A Complete Unknown - The New Movie On Bob Dylan Starring Timothée Chalamet And Edward Norton (2024)

A few days ago I saw A Complete Unknown, the new film biography on Bob Dylan. As a movie with a coherent storyline, fabulous acting - especially by its star, Timothée Chalamet - you couldn't ask for more.

Unusually, for a mainstream Hollywood film, it's mostly accurate. That means a lot to me because I've always been a curmudgeon when movies and TV shows play too fast and loose with historical facts so much that the viewer gets a totally skewed view of real events. Because I liked the movie a lot and wanted to continue liking it, I began researching its historical accuracy online after I got home. 
I'm OK with the liberties director James Mangold took because he didn't change the intent of the storyline. According to the website, Shortlist, it doesn't matter that actress Elle Fanning's character, Sylvie Russo, is an entirely different woman than Suze Rotolo who was Dylan's real first girlfriend in New York. (Rotolo is the young woman photgraphed walking with the future star on the front cover of his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.) Russo exists mostly to point out there really was a young woman in New York who served as Dylan's muse when he first arrived in the big city. Her personal story is not the focal point. 

Fanning's character was changed at the request of the protagonist because Rotolo wasn't known to the general public. Dylan asked that her privacy be respected even though she passed away in 2011, thirteen years before A Complete Unknown was released, so it's obvious the singer-songwriter had some input into the making of the movie. That's a little surprising because it doesn't really show him in a favorable light.
Chalamet and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez did all of the singing themselves, and it must be said that while the actress can sing she is not a match for the folk queen's powerfully sweet voice. On the other hand Chalamet is a better vocalist than Dylan. (That's not a terribly hard feat to accomplish even though he's one of the few singers with a bad voice that I can listen to without cringing.) 
I've always liked Edward Norton and he's personable here as the legendary Pete Seeger, and Chalamet's performance could very well win the best actor award at Oscar time.

One final point. A Complete Unknown doesn't cover Dylan's entire life like other flicks on iconic musicians have done. The story spans only a specific time period, beginning in 1961 when the Minnesota native arrived in New York to pursue his dream and ends in 1965 after after becoming a legend who was was booed off of the stage at the Newport Folk Festival for having the nerve to play rock music with an electric band. These were the years that turned Robert Zimmerman into Bob Dylan.
You don't have to be a rabid Dylan fan to enjoy the movie, but if you want to know what made him the huge icon he is today - and what was happening musically in the first half of the 60s - it will be worth your time to buy a ticket.     

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