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Film Review — A Complete Unknown

James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet is catnip for fans and fascinating for general audiences

Simon Dillon
Simon Dillon Cinema

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Credit: Searchlight Pictures

I suspect fans of Bob Dylan will love director James Mangold’s musical drama A Complete Unknown. Mangold’s screenplay, co-written by Jay Cocks, is adapted from Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald. The film features an excellent lead in Timothée Chalamet and a cornucopia of classic tracks, spanning his early Greenwich Village years playing folk festivals to his subsequent enraging of traditionalists by playing electric rather than acoustic guitars. Calling this a biopic is arguably inaccurate, as this isn’t so much about Bob Dylan as his most famous music. However, three of his key relationships are explored; two of them romantic.

The non-romantic one concerns the friendships with his hospitalised musical inspiration, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), and with Guthrie’s friend Pete Seeger (Edward Norton). Bob meets and regularly visits Woody, playing him songs. Woody and Pete immediately see the spark of genius in Bob’s music, and the latter gives him a leg up in performing and getting a record deal. Subsequent events follow the inevitable timeline of music biopics, with humble beginnings, breakthroughs, fame, and too much fame following. But Bob Dylan’s story doesn’t feature…

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