Bob Dylan is a musician who has, over the course of a more-than-six-decade-long career, staunchly defied categorisation. For that reason, Todd Haynes’s experimental 2007 biopic, I’m Not There – which tells the legendary singer’s story in six segments, with a string of actors adopting his mop of curly hair and signature dark shades – felt like a fittingly unconventional way to bring his life to the big screen.
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, on the other hand – the new musical reimagining of Dylan’s early years in New York, in which he’s played by a softly-spoken, hollow-eyed Timothée Chalamet – is, for better and for worse, far more straightforward and accessible, inserting the Nobel Prize-winning icon into a more familiar, old-school narrative structure. In many ways, the result isn’t quite worthy of its enigmatic subject matter, but it also demands to be seen, if only for the virtuosic performance at its centre, as well as the incredible, frequently goosebump-inducing music which permeates this tale. Together, they make this flawed film pretty irresistible.
We first see Chalamet’s curmudgeonly, withdrawn young Dylan in 1961, as he’s stuffed into the back of a car hurtling towards Manhattan, aged 19. He’s left his midwestern hometown on a pilgrimage: his idol, the pioneering folk singer Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), is recovering at a psychiatric hospital in nearby New Jersey, and he’s determined to meet him. Before you know it, he does, playing him a simple tune on his guitar – the elegiac “Song to Woody”, which would end up on Dylan’s self-titled debut album just a year later – and blowing him away, along with his visiting friend and fellow luminary, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).
