The American actor offers an impressive performance as Bob Dylan in this commendable biopic
Movie review originally published in Counter Arts on Medium on July 19, 2026
I first discovered Timothée Chalamet in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a visually and emotionally intoxicating film based on a novel by André Aciman. In that feature, which rightly boasts a 7.8 rating on IMDb, Chalamet is Elio, a 17-year-old who spends his summer at a vacation villa his parents own in northern Italy. There, he falls under the spell of Oliver (Armie Hammer), an American doctoral student. Their passion fizzes with tension and excitement. It’s a relationship that feels authentic and, in true Guadagnino fashion, beautiful, despite the pervasive cynicism of our age.
Chalamet was remarkable and memorable in that film. He was good in the Dune movies too, but I confess I didn’t have the patience to watch them in their entirety when they aired on TV. But then I learned he played Bob Dylan in a new biopic, and I was excited about seeing him act again since I’ve long been a fan of Bob Dylan and now I was a big fan of Chalamet as well. And the movie, A Complete Unknown (with a rating of 7.3 on IMDb), didn’t disappoint.
Unlike Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007), an art-house atmospheric feature about Dylan’s shifting identities that I enjoyed but don’t remember much of (which is probably my fault, for being insufficiently familiar at the time with Dylan’s life and career), James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024) is anchored by a strong plot about Dylan’s early years as a poet and musician till he goes electric in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival.
In this latter movie, Chalamet not only captures the feel of Dylan’s persona at the time — at least how it comes across in photos and videos — but he also sings Dylan’s songs. I admit this was quite a surprise, just like Marisa Abela in the new Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black (2024). Only Chalamet inhabited Dylan’s persona better, I think. Still in an affected way, much like Abela, but Mangold’s movie is more solid, more grounded in an expansive view of Dylan’s life even as it deals only with a small part of it. Back to Black unfortunately pins Amy Winehouse as a woman addicted to booze and drugs and her lover Blake, spending much less time presenting the beautiful wings her personality and music possessed.
A Complete Unknown is more substantial, connecting Dylan’s mysterious charm to real-life events, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Writers James Mangold, Jay Cocks, and Elijah Wald do a great job at evoking the sense of impending doom with only a few elements — radios blaring, the eerie sense of foreboding in the streets as people moved about, scared, or gathered in dive bars to escape the weight of those days — and Chalamet also manages to convey Dylan’s experience of it all, as an artist tormented both by the news and a muse that went beyond immediate reality — without laying it too thick.
Dylan was dating Sylvie Russo at the time — portrayed in the movie with understated sensibility by Elle Fanning — but he had met Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) two years previously and, though he didn’t evince it much, he quickly became taken with her. Just like Chalamet, Barbaro also performed as a singer in the movie, and, no matter how intense her training was, to try to capture the signature vocals of young Baez, with her pure, lustrous soprano trills of operatic power, it was still stunning to see that she could make her act believable in the context of the movie. That is to say, no one can be a good-enough tribute to Dylan or Baez on stage, but these two young actors were formidable in their attempt to bathe themselves in these two famous musicians’ charm and the atmosphere of the era when they met and fell in love.
Edward Norton’s performance as Pete Seeger was also a great casting choice. Norton captured the sensitivity of the folk singer who took Dylan under his wing when he arrived in New York in 1961 and then took him to the stage of the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, and who then felt brushed aside by the younger artist’s growing confidence and pride as he came famous and wanted to chart his own way. This culminated, of course, with the clash at the 1965 Newport Festival, when Dylan decided to use an electric guitar, something that Seeger couldn’t countenance.
There’s also Woody Guthrie in the film, played with fierce tenderness by Scoot McNairy. By the time nineteen-year-old Dylan visits Guthrie, his main icon in folk music, the older musician is in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from Huntington’s disease. He would spend eleven years there, and Dylan would often visit, singing some of his new songs and playing his guitar and harmonica to Guthrie’s delight.
Mangold’s movie is about all that and much more. What it does best is present Dylan’s life and first milestones in a way that feels fresh and surprising, as if we were witnessing Dylan’s trajectory as a musician for the first time. As other critics have noted, when Dylan is about to go electric at Newport in 1965, we’re there with Seeger wondering, will he, or won’t he? And Chalamet doesn’t go ahead of himself. Rather than projecting an actor who has his lines and act down pat, he seems to settle into his role gradually, alongside the viewers.
A Complete Unknown is a wonderful tribute to young Bob Dylan. I highly recommend it.
Enjoy!
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To a happier, healthier life,
Mira
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