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A Complete Unknown movie review: Timothee Chalamet is impressive in powerful Bob Dylan biopic

Name: A Complete Unknown
Released: 2025-02-28T10:18:50+05:30

A Complete Unknown movie review: Timothee Chalamet, however, is “too pretty” for the darker shades, too cool for the mercurial changes.

Rating: 4 out of 5

A Complete Unknown movie review: The film stars Timothée Chalamet in the lead role.

Dont’t go about doubting Bob Dylan the singer. Or bracketing Bob Dylan the man. Many have learned this, often the hard way, through the 60-odd years that the shape-shifting artiste has been around, tweaking his past, changing it all from his looks and religion to his music, and still standing, strumming his guitar – including on what is admiringly described as a ‘Never Ending Tour’, since 1988.

Can the beautiful, beautiful Timothée Chalamet be this slippery, sullen creature with the sublime talent (who years later would skip his own Nobel Prize ceremony)? Chalamet tries, and is impressive with his guitar playing and his singing (it ain’t the raspy Dylan though), and the scowl and disaffection that hang constantly around Dylan just a couple of years into fandom in the early 1960s.

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However, his Dylan has to lay out this disenchantment in words, again and again, for us to be in tune. Chalamet is “too pretty” – as Dylan once says of Joan Baez’s songs – for the darker shades, too cool for the mercurial changes.

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The women, starting with Monica Barbaro as the famed Baez, are the ones who bear the wounds of his blazing, bruising, self-absorbed genius. Barbaro is particularly good as a fellow artiste who sees through Dylan’s “bullshit”, but can’t help admire his talent or be hopelessly swept into an affair with him. Plus, she has an angelic voice as she sings Baez’s songs.

Elle Fanning has a thankless task as Dylan’s suffering on-again, off-again girlfriend Sylvie, who houses and feeds him (even making coffee escapes the man), and via her activism, steers him towards the causes that would make Dylan the voice of his generation. Dylan doesn’t seem to be much plagued by guilt in two-timing Baez and Sylvie, including with Baez in Sylvie’s house.

But Fanning is nice in the scenes where she realises, and accepts, the inescapable sparks between Baez and Dylan (or Chalamet and Barbaro) as they electrify an audience.

Ed Norton as the legendary folk artiste Pete Seeger, who has an Academy award nomination, like Barbaro and like Chalamet – the film has eight nominations in all, including best film and director – is the most singular of all. Seeger, who first spots Dylan’s talent when the latter visits and sings to his hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in hospital, has spent a lifetime “adding sand with a teaspoon” to sustain the structure of folk music in its humblest form.

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Dylan does the same in “shovels”, only to shake the structure’s “purist” base. In Norton’s delicate telling, Seeger is both a man who feels cheated and one honest enough to know that his protege can’t be denied.

It’s best said in Dylan’s own words, with their thrilling power captured beautifully in the film: “Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one, if you can’t lend your hand / For the times they are a-changin’.”

A Complete Unknown movie cast: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Scoot McNairy, Dan Fogler
A Complete Unknown movie director: James Mangold
A Complete Unknown movie rating: 4 stars

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