OSCARS 2025: A Complete Unknown (2024)

He's one of those artists so venerated and respected that he's sometimes spoken of more as a saint than as a mere musician. Music critics and pop culture scholars continue to consider Bob Dylan one of the defining artists of the 20th century. That reputation surely has nothing to do with boomers mythologizing everything that made them feel important and socially conscious back in their youths. Considering that, it should be unsurprising that Bob Dylan would eventually receive the biopic treatment, that highest testament to someone being deemed a historically significant figure. That movie was called “I'm Not There” and it attempted to put a fittingly iconoclastic take on the life of a famously iconoclastic artist. It was well reviewed but the Academy didn't love it, only nominating Cate Blanchette's gender-bending take on the singer. Now, twenty years later, the “Walk the Line” guy decided we needed another movie about Bob Dylan. “A Complete Unknown” is a far more traditional biopic than the previous one. Academy voters, playing directly into every conception we have about them, loved this one a lot more than “I'm Not There,” nominating it in eight different categories. 

In 1961, little Bobby Zimmerman arrives in New York City with nothing but the clothes on his back and the guitar in his hand. He's there to visit his idol, Woody Guthrie, recently hospitalized because of his Huntington's disease. The young singer impresses Guthrie and Pete Seeger, another folk singer. Seeger is so taken with this stranger that calls himself “Bob Dylan” that he invites him to stay in his home. Dylan soon becomes part of the city's folk scene, moving in with a girl named Sylvie, meeting Joan Baez, and getting a record deal. Collaborating – and beginning an affair with – Baez leads to Dylan building a following. By 1965, he is a certified superstar. Dylan is frustrated though by the pressures of his record company, the rest of the folk music community, and his fans simply wanting more of the same. He contemplates a move towards electric music, alienating, frustrating, and impressing those around him.

As I said above, “A Complete Unknown” is James Mangold returning to the musician biopic genre that he previously touched upon in “Walk the Line.” In fact, Johnny Cash is also a character in this story, depicted as a pen pal of Dylan's. (He's played by Boyd Halbrook, not Joaquin Phoenix, denying us a springboard for the Sixties Singers Cinematic Universe.) Cash's life was full of the kind of angsty back stories and substance abuse that usually occupy movies like this. Dylan's life was too but, either out of a desire not to repeat himself or to distinguish this film from “I'm Not There,” Mangold limits his focus strictly to Dylan's rise to fame and his famous decision to break away from the folk scene by “going electric.” This means Dylan's story is paired down to one of an artist struggling for the freedom to express himself however he wants. The main conflict of the story comes from his dissatisfaction with being boxed into the label of a folk singer by the corresponding scene. Dylan is depicted as a totally independent free spirit, not afraid to piss people off in the name of being true to his artist's heart. 

I'm not shocked that the Academy would be taken with a story such as this, being a whole bunch of self-satisfied artist types. “A Complete Unknown” stubbornly refuses to elaborate too much on Dylan's back story. He talks about traveling with a carnival, which Baez declares to be bullshit. His real name is only referenced in one scene. Instead, Dylan is defined almost entirely by his drive to do his music, his way. He cheats on Sylvie – based on his real life girlfriend, Suze Rotolo – with Baez. This doesn't stop him from acting like a prick around her, despite her giving him the idea to record his own music. While on tour with Joan, he walks off-stage after getting bored of playing the same songs. He is openly contemptuous of all the wannabe folkies he inspired. The climatic decision to add electric guitars and organs to his music is outright rejected by the people around him, Dylan caring more about his personal expression than pleasing people. Which is admirable, sure, but did he have to be such a conceited dick about it?

A better movie wouldn't make excuses for Bob's asshole-ish vanity and egotism. “A Complete Unknown” pretends not to, certainly drawing attention to how much Bob annoys the people around him. Joan Baez dismisses his obvious pretensions. Sylvie gets fed up with his philandering. Pete Seeger is depicted as a bumbling father figure, too nice to outright tell Bob no. The implication that Dylan merely cashed in on the actual social movements of the sixties, using political strife as a way to launch his career, lingers in the background. However, all of that is dismissed every time Bob actually performs. His music is shown as innately brilliant, the man coming across as a performer with an unavoidable sway over his audience. When he becomes a pop icon, people practically chasing him down in the streets and women throwing themselves at him, it's depicted as a natural reaction to his brilliance. Bobby wants nothing to do with that, because he's too fucking cool to be praised, but that doesn't change the utter admiration the film has for him. 

In other words, “A Complete Unknown” implicitly claims that any and all of Dylan's obnoxious rock star antics were totally justified by his genius. Everyone else becomes mere players in the story of Dylan self-actualizing as the defining artist of his time. Monica Barbaro plays Baez with a generous sense of being sick of this guy's bullshit. Elle Fanning gets one heartbreaking moment as Sylvie, when she realizes she's not the only woman in her boyfriend's life. Edward Norton puts on his chummy, normcore routine as Seeger to some success. Yet all of these performances and characters are never truly fleshed out, existing only as accessories to the grandness of Bob Dylan: The Great American Songwriter. This is also evident in Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash's depictions. The former is never more than the idol that inspires Dylan and, of course, thinks he's so great too. The latter is clearly drinking too much at this time but it's never considered if that might possibly be affecting his support of Dylan's tactics. All falls before Dylanism, the most important thing in the world.

An approach like this possibly, maybe, could have worked if “A Complete Unknown” included an utterly brilliant, once-in-a-generation central performance. If “Bob Dylan,” as a character in this film, actually did seem to be a mind-blowingly revolutionary artist, maybe the disconnect would bother me less. Timothée Chalamet is good in the lead role. He dutifully adopts Dylan's mumbly-mouthed method of speech. He sings and strums the guitar in a convincing simulation of the bard's style. He captures the mannerisms of Dylan, especially once the second half of the film begins and Bob has thoroughly created his disaffected hipster persona. However, never once was I absorbed by what Chalamet is doing. He's so clearly acting, showing off his own abilities as a professional less than he is embodying a character. This suits the movie's distance from Dylan, as it refuses to dig too deep into his personality outside of his drive to do his own thing. Would've been nice if we could have gotten some insight into what about the social change of the sixties inspired Bob, why he chose to write those words in that way. Instead, we have to be satisfied with Chalamet mirroring how the man sounded and moved.

“A Complete Unknown” is not totally your standard musician biopic, as it foregoes the standard rise-and-fall-and-rise again structure. The film heavily foreshadows the motorcycle crash that would almost end Dylan's life but stops shy of including it. “I'm Not There” is a much more self-reflective look at Dylan's philosophy as an artist and much more willing to call him on his own ridiculousness. “A Complete Unknown” largely lacks that attribute, coming across as more of a movie about Bob Dylan for people already convinced of Bob Dylan's greatness. I'm more agnostic about the guy and his music, if that wasn't obvious, and I ultimately found the film's self-aggrandizing ways a bit tiresome. Not a bad movie but the mystical allure of Dylan remains slightly beyond me. [6/10]