The Christmas release of James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, had been one of my most anticipated since photos from the set were first released in early 2024.
Why wouldn’t it be? I’m a massive Bob Dylan fan — he’s always been one of my favorite artists. I grew up with my parents constantly playing his music, and my appreciation has only grown with time. James Mangold’s 2005 Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line, essentially cemented the musician biopic genre (and was brutally parodied just two years later by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story). I also love nearly all of Timothée Chalamet’s films and performances. For me, the subject matter and the actor are a perfect match.
I also love music biopics. Rocketman, the Elton John biopic, was one of my favorite films of 2019, and I even went through an obsessive phase with the often-criticized Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018. So, I went into A Complete Unknown with incredibly high expectations. Unfortunately, I walked out feeling mostly disappointed — and in the weeks since my first viewing, my opinion has only soured further.
A Complete Unknown chronicles the early years of Bob Dylan’s career, beginning with his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961, his relationships with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, and culminating in the infamous “Dylan goes electric” controversy at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. If you’re going to focus on a period of Dylan’s life, I have to admit, this one offers plenty of meat for a filmmaker to sink their teeth into.
A Complete Unknown had plenty of strong moments — by no means was it a complete letdown. I particularly enjoyed how many of the performance sequences were staged and shot, even if there were far too many of them (which I’ll get into later). The performances delivered not only by Chalamet but also by Monica Barbaro (Baez), Edward Norton (Seeger), and Elle Fanning (Sylvie Russo, Dylan’s girlfriend) were strong and worthy of award consideration. And, of course, the music itself was outstanding.
What cripples A Complete Unknown at every turn is its weak script. This is especially disappointing because the actors deliver some truly incredible performances — but they do so in spite of the script, not because of it. Every line that rolls off Chalamet’s tongue as Dylan feels like it was generated by AI — so mystical and collected that it sounds like he’s quoting himself. There’s no nuance in how Bob Dylan is written. Yes, Dylan is a brilliant man and gifted lyricist, but are we really expected to believe he spoke in Blonde on Blonde vocabulary and cadence all the time? Eventually, I found myself rolling my eyes at the ridiculous dialogue the writers had Chalamet deliver in his Dylan drawl. For Chalamet’s sake, I wish the script had fleshed out its version of Dylan more, because his performance never truly felt like an embodiment to me — rather, it was a solid impression.
I was also disappointed by how the film handled Baez and Russo, the two women Dylan juggled relationships with over the film’s four-year span. I didn’t expect them to have central roles — it’s not their story, after all — but they’re about as two-dimensional as “important” characters can be. Both seemed to exist solely to gaze longingly at Dylan or get angry with him when the plot required it, with almost no depth or interiority. As a Baez fan, I found her portrayal especially frustrating. Here we have an icon of the folk music scene — the inspiration behind some of Dylan’s most beloved songs — yet the film reduces her to little more than an object. And with how underdeveloped Dylan’s character was, it became impossible to understand why these women kept coming back to him. The film wants to suggest his enigmatic genius was enough to keep Baez and Russo on a short leash, but the script simply doesn’t do enough to make him compelling.
As I’ve reflected on A Complete Unknown in the month since I first saw it, I find myself struggling to understand the film’s intent. It doesn’t provide any insight into Dylan’s background, nor does it attempt to show how a teenager from Minnesota evolved into the greatest songwriter of all time. It barely explores why he chose to go electric at the Newport Folk Festival, stripping away nearly all of the cultural context that led to that pivotal moment. Instead, the film awkwardly jumps from folk-era Dylan to the black-suit-and-sunglasses Dylan, leaving a frustrating gap. I left the theater without feeling like I’d gained any new understanding of Bob Dylan or his genius.
And while I did enjoy the musical numbers — purely because I adore Dylan’s music — it felt like Mangold packed the 140-minute runtime with performances to distract from the lack of meaningful plot development. A few of the Like a Rolling Stone scenes could have easily been trimmed to make room for some actual character progression. A Complete Unknown isn’t anywhere near the worst film of 2024, but it tops my list as the most disappointing. The period of Bob Dylan’s life it portrays is rich with potential for a dynamic, fascinating story, yet the film settles into a mostly formulaic snoozefest that left me wanting more. When the most engaging music biopic released on Christmas Day features a CGI monkey playing Robbie Williams, you know something’s gone wrong.