A Complete Unknown Review: Timothée Chalamet Is Captivating In An Otherwise Meandering Musical Biopic

What makes someone like Timothée Chalamet both a movie star and occasionally difficult to watch is that his screen presence prevents him from truly disappearing into roles — whoever he's playing, you can always see him. Timothée Chalamet as Willy Wonka. Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides. Not so, however, with "A Complete Unknown." As Bob Dylan, he seems as though he's finally found a role that he can melt into, embodying the presence of the enigmatic singer-songwriter rather than simply doing an impression. The film itself is not without its flaws, particularly in the development of its script, but it's one of Chalamet's most interesting performances yet.

As we first meet Bob Dylan, he's just 19 years old, hitchhiking to New York City in a bid to meet his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). When he finally tracks him down to a hospital where the older musician is being treated for end-stage Huntington's Disease, he plays "Song to Woody," a love letter to the singer who influenced his music so significantly. But although Dylan embraces his influences and the roots of folk music, "A Complete Unknown" is all about the process by which his style changes over the years, partially in response to his own evolving tastes, partially out of a desire to try something new. His expansive vision of folk music is what leads to his mainstream success, but it also earns him some enemies when he pushes too far out of his fans' comfort zone.

The star of this show is Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, who impresses with both his acting prowess and singing chops. His on-stage performances as Dylan are electric (forgive the pun), and he imbues classic 1960s folk songs with a freshness and urgency that makes them feel as though they were written yesterday. But the strength of "A Complete Unknown" is that as much as Chalamet necessarily centers the production, he is surrounded by a host of strong supporting actors who make an immediate impression, adding depth to Dylan's world of 1960s New York. Edward Norton's take on Pete Seeger is understated but undeniably effective, playing him as a mild-mannered musician who serves as a mentor to Dylan in his early years but finds himself increasingly protective of folk music at the expense of their relationship. 

As Dylan's popularity grows, he shines a light on folk music, but also threatens its purity as a niche genre — the more it moves into the mainstream, the more Dylan experiments in blending it with pop music, the less he recognizes it. Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez is utterly captivating: when she's performing, the air crackles around her, and you can see immediately the impact she has on her audiences. Scoot McNairy's performance of Woody doesn't see him get to do a whole lot — by the time we meet the folk giant, he's lost his power of speech to Huntington's — but he provides a powerful emotional core to the film. The only member of the main cast who struggles is Elle Fanning, who is criminally underused as little more than Dylan's girlfriend, and falls victim to the film's tendency to hop from important Dylan moment to important Dylan moment.

The music is delightful, the performances are entertaining, and everything is shot beautifully, but the biggest weakness of "A Complete Unknown" is its overarching structure. It attempts to capture the trajectory of Bob Dylan's career throughout the 1960s, but there's no real narrative thrust or, for that matter, dramatic tension. His efforts to creatively challenge himself by expanding the parameters of his chosen genre create conflict with other characters, especially Pete Seeger, but Dylan himself seems to care so little about the opinions of others that you don't end up feeling the weight of that conflict. It's no skin off Dylan's back whether the organizers of the Newport Folk Festival are peeved at him for going electric, and with the benefit of hindsight we know that this gambit of his is all going to work out fine, so it all feels bizarrely anticlimactic. Dylan himself feels as though he's simply shuffling from career point to career point, and we aren't given enough insight into his thought process for there to be any meaningful form to it.

As a musical biopic –- a cinematic genre that's fraught with a number of potential pitfalls — "A Complete Unknown" is fairly successful. But that's largely thanks to the lead performance of Timothée Chalamet, who takes an interesting step forward in his career with this role that showcases different facets of him as an actor. And although director James Mangold makes a lot of choices that work — the focus on musical performances as a lens through which we view the actors, for one — from a narrative perspective, "A Complete Unknown" suffers under the weight of the subgenre's inherent limitations. The plot, like Dylan himself, seems to be meandering, and while it's an interesting parallel, the end result is a film that feels more than a little listless whenever someone's not singing.

"A Complete Unknown" hits theaters on December 25.