Timothee Chalamet stars a young Bob Dylan at the beginning of his career, in director James Mangold’s A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. The biopic begins with the 19-year-old musician newly arrived in New York and visiting Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), hospitalized and rendered mute by his Huntington’s chorea. Guthrie’s friend and fellow social activist folk musician great Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) is there too, visiting Guthrie as he regularly did.
Seeger is polite to the young visitor but, at first, he assumes Dylan is just another fan, paying his respects to the legendary Woody Guthrie. That all changes when Dylan plays a song he wrote for Guthrie, and both Guthrie and Seeger are thunder-struck as they realize they are hearing a brilliant new talent. Seeger sets out to introduce young Bob Dylan to the central forces in the folk music movement in New York, including recording studio owners, and iconic figures like music ethnographer Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), and Dylan’s tough manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler). Seeger shepherds Dylan into the top tier of its Greenwich Village inner circle.
The biopic follows Dylan’s rise in the New York’s folk music community, then his leap to fame, and then up to the famous pivotal moment when he split with the folk music movement by going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
The music is one of the most delightful aspects of this top-notch drama. The film lets Bob Dylan fans revisit his music and his story, but the film also introduces that music to another generation, as it recounts the history. We hear all the Bob Dylan early hits, including the song that forms the title.
We meet other musical greats of the era, such as Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), and we get a sampling of their hits as well. The film covers Dylan’s personal life and love life as well as his music, and that includes his romance with Baez. Elle Fanning plays non-musician Sylvie Russo, which whom Timothee Chalamet’s Dylan pursues and then has a long up-and-down affair, in a nice performance. But the one who comes on strongest in the film is Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, already a star when Dylan arrives and the only seemingly not awed by his talent. Her strong-will and independence make her irresistible to Dylan but set up round after round of conflict, giving the film a bit dramatic kick and an unpredictability.
In this warts-and-all biopic, Chalamet is both charming and callous as the talented but sometimes selfish Dylan, but the most impressive performance comes from Edward Norton, who is astonishing as he channels folk legend Pete Seeger. As someone who met the real Pete Seeger late in his life, I was struck by how perfectly Edward Norton captured Seeger’s posture and mannerisms, his speech cadence, and even more his personality, his combination of gentleness, tact and yet total determination that you will do it his way.
The film does a wonderful job evoking that era of folk music and artists in the smokey, underground cafes of Greenwich Village. The folk music movement aimed to spread appreciation of traditional music played on traditional instruments, with a sense of social activism and awareness, with a big pro-union base. Pete Seeger had taken on leadership in that movement, but he and all the folk music supporters were thrilled by the star power and public attention Bob Dylan brought to their cause.
With A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, James Mangold is top of his game, crafting an excellent biopic filled with glorious music and a spot-on, perfect recreation of a vanished time and New York’s folk music community at it’s height.
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN opens Wednesday, Dec. 25, in theaters.
RATING: 4 out of 4 stars
