A Complete Unknown (2024)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on January 4, 2025 @ tonymacklin.net.
A Complete Unknown is a tricky imposture. It's part fact, but a lot of fancy.
In 2024, facts don't matter. In Rolling Stone magazine, Andy Green found 27 times in the film that facts were changed or ignored.
I knew Bob Dylan, and Timothee Chalamet is no Bob Dylan. They cleaned him up, and softened him. They've taken some of the edge off.
Joan Baez has said when she first met and heard him, Dylan was "scruffy" and "dirty."
Timothee Chalamet scrubbed Dylan. Chalamet recently did a television commercial for Chanel Bleu. Can you imagine Dylan doing that?
It's like Pat Boone played Leonard Cohen.
A Complete Unknown follows Dylan from his arrival in New York in 1961 as a 19 year old to his fame in 1965.
A Complete Unknown is romanticized. For instance, one of the changes that makes the film more dramatic and emotional is when Dylan goes to a psychiatric hospital where he first meets Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) sitting by Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in a bed. Dylan sings a song "Song to Woody" for Guthrie.
In actuality, it wasn't the first time Dylan met Seeger, whom he had met previously in Greenwich Village. Dylan didn't do any song when he visited Guthrie. "Song to Woody" hadn't even been written yet.
It's an appealing, memorable scene, but it never happened. Such is the movie.
Dylan was involved in making the film, but never visited the set. He went over the screenplay line by line with director and co-writer James Mangold. Mangold and Jay Cocks loosely based their film on the book by Elijah Ward.
Dylan did have the name of his New York girlfriend Suze Rotolo changed to Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning).
The cast generally is a strong one. Chalamet should get a nomination for Best Actor for his ability to sing and perform. Monica Barbaro wasn't a singer, but learned to sing powerfully as Joan Baez. If it was her voice.
A Complete Unknown throws everything into question. Dylan and Baez are watching JFK's speech on tv after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It may be JFK's voice, but it doesn't sound like him. Maybe they couldn't get the rights.
The film doesn't get the feeling of Greenwich Village. I spent a lot of time at O'Henry's Steak House in Greenwich Village. It had a palpable sense of place. The film doesn't.
I was pleased to hear an allusion in the film to a piece Dwight Macdonald had written. Macdonald was my first interview with a critic on a Sunday night in the empty New Yorker building.
Unlike many biopics, A Complete Unknown has no pictures of its subject in the credits.
I would prefer the film was about a fictional iconic singer rather than a biopic.
Then A Complete Unknown wouldn't be such a rolling tambourine man.