A Complete Unknown review: Timothee Chalamet embodies Bob Dylan’s once-in-a-generation coolness

REVIEW

The rocker is too mercurial a figure for a biopic to ever fully capture him – but this gorgeous film comes as close as you could hope.

When Walk the Line sauntered into cinemas in 2005, no one could have foreseen the havoc it would go on to wreak. James Mangold’s life of Johnny Cash pinned down the rock-star biopic recipe so precisely that the recipe itself just looked like ludicrous cliche in its wake. So almost two decades later – and with 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story having spoofed the form so mercilessly in the interim, making the likes of Bohemian Rhapsody look even more cornily formulaic than they were – Mangold deserves no little credit for personally getting the genre back on its feet.

His new film about Bob Dylan’s rise to stardom is a dream – as accessible to newcomers as it is rewarding for die-hards, with a rivetingly lived-in central performance from Timothee Chalamet, a keen eye for immersive detail, and a gorgeously tactile, five-o-clock-shadow-rough surface.

Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan.

And it only pulls this off because the whole enterprise feels fresh – though note that Mangold’s film, named after a lyric from Like a Rolling Stone, isn’t actually that wild or innovative. We’re not talking about Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis – one of the recent life-of-a-rock-god films to neatly sidestep the Walk Hard curse.

In fact, A Complete Unknown’s defiantly trad style does mean it struggles towards the end to capture the sheer shock value of Dylan’s controversial 1965 show at the Newport Folk Festival, where he performed with electric instruments and unveiled his new rockier sound.

Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash. Photo / YouTube

But the secret to the rest is there was no secret all along. Mangold and his co-writer Jay Cocks have just simply looked at every stock scene and hackneyed line in the genre’s repertoire and avoided them all. Not every last one: there are the expected moments in which suits exchange greedy glances in the recording studio, and song lyrics sync up a little too neatly with biographical details. But for the most part, the film plays like a juicy rise-to-power drama rather than a scenic tour of an artist’s Wikipedia page.

It also boasts two unfussily terrific performances at its core. One is from the sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated Chalamet, who miraculously embodies the young Dylan’s once-in-a-generation coolness, genius and truculence. (He partly makes you want to worship him, and partly tear your own hair out, perhaps followed by his.) The cast all sing their own songs, and if there’s a problem with Chalamet’s voice, it’s that it’s slightly too good.

The other great asset is Edward Norton as Dylan’s sometime-mentor Pete Seeger, a folk-music pioneer and purist and founder of the Newport festival at which Dylan’s reputation was first minted, then melted down and re-cast.

Mangold frames each man as the other’s opposite: past versus future, precise versus spontaneous, transparent versus opaque. Yet the tension between them never snaps into rivalry – rather it vibrates away fruitfully, as tight and tuneful as a steel-string. Seeger hears tradition in Dylan’s work, but also its ferocious overturning – and Norton’s subtle expression of the older musician’s sadness and wonder at this is where the soul of Mangold’s film is rooted.

The rest of the supporting cast is largely made up of nicely judged famous-face turns, from Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash to Monica Barbaro’s duskily charismatic Joan Baez, whose fling with Dylan (during his longer relationship with Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo, who turns the singer on to the power and commercial value of protest) leads to tensions on stage.

Perhaps Dylan himself is too mercurial a figure for a biopic to ever capture him completely – indeed, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There gloried in the futility of the task. But A Complete Unknown comes about as close as one could reasonably hope.

A Complete Unknown is in New Zealand cinemas from January 23.