- A Complete Unknown will be out in the US on 25 December
- It tells the story of Bob Dylan and stars Timothée Chalamet
- Reaction is largely glowing for the film
A Complete Unknown is one of the most hotly anticipated biopics of 2024.
Now, the critics have given their take on the Bob Dylan-inspired movie.
The film – which stars Timothee Chalamet as The Tambourine Man himself – is based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric by Eilijah Wald. The director, James Mangold, received a blessing from Dylan himself, whose 1965 song Like A Rolling Stone provided the title.
Along with Chalamet, it stars Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro as Dylan’s love interests. Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, the fictionalised version of Suze Rotolo, while Barbaro takes on the real-life folk icon Joan Baez.
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Other musical legends featured in the film include Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie, played by Boyd Holbrook and Scoot McNairy, respectively.
The film will hit theatres in the US on Christmas Day (25 December), while UK audiences have to wait until 17 January. Now, critics are offering their views, and it is largely positive.
Let’s take a look at what they have said about A Complete Unknown…
A Complete Unknown movie reviews
The New York Post: ‘Timothee Chalamet makes a killer Bob Dylan in biopic’
“Carrying his indie roots with him like a membership card on every frame, Chalamet has Dylan’s same art-before-fame persona, his New York cool, his hair that’s blowin’ in the wind. Most vital, he ably handles the singer’s signature nasal twang in both song and speech. Some 40 tunes, all told.
“And, because Mangold has made a quiet and intimate film — not a cliche, showboating one of tears and tragedy — Chalamet never pushes these traits into a silly tribute act. Far from an animatronic impersonator, the actor is always honest and believable.”
Pitchfork: ‘A flimsy slice of Bob Dylan’
“Chalamet may well be guarding against what he did not capture, as it appears that he spent so much time rehearsing songs that he phoned in the rest of his performance, most of which is played stiff and brooding.
“Chalamet sulks and talks out of the side of his mouth, picking from a grab bag of accents that vary with each scene—all of which are far more reedy and cartoonish than Dylan actually sounded in his younger days. At times, it ventured into the pinched wheezing that marks so many late-era Dylan parodies.”
The Independent: ‘Chalamet tries his best’
“Chalamet, perhaps, isn’t as perfectly poised to play Dylan as Phoenix was to play Cash. There’s something a touch too uncrumpled about his persona, even if the steam-cloud coif and sunglasses barricade help with the transformation in his later scenes.
“But he’s still a formidable talent, and there’s a bittersweet moment he plays towards the end, standing by Guthrie’s hospital bed (McNairy and Norton, it should be noted, are very strong in their limited screen time), that speaks so purely to the uncertainty and terror of a young artist in search of his voice.”
Little White Lies: ‘drips with hollow trivia’
“There’s no point where you’re listening to Timothée Chalamet do his exemplary Dylan cosplay where you feel you’re being better served than had you stayed home and whacked on ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’.
“Indeed, the film has little interest in the music, instead it’s more intent to assure the audience that it’s good and important via an omnipresent phalanx of grotesque, beaming reaction shots.”
Variety: ‘Timothee Chalamet is Uncanny as Bob Dylan’
“A Complete Unknown” is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. Yet the feel — the effect — is that of a musical.
“You’d assume that might be true of any classic rock biopic, but in this case the film, with its beautifully haphazard song-cycle structure, truly is about Dylan and his music, and how the music changed everything.”
The Guardian: ‘Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan is an electric revelation’
“Chalamet is also good at Dylan’s insolent comedy in art as in life: puckish, witty, insufferable and yet wounded, someone whose habit of wearing dark glasses indoors gets him beaten up. How did he get to sing and talk like that? How did Robert Zimmerman from Minnesota get to sound more raw and less intelligible than either Seeger or Guthrie?
“His claim to have learned guitar chords from cowboys at carnivals deeply irritates Baez who says he’s full of shit. But Mangold and Chalamet show his vocation lies in self-invention and reinvention; the shapeshifting which needs troubadour comedy as a cover, and which brings him to folk and then, footloose, on to something else.”
BBC: ‘Timothee Chamalet is brilliant and believable in conventional biopic’
“Fortunately, it turns out that Timmy is brilliant here and completely believable, better than the film itself. He sings and plays guitar and harmonica with apparent ease, and creates a thoroughly convincing avatar of Dylan.
“At 19, he arrives in New York straight out of Minnesota, with a backpack and a guitar, and in this telling soon goes to visit his idol, Woody Guthrie, who is in a veterans’ hospital. (The hospital visit really happened. The film collapses timelines and events, but generally relies on facts.)”
