I had my dukes up for A Complete Unknown (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), and I’m sure I wasn’t alone. It’s an Oscar-bait (ugh) music biopic (ugh) starring Timothy “Eyebrows” Chalamet as Bob Dylan (ugh? Yeah, pretty much) – three strikes and you’ve got an uphill climb to overcome, he said, mangling a metaphor like Bob Dylan never would. Interestingly, director James Mangold returned to the biopic realm after his excellent 2005 Johnny Cash film Walk the Line inspired the excellent satire Walk Hard, both films all but killing the artistic viability of this creaky old genre. Predictably, A Complete Unknown’s strategic Christmastime release and Prestige Marketing earned it eight 2025 Oscar nods, including best picture and actor for Chalamet, and the Boomers won again, right? Well, sort of. This narrative I’ve outlined, concocted wholly without actually watching the movie, was upended when the film ended up being far better than expected; beneath a veneer of conventionality bubbled a quietly subversive approach to this type of storytelling, with the placement of songs forming its structure, and some fast-and-loose handling of the facts of Dylan’s life and career (note, every biopic you’ve ever watched, ever ever ever, are historical fiction, emphasis on the fiction). So maybe it’s time to put down those dukes.
The Gist: It’s 1961, and Bobby Dylan (Chalamet) manifests as a 20-year-old man bumping around in the back of a station wagon. New York City is on the horizon. He hitched a ride and he lands in a bustle of urban life where nobody knows him but in two years or so everyone in the bustle will know who he is. He makes his way to the hospital where his hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is interned, shaky and unable to speak. Current smiling upbeat face of folk music Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, Oscar nominated) sits next to Woody with a banjo when Bobby walks in and says Woody’s records “struck me down to the ground,” dropping at the end, “I like yours too, Pete.” Bobby plays “Song to Woody” for them and ends up crashing at Pete’s house that night, and lo, Bob Dylan has been “discovered” in the same mystifying sense that Columbus “discovered” America, a thing that came into being and existed before he saw it. Subjective points-of-view are everything, I guess?
Anyway, Bob Dylan wasn’t so easily colonized, and that’s the heart of the story being told here. Not that Pete would ever colonize anyone, mind you. That’s the music business’ job, although he’s definitely part of it, as a key organizer of the Newport Folk Festival, and a firm believer that Dylan could be the perfect crossover artist to bring this type of music to the masses. Which, of course, happens, and happens real hard, until Bob Dylan wiggles and punches and eventually nukes his way out of it right here in this here story here. Eventually. First he has to secure a manager in Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), and secure a girlfriend in Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), and follow Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, also Oscar nominated) on stage at a folk club by saying she sings “maybe a little too pretty” before he even plays a song, and play “Masters of War” for a crowd right at the hysterical height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and record an album, and become famous, and sleep with Baez, and duet with Baez at Monterey in 1963, and get a glowing fan letter from Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook, probably should’ve been Oscar nominated), and draw a big-ass line of demarcation in the sand at Newport 1964 by playing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
That’s about half the movie, many details removed, of course. One detail I pondered is the apparent disappearance of Bobby, of whom we saw maybe a vestige or three, tops, early on, and the emergence of Bob Dylan in a somewhat mystical fashion. Not that there are any fairies with wands or deals with the devil or anything requiring special effects here, mind you. You just sense something in the air around the guy, like he’s silently manipulating things in order to shape himself and the world around him, or that Destiny set down his romance novel and started guiding the guy, something like that. You start to wonder if Bob Dylan’s using Sylvie for her means of supporting him (money, apartment) and using Baez for her status (she’s a couple steps ahead of him in the playing-music-for-a-living sweepstakes), but at the same time possibly almost loving them too? It’s hard to tell, especially after he starts wearing sunglasses at all times, which makes him even harder to read, and frankly doesn’t hide him as much as it makes him an even bigger sore thumb on the streets of NYC, where he can’t wander past a record store without being mobbed by fans. Anyway, folk music people love the shit out of him, and that’s a cage with golden bars, man. There might not be a better time to Go Electric.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I’m Not There is Todd Haynes’ inscrutable bio of an inscrutable man. No Direction Home and Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back capture him via the documentary form. And y’all need to rewatch Inside Llewyn Davis because it’s about a Dylanesque character who’s far enough ahead of the folk-music curve to crash and burn spectactularly (and also because it’s top-five Coen Bros.).
