The thing about biopics is, they’re hard to make. If you’re a filmmaker and want to tell a story about a famous person, common wisdom says that there are one of two ways to do it. The first is to portray the entirety of a famous person’s life and try to capture their essence. Oliver Stone’s Nixon does a nice job of that, as does Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. The second option is to compress time, and show a few key events in the famous person’s life. David Fincher’s The Social Network and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs pull this off magnificently.

Biopics about famous musicians are much, much harder. Directors have to not only show the essence of the musician, while also satisfying the audience who showed up to hear their favorite songs. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, such as with the not very good Bohemian Rhapsody. It works out quite a bit better other times, such as with Rocketman and Walk the Line.

Speaking of Walk the Line, two things happened when it was released in 2005. The first is that it was a critical and commercial success. The second is that it inspired the 2007 Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. This brilliantly funny parody mocked the tropes of musician biopics so brutally that it kind of killed the genre for a few years. Only for a few years, and these kinds of films have returned as an awards season mainstay. I give you A Complete Unknown, a biopic about the quite accurately freewheeling Bob Dylan helmed by the director of Walk the Line.

In 1961, Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) waves goodbye to the people who have dropped him off in New York City. He’s only twenty years old, and all he carries with him is an acoustic guitar. The young man moves with purpose. He’s on a mission, and the mission is completed when he finds his hero. That would be legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy),* who’s confined to the hospital as he wastes away from Huntington’s Disease.

Guthrie is cared for by his close friend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who is bemused to see the young Bob step into the quiet hospital room. All Bob wants is to pay tribute to Woody. Pete suggests that the best way to do that is to sing to his hero. Bob concurs, and that moment of spontaneous performance is electric.

From there, Pete takes Bob under his wing. It turns out Bob doesn’t need much in the way of encouragement, as he leaps into the bustling folk scene. As he rises in popularity, he meets Sylvie (Elle Fanning)** who falls in love with the mysterious young man. She soon learns that Bob does things his own way, and when I say “does things his own way,” I mean, “sucks at household chores, doesn’t communicate, and has an affair with folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) while simultaneously criticizing Joan’s lyrics.”

Time passes. Bob becomes a BFD. He hates the fame, hates the fans, hates the scene, and starts to hate the dogmatic Newport Folk Festival. So much so that Bob contemplates committing the ultimate heresy against folk musicians – performing with an electric guitar.*** Will Bob recover from this musical apostasy? Will he finally commit to Sylvie? Will he stop acting like a ten-ton a-hole? Spoiler alerts – yes, no, no.

Apologies if those last few paragraphs got a little snide. The fact remains that A Complete Unknown is a rock-solid film. No surprise there considering James Mangold, the avatar of satisfying filmmaking, directed. Take a look at his filmography and you’ll see a consistent run of low-key, no-frills quality movies. That’s the case here, and Mangold doesn’t overly futz with the story using editing trickery or “Hey, Ma, look at me and my film school degree!” cinematography. He’s more concerned with cleanly telling a story about one of the great enigmas of the twentieth century. Even better are Mangold’s musical sequences. Instead of feeling like glorified jukebox numbers, they feel organic, as if they’re happening right now. That decision gives them an energy that’s lacking in so many other biopics.

That concept is one that Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks dig into in their screenplay. It never tries to explain Dylan, nor does it try to deconstruct him or tear down his influence. It’s true that Bob is a genius, an influencer one might say, and he stands athwart history like a colossus holding a really big guitar. He’s also, and there’s no use mincing words, kind of a gigantic dick. My kid made an excellent observation, which is that the tragic flaw of Bob Dylan is commitment. He won’t commit to a set list, won’t commit to making his fans or financial backers happy, and won’t commit to the women in his life. He just does what he does, and if everyone in his life and on the planet has a problem with that, then tough luck. The screenplay also makes the wise choice to focus on a relatively narrow window of Dylan’s life. That’s smart since it shows us the essence of the man while largely avoiding the pitfall of, “This happened, and this, then this.”

I have a feeling that when the envelope is opened to announce the Academy Award for Best Actor, it’ll go to either Daniel Craig for Queer or to Timothee Chalamet. As you watch this film, you’ll hear Chalamet singing in Dylan’s distinctive style, uncannily so. It’s not just a glorified impersonation. As Dylan, Chalamet keeps the emotional shields down at nearly all times. He positively will not let anyone in, with the exception of when he’s on stage. Then, the emotion comes out laser focused. Watch him performing “Masters of War” in a sequence that takes place during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s a moment of compressed and tightly controlled rage from a man who never blew up. 

Chalamet doesn’t dominate the cast. While he correctly withholds emotionally, Elle Fanning does strong work as Sylvie. She shows us the exasperation and heartbreak of a woman who loves Bob Dylan and rarely gets much in return. I liked Monica Barbaro very much as Joan Baez, and the conflict between Dylan’s gritty poetry and her more conventional fame is highly satisfying. I was also impressed with Edward Norton as the likable, almost grandfatherly Pete Seeger. And, just my two cents, I thought Boyd Holbrook’s limited amount of screen time as Johnny Cash was ultimately more impactful than Joaquin Phoenix’s leading performance in Walk the Line. 

I wouldn’t call myself a Bob Dylan superfan. I’m more of a casual admirer, and I do quite like his cover of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” The benefit of A Complete Unknown is that it slightly cracks a window into who he is and doesn’t become a glorified Wikipedia article. As far as musician biopics go, it’s a comfortable success.

*It bears mentioning that Woody Guthrie wrote a song in 1954 about a famously racist slumlord. The name of the song is “Old Man Trump,” and I present that information to you without comment.

**Sylvie is based on Suze Rotolo, who appears on the album cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”

***Look, I get that Dylan going electric was a seismic moment in the history of American music. But you have to admit that the idea of a guy literally causing a riot at a folk festival because he played an electric guitar is extremely funny.

Tim Brennan Movie Critic

Tim has been alarmingly enthusiastic about movies ever since childhood. He grew up in Boulder and, foolishly, left Colorado to study Communications in Washington State. Making matters worse, he moved to Connecticut after meeting his too-good-for-him wife. Drawn by the Rockies and a mild climate, he triumphantly returned and settled down back in Boulder County. He's written numerous screenplays, loves hiking, and embarrassed himself in front of Samuel L. Jackson. True story.