A Complete Unknown (2024)

Here's the thing about A Complete Unknown: it's a perfectly decent film that somehow manages to make one of the most fascinating figures in twentieth century music feel like a Wikipedia summary. And that, for a biopic with this much talent behind it, is a genuine shame.

Timothée Chalamet is extraordinary. I mean that without any qualification. He doesn't just do a passable Dylan impression, he inhabits the man, the awkward magnetism, the deliberate mysteriousness, the voice that somehow gets under your skin whether you want it to or not. It's a proper transformative performance. And Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez more than matches him. Their scenes together crackle with a real, complicated tension, and Barbaro brings a warmth and strength to Baez that feels genuinely earned. Between the two of them, and an soundtrack that, let's be honest, was always going to be incredible given whose music it is, there's a lot to admire here.

But admiration isn't the same as satisfaction. And by the time the credits rolled, I felt strangely empty.

The problem is the film doesn't seem particularly interested in who Bob Dylan actually is. It's content to map out the key waypoints of his early career, the arrival in New York, the folk scene, the electric controversy at Newport, and treat those events as the whole story. We get the what. We barely get the why. What made this young man from Minnesota so driven, so guarded, so determined to keep reinventing himself the moment anyone thought they had him figured out? The film gestures at these questions and then moves on to the next scene.

Compare it to something like Walk the Line, or even Bohemian Rhapsody, which for all its well-documented liberties with the facts still managed to make you feel like you understood something about Freddie Mercury by the end. A Complete Unknown never quite gets there. Dylan remains, well, unknown. Whether that's an intentional artistic choice, honouring the man's own lifelong refusal to be decoded, or simply a structural weakness in the screenplay, I'm genuinely not sure. But either way, it leaves the audience at arm's length.

There's also a flatness to the pacing in the middle stretch that no amount of great music can entirely disguise. The film moves from scene to scene in a fairly dutiful, chronological fashion, and without much psychological depth to anchor us, some of it starts to blur together. You find yourself watching a series of events rather than living inside a story.

It reminded me a little of my experience with Beautiful Boy, another film built around a stunning central performance that I felt kept its subject at a slightly frustrating distance. Great acting can carry you a long way. It can't do everything.

I don't want to be too hard on it, because the things it does well, it does genuinely well. Chalamet alone is worth the price of a ticket. The concert sequences have real energy. And if you've any love for Dylan's music, you'll find plenty to enjoy in just hearing it played out in context. For a casual Sunday afternoon watch, it delivers.

But as a biopic, as an attempt to illuminate a genuinely complex and endlessly compelling human being, it pulls its punches. It settles for the surface when it should've gone digging. Three and a half stars, and I suspect most of those belong to the two leads.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2024  | Watched: 2025-05-16

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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