James Mangold gave Johnny Cash Walk the Line. Now he gives Bob Dylan A Complete Unknown, a biopic and instruction manual on how to do this sort of thing. If you’re being picky, it doesn’t say much that hasn’t already been said about Dylan. And its criticisms are ones Dylan has made about himself. But if you’re happy to watch as Mangold and a brilliant cast burnish the legend, this is the film for you.
It tracks Dylan from being “a complete unknown” in New York in 1961, where he visits his idol, folk superstar Woody Guthrie in his hospital bed, before being taken under the wing of fellow folkie Pete Seeger. And then follows him to global fame and 1965, when Dylan appalls the folk purists and dismays Seeger by playing an electric set at the Newport Folk Festival.
Dylan going electric was a key moment of the 1960s. To folkies, pop and rock’n’roll were manufactured and fake whereas folk was artisanal and authentic. Dylan’s “sell-out” (as the Newport crowds scream at him) was significant, though from the perspective of all these decades later it looks less like the cultural plates shifting and more part of the Dylan process. Switching musical styles, levels of earnestness and even religions, the man has re-invented himself many times in the decades since.
This Newport watershed is what the film leads up to and is the film’s philosophical backbone, onto which director James Mangold straps the rags-to-riches story of Dylan becoming famous. There is nothing particularly remarkable in the details – a girl here, another there, recording studios, the doubters turning into believers, the fans becoming fanatics – but the performances make it remarkable.
Timothée Chalamet – slight, a little diffident, a little arrogant – seems obviously born to play the role and he gets right inside Dylan’s character, singing in his own voice and playing the guitar. He doesn’t always sound 100% like Dylan, but then Dylan often doesn’t sound like Dylan and into that gap Chalamet drives his train.
Did you know how well Ed Norton could sing? He also does his own stuff, and also pulls off a brilliant performance as Seeger, his face registering Seeger’s suspicion that Dylan is going to go to the dark side long before it happens. As Dylan does so, Seeger and his ilk find themselves in a world where folk no longer means as much. It’s Norton’s performance that conveys the enormity of what’s happening, to Seeger and to everything he stands for.
No one could ever quite get the crystalline purity of Joan Baez’s voice, but Monica Barbero gets pretty close and she’s also convincing as a young woman oblivious and yet also constantly aware of her hotness. Down the table, Hal Holbrook does a pretty decent Johnny Cash, but the performances are good no matter how familiar the name. I’d never heard of Delta bluesman Jesse Moffette before, but Big Bill Morganfield, who plays him, is electrifying (if that isn’t the wrong word).
Money has been spent and Mangold and technical crew capture the tweedy earnestness of early 1960s Greenwich Village and the beatniks who inhabit it. Money’s also been spent on licensing Dylan’s music – Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall and Highway 61 Revisited all get a good airing.
It strips back the legend to the human, peels back the parody that even Dylan himself plays with, to present Dylan as the inventor of himself, a rider of the zeitgeist, canny operator, and possessor of a talent to write songs. Wisely, it does not bother asking where that talent comes from. There are scenes where Dylan is humming something and feverishly scribbling down lyrics, but it goes no further than that into the creative process, a term Dylan would probably sneer at.
By the end we know more biographical detail about Dylan than we did going in but barely anything more about the man – he’s enigmatic, cool, sarcastic, driven, unknowable and not beyond being horrible. “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” Joan Baez accuses Dylan at one point. “I guess,” shrugs Bob.
A Complete Unknown – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
