A Complete Unknown. 2024. USA. Directed by James Mangold. Screenplay by Mangold, Jay Cocks. With Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro. DCP courtesy Searchlight Pictures. 135 min.
Eschewing the caricature and spectacle of the slew of music biopics of the past two decades, James Mangold’s chronicle of Greenwich Village–era Bob Dylan is a startlingly intimate portrait of the artist as a young dissident. Timothée Chalamet plays Dylan the drifter, dropped with a guitar into lower Manhattan and soon couch-surfing at Pete Seeger’s Hudson Valley nature sanctuary. This young Dylan is notably aloof and naive, but when he climbs onto a barstool to croon following a crowd-pleasing number by Joan Baez (embodied with extraordinary verve by Monica Barbaro), it’s clear that his arrival will reshape the Village Beat crowd. A few years later, Dylan is now the prolific American critic, his fame surpassing his ability to maintain his numerous relationships: both with Baez and his on-again-off-again partner Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning), and even with his longtime mentor, Seeger. Seeger (a sublime Edward Norton) is dreading the possibility that Dylan and his band will plug in electric guitars at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—a pointed betrayal of their thriving folk community. Chalamet anchors the film, but it’s in his interactions with the supporting cast that the movie soars, most notably in touching interludes with an ailing Woody Guthrie at Greystone Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey.