'A Complete Unknown': A portrait of the artist as a young asshole

Could this be the beginning of the Bob Dylan Cinematic Universe?

Over the holidays, sitting around talking one night with several extended family members, whose ages range from their late 20s to early 70s, the subject of the worst concert we’ve ever seen came up. Surprisingly, there was a consensus answer: Bob Dylan.

I saw Dylan at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side around 2004. I was 18. He would have been about 63. For over two unbearable hours, a raspier than ever Dylan whisper-sang his way through the deepest of deep cuts. He sprinkled in a couple of his biggest hits, albeit with arrangements that made them totally unrecognizable until you heard the lyrics. There was no banter, there were no stories. He was indifferent to the presence of the audience. I can’t imagine who, other than the most pathologically obsessive Dylan fanatic, would have enjoyed that show. My relatives had nearly identical experiences seeing him a decade before and a decade after my experience. This is what he does live.

There are two ways of explaining why Dylan seems almost allergic to giving the audience what they want. One is he’s supremely committed to his own artistic integrity. Another is that the guy is an asshole. “A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s shiny, smooth around the edges biopic of Dylan’s early years suggests the answer is both. Think of it as a portrait of the artist as a young asshole.

Dylan is a chameleon, updating and modifying his persona as the decades have dragged on and his interests have changed. He’s been everything from a folk troubadour to an evangelical Christian revivalist to a super group member to an elder statesman of rock. “A Complete Unknown” marks Dylan’s latest transformation for the age of IP. It’s his superhero origin story, a way to introduce him to Gen Z with the yassified visage of sexy rat-twink Timothée Chalamet.

“A Complete Unknown” takes place between 1961 — when a young pageboy cap-wearing Dylan hitchhikes his way to New York City to sing folk songs — and 1965, a turning point in music history when Dylan caused an uproar by making rock-n-roll. “Dylan goes electric” is still shorthand for an artist defying their audience. In 2025, when Beyonce can follow up an album of gay club bangers with a megahit country music classic, a time where an artist expanding into a new genre would elicit boos and accusations of “Judas” from their fans seems unimaginable.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at Baby Boomers recounting how revolutionary and subversive Dylan’s action was. Whoa, man! This was rock-n-roll! Pretty dangerous stuff! “A Complete Unknown,” from a script by Mangold and Jay Cocks (lol… cocks), based on a book by Elijah Wald, does a decent job of portraying how rigid the walls between folk and rock were 60 years ago.

The movie has several other strengths, too. A musical biopic lives or dies by the performances of the songs that made its subject famous. Chalamet is too pretty and he doesn’t sound much like Dylan either. But “A Complete Unknown” is at its best and most captivating when the characters sing. Chalamet, using his real voice and wearing a fake nose, wisely eschews the nasally Dylan impression most people resort to during karaoke. Like Angela Bassett as Tina Turner or Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison, the differences between Chalamet and the young Dylan become blurred in your mind until they merge into one. The same can be said for Monica Barbaro, who is wonderful as Joan Baez.

Baez is presented as a perfect foil to Dylan. She’s beautiful, funny, more famous, maybe even more talented – and she doesn’t put up with his bullshit. “You’re kind of an asshole, aren’t you Bob?” she asks him after the first night they spend together. Barbaro and Chalamet have palpable chemistry. Every moment they spend on screen together is electricity.

Less can be said of Chalamet and Elle Fanning, who plays Sylvie Russo, a fictionalized version of Dylan’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who appeared with him on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” I’ve read that the real Dylan requested Rotolo’s name be changed, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because Sylvie is a pathetic doormat who allows the asshole in Dylan to trample over her emotions and sense of dignity again and again. What she sees in him, beyond his talent, is never clear. That’s one of the biggest problems with “A Complete Unknown.”

For someone so iconic, Dylan is a deeply enigmatic figure. He’s spent the better part of seven decades in the public eye crafting his own lore. When he gives interviews, he often speaks cryptically. He seems to enjoy fucking with us. He’s the original troll.

“A Complete Unknown,” a lyric cribbed from “Like a Rolling Stone,” doesn’t just refer to Dylan’s status as a nobody wanting to break through. It also describes your understanding of who he is and what makes him tick. He’s completely unknowable.

Mangold tries to make up for this by depicting how Dylan’s world historic presence impacts the lives of the more emotionally accessible characters. We spend the most time with folk legend Pete Seeger, an early Dylan mentor who becomes one of his harshest critics when he goes electric. Played by Edward Norton with a shaved back hairline and a fake nose (this movie loves a prosthetic schnoz), Seeger is an overly earnest soy boy, who like many leftists is irritatingly obsessed with rules. Seeger joins together with other middle aged men of folk, led by the musicologist Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), to ostensibly become the villains of this movie, as they try to block Dylan from the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when they don’t like his new sound.

There’s an interesting “the apprentice has become the master” storyline to Dylan and Seeger’s relationship, but “A Complete Unknown” is so overstuffed, it barely has enough time to breathe. At one point, Dylan says he has “a lot of plates in the air.” So does this movie. Three women, three albums, multiple live performances. Johnny Cash, Woody Gutherie, Albert Grossman, Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, and a whole bunch of other people with their own Wikipedia pages pop up too.

You don’t need to be a fan of Dylan’s, just of cinema, to have seen this all before. D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Don’t Look Back” follows Dylan on his 1965 tour of England, as he was toggling between folk and rock, and pissing off his fans – the momentous period where “A Complete Unknown” climaxes. Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary “No Direction Home,” the title of which is also pulled from a “Like A Rolling Stone” lyric, covers all the same material as Mangold’s film in greater depth.

The Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” follows a folk singer in 1961 Greenwich Village who is not Bob Dylan, but is very much like him – perhaps an acknowledgement that Dylan is difficult to fictionalize as a protagonist. Todd Haynes had the greatest success with “I’m Not There,” where Dylan is split into six different characters representing his various personas, played by actors as different as Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, and an 11 year old Black boy. By refusing to depict a literal Dylan, Haynes reaches a greater understanding of his artistry. (Blanchett, as “Jude Quinn,” the electric era Dylan, opens up a guitar case, takes out a gun, and fires upon the audience at the Newport Folk Festival. It’s fantastic.) With each segment shot in a different style, “I’m Not There” is also a hell of a lot more fun to watch at than Mangold’s perfectly color graded, digitally soft looking expanse of vintage cars, clothing, and furniture. But the Baby Boomers in your life will probably prefer the unchallenging “A Complete Unknown” a lot more. (Mileage with “A Complete Unknown” varies a lot with age.)

“I’m Not There” is also a reminder that Dylan’s most famous period might not be his most interesting – something confirmed by “A Complete Unknown.” I think Dylan was most fascinating during his gospel period, which lasted from the late 70s to the early 80s. Dylan, a Jew whose real name is Robert Zimmerman, turned to evangelical Christianity and began handing out Bibles at his concerts. (Big asshole move!)

You could call it “Gotta Serve Somebody.” I’d watch Chalamet play that role in about 10 years. They could make a whole Dylan Cinematic Universe, with Chalamet playing him in each part of his life. Sounds awful? Well, the IP must be refreshed. This isn’t the 1960s. Gotta give the people what they want, which is nothing new and nothing different.

“A Complete Unknown” is now playing in theaters.