Performance Worth Watching: I so don’t want to like It Boy Chalamet as Dylan, but f— me, I guess. He’s very good. Oscar good? I dunno about that. But good. That said, the standout who truly gives this movie life is Barbaro, who has terrific spiky chemistry with Chalamet, playing a character who’s both everything Bob Dylan does and doesn’t want to be. Oscar —-> Barbaro, please.
Memorable Dialogue: Baez fires a missile that Bob Dylan doesn’t even try to dodge but somehow seems to catch and cradle in his arms:
Joan: You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.
Bob Dylan: Yeah, I guess.
Sex and Skin: Nothing worth noting.
Our Take: Let it be known that I do believe this Chalamet-pixie-dust Bob Dylan can, indeed, love, and that he’s not a supernatural entity like, I dunno, Dr. Manhattan. At times, A Complete Unknown renders him superhuman, an iconic album-cover shoot come to life, a rock star in a series of dramatic poses with a cigarette or a harmonica or peering out of sunglasses with legs crossed, but never inhuman. Chalamet plays the character like someone who adopted a persona in the back of that station wagon and never looked back – and this is the birth of an artist who never truly compromised, and somehow maintained his mystique for more than 50 years, an act that’s surely more difficult than being the voice of a generation, one of the best-selling recording artists of all time, a half-billionaire and a Pulitzer-winning poet-songwriter.
And it’s in that nebulous spot where Mangold, quite admirably, tries to land this film. There are moments when Chalamet veers precariously close to poserville, but tightroping that line is part of the exhilarating danger of playing Dylan in the first place. And he sings and strums and harps with surprising authenticity and conviction, in a movie that’s essentially about the songs more than the man, because the man will someday die while his work lives on, as long as we care enough and have the means to preserve it. (There are days when I worry about humanity’s capacity to maintain its own art and history.)
Smartly, the film’s drama doesn’t swell with the usual peaks and valleys of the protagonist’s commercial success and personal turmoil. Sure, the latter is addressed via a loose Bob Dylan-Baez-Sylvie love triangle that crumbles when the former two duet on “It Ain’t Me Babe” and the latter flees the area with tears sludging up her mascara – a moment that, despite its effectiveness, feels like the film’s commercial compromise, and an attempt to keep its audience from feeling alienated (and a fudging of Dylan’s real-life story, but if you’re getting hung up on such things, here’s my advice: don’t).
The film’s most dramatically effective moment prompts wider, deeper existential ponderings, when Chalamet’s scorching performance of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” cuts through you like you’re hot butter – hot butter dripping with the recognition of the power of a song that feels timely and timeless in any era, a song about the inevitability of change in a world full of people deeply compelled to resist it, whether they’re folk music traditionalists or elected officials of a certain political party or aging folk confused by the interests and actions of a younger generation. And so this Bob Dylan becomes more than just a historical figure, or a rock star admired by millions, or even a man. He becomes a representative of the inevitable natural force of progress, that time will pass, and someday you too will grow older (or even older still) and realize, as the wise man once said, you used to be with it, and they changed what it was, and now what you’re with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary.
And so the world keeps turning, with or without us, as Barbaro’s Baez realizes when she watches a garbageman empty the cans the day after the U.S. and Russia chose, perhaps miraculously or perhaps with mighty wisdom, not to press the button. This is when films become intensely personal experiences, and when this one underscored how I struggle to embrace conservatism and progressivism on any level, because at the very deepest core of both lurks a terrifying amorality – although for me, the acceptance of change is to embrace reality in a bolder and more meaningful way. Where was I? Right: A Complete Unknown. Excellent movie. Consider the legend printed with this one.
Our Call: The biopic has evolved with A Complete Unknown. But it might be good if it stopped right there, because in the realm of human-made art, progress has its limitations. Unlike many things, we can control this if we choose. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.