{"id":10638,"date":"2025-03-03T11:20:12","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T16:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10638"},"modified":"2025-03-03T11:20:23","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T16:20:23","slug":"a-complete-unknown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/03\/a-complete-unknown\/","title":{"rendered":"A Complete Unknown."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Complete Unknown<\/em> looked for all the world like another hagiographic biopic of a musician who deserved better, but, much to my surprise at least, it\u2019s a solid and at least somewhat balanced portrayal of a short window of Bob Dylan\u2019s life. It\u2019s well-paced, gets the right songs in the right places, and brings two outstanding supporting performances. It\u2019s just unfortunate the guy playing Dylan is so tied up in an impersonation that the portrayal says nothing remotely insightful about the main character. (You can rent it on iTunes<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, etc.; I received a review code from the studio\u2019s publicity department.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story begins with Dylan\u2019s (Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet) arrival in New York City, upon which he tracks down one of his idols, Woody Guthrie, by that point in hospital as Huntington\u2019s Disease had affected his ability to control his muscles. Sitting by Guthrie\u2019s bedside is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who invites Dylan to come stay with him and his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune, in the film\u2019s most thankless role), where Pete quickly realizes that \u201cBobby\u201d has some talent. We follow Dylan through little shows in New York City coffee houses and in slightly larger spaces where Seeger gets him on the billing \u2013 which is where he meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) \u2013 and onwards and upwards until Dylan gets to play the Newport Folk Festival. His first two appearances there were huge successes, but when he returned as the headliner in 1965, at the point where he was incorporating more rock sounds and was about to release Highway 61<\/em>, he found himself in conflict with the festival\u2019s organizers and many fans while also at a major inflection point in his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Complete Unknown<\/em> dispenses with the music biopic trope of some sort of adversity \u2013 usually drugs or alcohol \u2013 for the subject to overcome before the triumphant conclusion, likely because Dylan simply hasn\u2019t had anything like that. The dips in his career were far less dramatic; the biggest one is probably his flirtation with Christianity, leading to a trio of albums that are generally considered his weakest, and all of that is more than a decade after the time period of this film. Instead, the script just lets the natural vicissitudes of the life of a rising musician define the narrative arc, such as his on-again, off-again affairs with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, playing a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo) and with Baez, along with his conflicts with music industry suits and the Festival organizers. The slope of the curve is always positive, but there\u2019s enough variation here to keep the story interesting \u2013 and the music doesn\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, there\u2019s a clear choice here to portray Bob Dylan as some sort of pop star, and it doesn\u2019t exactly work with the source material. This is Bob Dylan, not just any songwriter or singer or musician. He won a Nobel Prize. He\u2019s been covered by over 600 artists, running the gamut from Jimi Hendrix to Adele to Ministry to Bryan Ferry to XTC to the Ramons to Guns \u2018N Roses to Van Morrison (with Them). He\u2019s one of the most influential songwriters in the history of recorded music, but there\u2019s very little to indicate that in A Complete Unknown<\/em>. The portrayal here, which has fans recognizing him everywhere and hounding him in the streets, doesn\u2019t even seem to line up with his commercial results in the film\u2019s time period; his first album to reach the Billboard<\/em> top ten came out in 1965, near the very end of the narrow window the movie covers. Maybe he had screaming groupies following him around, maybe he couldn\u2019t go out in public to see his friend\u2019s band play, but that doesn\u2019t seem to jibe with the facts or Dylan\u2019s persona.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m writing this just an hour or two after the Oscars ended, and although I haven\u2019t seen The Brutalist<\/em> to comment on whether Adrien Brody was deserving, I\u2019m not upset that Chalamet didn\u2019t win. He\u2019s doing an extended impersonation, and in his case, it feels like Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet impersonating Bob Dylan impersonating Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet. The scene in the elevator when he meets Bobby Neuwirth for the first time is cringeworthy, as Chalamet is trying so hard to mimic Dylan\u2019s voice and mannerisms that it comes off as bad parody; Richard Belzer never sank to such depths. Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro are both marvelous in their supporting roles, however, and while neither had much of a chance, especially not Norton, they really help A Complete Unknown<\/em> keep its momentum and its general atmosphere, Norton \u2013 as charming as I\u2019ve ever seen him \u2013 in the first half, Barbaro in the second. There\u2019s also a brief cameo by James Austin Johnson as an emcee, which is a brilliant nod to Johnson\u2019s impersonations of Dylan on Saturday Night Live<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film also completely ignores Toshi Seeger, even though she was a significant figure in several of the events the movie depicts. She helped set up the original Newport Folk Festival; she produced and directed the TV series starring her husband on which Dylan appears in the movie; she later won an Emmy for a documentary about Pete\u2019s career. Yet A Complete Unknown<\/em> barely gives her any lines, and in most scenes she\u2019s busy frowning or scowling, with a near-constant expression on her face like someone has placed a rotten onion just below her chin. The film has one nonwhite character of any significance at all, and she gets whitewashed out of the story. There are a lot of details here that are made up or combined into single events, typical artistic license in this kind of film, but the erasure of Toshi Seeger is almost unforgivable. (The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 obituary for her has more details on her life and legacy<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The screenplay for A Complete Unknown<\/em>, adapted from Elijah Wald\u2019s book Dylan Goes Electric!<\/a><\/em>,does veer enough from the clich\u00e9s of the genre to maintain enough narrative greed to power through two-plus hours without a big dramatic twist to overcome my two pretty significant reservations about the film. Chalamet plays well and sings passably, even when imitating such an oft-imitated voice, and the performances around him hold him up in the moments when he descends too far into impersonation. I recommend it with the caveat that it could have been so much more, especially in terms of delving into Dylan\u2019s character, perhaps in the hands of a different screenwriter and lead actor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Complete Unknown looked for all the world like another hagiographic biopic of a musician who deserved better, but, much to my surprise at least, it\u2019s a solid and at least somewhat balanced portrayal of a short window of Bob Dylan\u2019s life. It\u2019s well-paced, gets the right songs in the right places, and brings two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1417,1441,1444,1445,1440,1442,1443,1292,215],"class_list":["post-10638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2024-movies","tag-2025-best-actor-nominees","tag-2025-best-adapted-screenplay-nominees","tag-2025-best-director-nominees","tag-2025-best-picture-nominees","tag-2025-best-supporting-actor-nominees","tag-2025-best-supporting-actress-nominees","tag-biopics","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10638"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10639,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10638\/revisions\/10639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}