the portrayal feels earnest, sincere and intriguing even when the film is not.
One of the reasons that made Baez’s and Dylan’s career so complicated is because she was very politically engaged in these early years of her own career, and he was less so at the time. That’s something “A Complete Unknown” fails to take into account; instead portraying their relationship as more or less a pompous, philandering musician, and his also talented mistress.
For a film that is so awestruck by Dylan’s rebellion, it does little to portray him as a revolutionary — in his music, his politics or otherwise. He actually comes across typical; a man and cheating lover whose music propels him into superstardom, who apparently becomes bored with his women and music then delivers a rocked-out performance that pisses off a lot of people.
The end.
The real Dylan did get one thing right in his assessment of “A Complete Unknown:” It is… some other version of him. And it’s unfulfilling.