The Media Tourist

Timothée Chalamet channels Bob Dylan in tune-filled biopic about the young troubadour.

A Complete Unknown
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro
Directed by James Mangold
Rated R

In theaters Wednesday, Dec. 25

He hitchhiked a ride, in the back of a station wagon, into New York City in 1961—as a complete unknown—with dreams of becoming a successful singer/songwriter. That’s how this vibrant biopic of Bob Dylan begins, setting up its intoxicating whirl through the turbulent first half of the decade as the former Robert Zimmerman becomes the new “youthful” voice and face of folk music, setting the foundation for all that would follow.

And just this time last year, Timothée Chalamet was singing a different tune, as the spry young chocolatier Willy Wonka. Now he’s kicked it up a few notches and dug down deeper, giving a much more matured, grounded and finely nuanced performance as the enigmatic, petulant, creatively restless and intriguingly shape-shifting writer of such classics as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changing,” “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” He sings like Dylan, talks like Dylan, looks like Dylan and even nails Dylan’s tics and mannerisms. I’ll let true Bob Dylan scholars weigh in on the deep-dish accuracy, but to me, it sure feels like Chalamet could well be in the year-end Oscars race.

The movie introduces us to other real-life characters in Dylan’s early orbit. There’s banjo-playing elder statesman Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and the legendary Woody “This Land is Your Land” Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), twin pillars of era’s folk scene. Monica Barbaro, from NBC’s Chicago franchise (Chicago Justice and Chicago P.D.), brings fire, spice and ice as folksinger Joan Baez; her complicated and testy relationship with Dylan—she calls him an “asshole,” he disses her songwriting as something like “an oil painting at a dentist’s office”—becomes one leg of a romantic triangle with Bob and New York artist Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning). Ozark’s Charlie Tahan is Al Kooper—who’d later go on to found Blood, Sweat & Tears—as he scoots behind the Columbia studio’s Hammond B3 for a Dylan session and lays down the distinctive organ intro for “Like a Rolling Stone”  (a line from which the movie takes its title). And there’s country hitmaker Johnny Cash (Robert Holbrook), who becomes a pen pal and idol to young “Bobbie.”

Director James Mangold, whose wide-ranging movie and TV work also includes Walk the Line (2005), the Oscar-nominated biopic about Johnny Cash and wife June Carter, creates an authentic, almost encyclopedic milieu of the times, from music-makers in hippie-dippy clothes and smoky Greenwich Village coffeehouses to brow-creasing worries about Communists lurking everywhere, nuclear Armageddon and race riots in the aftermath of the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. It shows how folk music became instrumental in the social activism of its times, its songs confronting and colliding with politics to create seismic pop-culture shifts and upheaval.

A Complete Unknown is really all about Dylan, how he became interwoven into the larger social fabric of the ‘60s, and how the success he wanted so badly also brought him a suffocating level of acclaim that he didn’t. And it’s about how he continually worked to create and re-create himself, twisting and retooling his musical identity in a stubborn refusal to conform to anyone’s expectations—and how even people close to him felt like they didn’t really know him, who he really was, or who he wanted to be.

Fittingly, the movie ends in 1965, just after Dylan goes “rogue” at the iconic Newport Folk Festival, causing a near riot by introducing a jangly bombast of electric instruments and drums for his three-song closing set—and then coming out, with just his acoustic guitar, to sing “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” It’s his final kiss-off to the folk darling he used to be, and how he started. Then he roars off on his motorcycle.

Music fans will dig it for sure, and everyone else—including those too young to “remember” Bob Dylan or the ‘60s—can certainly appreciate the care and attention that clearly went into depicting the events, and finally the pivotal moment when the young troubadour, only in his mid-20s, shook off folk music’s dusty past and headed down a highway into the future. Like a rolling stone, indeed.

—Neil Pond