A Complete Unknown ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Great movies stay with you.

That’s what I thought while sipping on a post-Cinema beer with my friends as we took turns to discuss our favourite scenes from A Complete Unknown. It was a film that stayed with me long after the taste of overpriced popcorn had left my lips, and will likely remain with me for even longer still.

A Complete Unknown is the James Mangold-directed biopic of Bob Dylan, played by industry darling Timothée Chalamet. It centres around Dylan’s rise to fame, struggles with said fame, and desire to break out of a multitude of creative boxes placed on him by others. “Two hundred people in that room and each one wants me to be someone else.”

Perhaps fittingly, I wasn’t sure what to expect from A Complete Unknown. Sure, the trailer had enticed me through the cinema doors, but I’m not a big Bob Dylan guy – I always found him a little bit… whiney. Also, as great an actor as I believe him to be, Chalamet’s casting in every single major film of the past five years had started to grate on me.

That was before though.

By the end of the night I had already mentally awarded Chalamet his Best Leading Actor Oscar and found myself searching for cheap harmonicas on Amazon – something for which Mangold should probably apologise to my neighbours directly. So, how did this biopic inspire such flagrant disregard for my apartment block’s ear holes, not to mention a sudden craving for cigarettes and folk music?

A lot of it boils down to Mangold’s ability to completely immerse an audience in the stories of real people. He did it with Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line in 2005, telling the tale of Johnny Cash (who has an integral part to play in A Complete Unknown) and then again in Ford vs Ferrari in 2019, featuring Christian Bale as racing car driver Ken Miles.

Much like Walk the Line, the music is intricately woven into the fabric of A Complete Unknown. The plot is driven by the music and the music by the plot. It is never abrasive or forced as it so often is with biopics about musicians (cough… Elvis… cough). Instead, it genuinely feels like you’re part of the creative process, experiencing a genius at work as he experiences the changing world around him.

A large part of this is due to the fact that the music is performed by the actors themselves. Chalamet had to learn both the guitar and harmonica for the film, and somehow looks so natural you believe he had been playing since the day he was born. Meanwhile, Ed Norton is entirely convincing as banjo-playing Pete Seeger, and Monica Barbaro, well, in the words of Chalamet’s Dylan:

“She sings pretty… maybe a little too pretty.”

That brings us on to the acting. I’m always cynical when actors portraying real people claim to have “gone deep” in the role, because the result is typically a charicature – an actor with a silly voice, haircut, and over-inflated ego (cough… Elvis… cough). That is not the case here. It might be a cliché, but Chalamet isn’t playing Dylan, he simply becomes him. For me, this is the 29-year-old’s best work, and that’s no mean feat.

The film rests on his ability to convey intense emotions while singing and playing instruments. In one scene that best exemplifies this, he plays Song to Woody to a bedbound Woody Guthrie, who is struggling with Huntington’s Disease. As an untypically nervous Dylan gradually gains the confidence to gaze up from his guitar, the look in his eyes conveys a multitude of emotions – sadness, gratitude, determination. It’s a beautiful early moment that sets the tone for the film, and there are plenty more where that came from.

Norton is also outstanding as Dylan’s mentor/father figure Pete Seeger. He is a source of safety for Dylan until he ultimately becomes symbolic of the folk label that Dylan wants to shake off. The same can be said for Dylan’s love interests, Joan Baez played by Barbaro and Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo. They create a depth of character that allows us to understand why Dylan both loves them and is conflicted by that love.

Chalamet deserves the Best Actor Oscar for A Complete Unknown and I will hear nothing else on the matter. It’s turned me into a Bob Dylan-loving, harmonica playing freak, and if that’s not a success then I don’t know what is.

Five stars.