A Complete UnknownReview: Timothée Chalamet Is Perfect as a Forever-Young Bob Dylan

Mar. 15, 2025

Chalamet as Dylan and Elle Fanning as his frustrated lover.Photo:Searchlight Pictures/Youtube

Searchlight Pictures/Youtube

In a Dec. 4 post on the social media platform X, Bob Dylan expressed his admiration for “brilliant actor"Timothée Chalamet,who happens to be starring inA Complete Unknown,the new film that chroniclesthe music legend’s careerfrom 1961 to 1965 — the blazing period in which he went from establishing himself as the great hope of the American folk scene to breaking free and “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival.

However, Dylan has a way of phrasing himself in a way that can be teasingly hard to pin down. Chalamet, he wrote, is “going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me.” But why “going to be” instead of “is”? Because Dylan, in fact, hadn’t seen the movie at the time he posted about it.

But perhaps there’s no rush — this, after all, isthe man who kept the Nobel Committee waiting for monthsbefore he finally arrived in Stockholm to accept his award for literature. You wonder whether the committee considered giving him the Peace Prize as a further inducement to show up.

When Dylan gets around to seeing the completed film, at any rate, he’ll find that his confidence in Chalamet was justified.

IfDune: Part Twosuggested that Chalamet didn’t have the fire power to play a rising messiah refusing to have his will thwarted — he was more like a kid upset because he couldn’t borrow his dad’s car —Unknownreturns him to the kind of soft, poetic roles he does so well, even when playing a cannibal in 2022’sBones and All.

Ironically, I suppose, the young Dylan couldalsoprobably be described as a rising messiah of tremendous will, but that isn’t what Chalamet, wearing an inconspicuous prosthetic nose, is up to here. What matters is his slight, slim build and his eyes, which can safely be described as moony and beautiful.

This, remember, is early Dylan, whose own eyes (as singer Joan Baez described them in"Diamonds and Rust,“her sad-nostalgic ballad from 1975) “were bluer than robin’s eggs.”

Timothee Chalamet in “A Complete Unknown”.Macall Polay/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Macall Polay/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Over time, as the world knows, Dylan aged into a gnomic enigma who, more like the figure in the famous Stephen Crane poem"In the Desert,“might perhaps be found alone, devouring his own heart: “It is bitter—bitter… But I like it / Because it is bitter / And because it is my heart.” Oh, wait — that’s me. At any rate, that Dylan would make for a much different movie, perhaps something more like 1978’sRenaldo and Clara,the inscrutable four-hour epic he himself directed and starred in.I was going to add that Chalamet deserves credit for his expert mimicry of Dylan’s speaking and singing voices — but, on second thought, is itthathard to do a decent Dylan impersonation? Cate Blanchett’s version in 2007’sI’m Not Therewas just as good, and wittier, andSaturday Night LivestarJames Austin Johnson’s impersonationis phenomenal. But this matters far less than Chalamet being presented to us as a vision of the loveliest of troubadours, a figure of pure romance.If Chalamet earns an Oscar nomination, which seems guaranteed, it will be because of his own presence and not his invocation of boy Bob.

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Dylan in June, 1965, weeks before his breakthrough at the Newport Folk Festival,.Val Wilmer/Redferns

Val Wilmer/Redferns

But what about the rest ofA Complete Unknown? Well, to quote Dylan himself, “It’s not my cup of meat.”

The dramatic lynchpin of the film is that epic moment when Dylan, apparently offending the sanctity of those who lived to hear Baez sing “Barbara Allen” in her clear, ringing voice, opened his set at Newport with a rocking, thunky version of “Maggie’s Farm.”

When someone in the audience shouts “Judas!” Dylan answers: “You’re a liar. I don’t believe you.” (Note: That famous exchange took place not at Newport, but on a later British tour.) Going electric liberated Dylan to create one of the greatest, strangest bodies of original songs in the history of American music, combining together folk, rock, blues, Beat poetry, William Blake and tossed-off references to everyone from Omar Khayyám to Tennessee Williams to, for all we know,Schrödinger’s cat.

Like the director’s Johnny Cash biopic,Walk the Line, Unknownis solidly crafted, well-cast and conscientious about laying out the narrative — something like the way you might lay out what’s necessary to include your luggage. But nothing you watch here is as charged as listening to Dylan’s music.

Searchlight Pictures

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Dylan, she sings ruefully on “Diamonds and Rust,” was “so good with words, and at keeping things vague.“Unknowncould use some of that vagueness. Why spend two hours and 20 minutes hoping to see Dylan’s obscure genius clearly?

A Complete Unknownis in theaters now.Note: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Dylan’s famous “You’re a liar” comment preceded the Newport Folk Festival. Rather, it dates from a later British tour. We regret any mixed-up confusion this error may have caused,

source: people.com