‘A Complete Unknown’ movie review: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton singe the screen in beautiful but anodyne musical drama

‘A Complete Unknown’ movie review: Though James Mangold plays it frustratingly safe, the story of Bob Dylan’s switch to an electric sound is nevertheless a jolly trip thanks to the incendiary performances

Do not go into A Complete Unknown expecting your senses to be set upon a magic swirling ship a la Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There or Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese or No Direction Home. James Mangold’s biopic based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric!, about the counterculture icon’s controversial decision to go electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, is scarily vanilla.

The movie begins in 1961, with a 19-year-old chubby-faced Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) coming to New York from Hibbing, Minnesota to visit his idol, the folk musician Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), in hospital where he is wasting away.

At Guthrie’s bedside, Dylan meets and impresses folk singer and social activist Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). Seeger brings Dylan home (as he has no place to sleep) and introduces him in the folk circles. The film traces Dylan’s stratospheric rise through the cafe scene as well as his increasing disenchantment with everyone wanting him to be their version of salvation, which he naturally answered with a lethal dose.

Dylan’s relationships with girlfriend Sylvie (Elle Fanning), and fellow musician Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) finding a kindred spirit in Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison) and his “dear landlord” manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), are laid out in all their designer messiness.

Sylvie is based on Dylan’s girlfriend of the time, Suze Rotolo (she is on the cover of Dylan’s second studio album, The Freewheelin‘ Bob Dylan). However, Dylan’s request that her name not be used in the film, drags one out of the movie every time she is on screen as you are thinking, that is Rotolo, no that is Sylvie...

There are moments of electricity in A Complete Unknown, especially in the ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ duet between Baez and Dylan — what a classy break-up song! — and those recognisable snatches of verse as Dylan composes all those classics: he not busy being born is busy dying.

The acting, while sometimes coming across as too much (like in 84-point gothic bold) also works to anchor the film. Chalamet, who has sung 40 songs as well as played the guitar and harmonica, is on the top of his game. There is absolutely no sign of Paul Atreides in his tousled-haired, vampiric fingernailed Dylan. It is Norton, however, who slays it as Seeger, while Boyd Holbrook is great fun as Johnny Cash.