A Complete Unknown Feels So Familiar

Let's first address the elephant in the room. Yes, Timothée Chalamet sings and plays the guitar and harmonica in A Complete Unknown – no overdubbing, no lip syncing. The trailer put a lot of doubt into people's minds, including my own, about his ability to achieve this without sounding corny. Director James Mangold and screenwriter Jay Cocks must have known we would wonder about Chalamet's musical chops, for they throw him into the deep end early.

In one of the movie's first scenes, Chalamet's Bob Dylan meets his idol, Woody Guthrie. In close-up and with the guitar in shot, he sings and plays the song he wrote specifically for this legendary, dying man. His fingers move with fluid confidence across the frets of his acoustic guitar and his voice is a perfect blend of skill and nerves. Within the first few notes, Chalamet immediately grabs hold of the audience and he never lets go.

Chalamet leads the charge of stellar performances in A Complete Unknown. He conveys more emotion in a single blink than most actors do in an entire movie. I could sing his praises all day (and I often do), but there are two other actors that stood out to me in this movie.

The first is Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. She's drop-dead gorgeous, sings beautifully and plays Baez with a wonderful duality. She's at once intensely attracted to Dylan's lyricism and disgusted by his lack of empathy. The two have explosive chemistry and deliver a smooch that's an easy candidate for MTV Best Kiss Award. Their chemistry is most prominent whenever they share the stage – at times it's beautiful; at others, it's humiliating. Barbaro is a regular on Chicago Justice and The Good Cop, but this performance should help her permanently jump from the small screen to the big screen. She's proves in A Complete Unknown that she can play the intricacies of a character with deft precision.

Another performance that stood out is Dan Fogler, who plays Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager. Fogler is steadily becoming my favourite character actor working today. I first noticed Fogler while watching the Fantastic Beasts trilogy. I'm happy to see him deliver such a sensational, scene-stealing performance in A Complete Unknown. One standout scene is when he sees Dylan perform for the first time and starts calling him “my client” before ever even talking to the musician. Such a scumbag management move; I loved it.

Mangold and his team do a superb job of bringing the 1960s back to life. I especially adored the scenes set in Greenwich Village. It's a special moment to feel like you are in the room as Joan Baez performs in a small café to a handful of people. In this scene, particularly, I applaud the decision to have many suited businessmen in the audience. This visual cue emphasized the commercializing of this artsy scene. Although the movement was grounded in anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-"the man" sentiment, there was no denying that it was popular and the big wigs at Columbia and other record labels were financially fuelling this libertarian fire.

The costumes, makeup and hair are all exemplary, with attention to detail going down to the fingernails. I loved how they developed Dylan's style throughout the movie. He arrives in New York in his bohemian clothes – a flat hat and scarf. Then, as he starts to find success, we see his persona start to develop. Once the black shades come on, we almost never see his eyes again. His hair grows bigger and bigger. Others start dressing like him. It's fascinating to watch this cult of personality subtly develop.

A Complete Unknown is more of a musical than you may expect. Few music biopics include as much music as this movie does. As the story unfolds, I noticed how the lyrics of Dylan, known for his obtuse lyricism, actually reflect his life. For example, “Maggie's Farm” is more than the chronicle of a fed-up employee. It's about Dylan's discontent with having to do what someone else says; how he wants to do his own thing. It's a clever, if not altogether original (we saw it before in Bohemian Rhapsody), trope that helps weave the music into the story.

Despite the movie being about his breaking away from his folk roots, A Complete Unknown simultaneously shows us how deeply Dylan loves his craft and reveres the artists that came before him. It starts with his relationship with Scoot McNairy's Guthrie. This heartfelt relationship beautifully bookends the movie, and their final scene together is silent and poignant. There's also a small scene where Pete Seeger (played by Ed Norton) is filming a television show alongside a blues musician (played by Big Bill Morganfield, son of Muddy Waters). The musician offers Seeger a drink on air and Seeger, in line with his character, politely declines. When Dylan shows up, the curly-haired kid sits down with the musician, starts talking music, swigs from the musician's bottle and even is hesitant to touch the man's guitar, saying that to touch a man's guitar is like touching his woman.

Then, most importantly in the movie, there's Dylan's relationship with Boyd Holbrook's Johnny Cash. They have a few great scenes together but their strongest moment is close to the end. Dylan walks off the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival to a mix of boos and cheers. Seeger and others want him to go back out, do a couple acoustic songs and appease the crowd. Dylan, ever the contrarian, doesn't want to do it. But, among the panicked faces, Dylan sees Cash, stone-cold honest and understanding, holding his acoustic guitar out to the newly minted rock star. Then, either out of understanding or reverence, Dylan grabs Cash's acoustic guitar and goes to face the crowd again. All these scenes show Dylan's desire to find acceptance from the idols that he revered.

I have a friend that always talks about a movie's stakes. If things don't go the protagonist's way, what does the protagonist risk losing? I used to not much care about this concept but I've started thinking about it more and more. This is where A Complete Unknown starts to faulter.

The adversity that Dylan faces feels superficial, at best. He can't do original songs on his first album, but he does on his second album and finds greater success. He struggles to find consistent romance but it doesn't really seem to bother him, until his teary final scene with Elle Fanning's Sylvie Russo. Not only does it not seem to not bother him, he also doesn't have many, if any, romantic failures. Sylvie welcomes him back with little pushback; Joan Baez lets him in time and again. He plays by his own rules, but we rarely, if ever, see a dark side to Dylan. Being an independent iconoclast can make you a jerk, but it doesn't necessarily make you flawed. He stays up late writing songs and likes to take credit for his work. What of it? The dramatic climax, if you can even call it that, has Dylan deciding to play some songs at the Newport Folk Festival, a strictly acoustic venue, with a backing band and electric guitars. Everyone behind the stage, like Pete Seeger and Norbert Leo Butz's Alan Lomax, are worried that he's going to ruin the festival. Then he does it and some people boo but people also cheer. He walks off the stage and that's it. This is historically accurate, but it's also not very riveting.

In Straight Outta Compton, there was the scene where, in Detroit, the police threatened to shutdown the concert if N.W.A. played their hit song, “Fuck the Police.” They do the song anyways and chaos breaks out; the band is arrested and a riot starts. There is cause and effect. In A Complete Unknown, they act like this kind of bubbling explosion will happen at Newport, but it never really accumulates.

What are the consequences, if Dylan doesn't perform the electric songs at Newport? Probably nothing. He was still famous, still selling records like mad. Yes, the moment was monumental. It helped introduce the world to the concept of folk rock, a direction that Dylan would pioneer for years to come. It's a great genre, an influential genre, that deserves its praise. But that doesn't mean it makes for great cinematic storytelling. On screen, it felt like the folk community made a mountain out of a molehill.

For a movie that is about an enigma like Dylan, we rarely feel like we don't understand him. They mention his past and his real last name, but this thread isn't fully explored by Sylvie or anyone else. I know it's possible to use an enigma as a central character; I saw it only a few weeks ago in A Real Pain, but A Complete Unknown never really does this. It shows us that there are some questions about this man, but it doesn't blend the comprehensible with the incomprehensible like Jesse Eisenberg did in A Real Pain.

For a movie about a guy breaking genre boundaries and pushing the limits of music, this biopic feels surprisingly safe. For the more radical side of Dylan's influence, you only need to look at Chalamet's groundbreaking press tour for A Complete Unknown. That had more of the experimental, freewheeling spirit of Dylan than the actual movie. A Complete Unknown makes for great, family-friendly viewing, but it doesn't shock the world like Dylan did in 1965.