Who else could recreate a 20-year-old Bob Dylan capable of making Joan Baez, upon hearing a single performance, feel "of course, my heart completely melted, because it was so beautiful," besides Timothée Chalamet?
Scene from A Complete Unknown - Image IMdB
With his slender build, unruly curly hair, deep eyes that seem to wander into a realm unseen by others, and a raw, raw voice like a mixture of "sand and glue," Timothée Chalamet is perfectly qualified to play a sweet yet wicked young man, a cruel artist to those who love him, yet they still cannot help but love and forgive him.
In other words, Chalamet possesses all the qualities to bring the legend Bob Dylan back from the past. Except that the highly anticipated biographical film of early 2025, A Complete Unknown by director James Mangold, doesn't have the best script.
A Complete Unknown Trailer
Anonymous, or simply incomprehensible?
The film's title can be interpreted in two ways: "a completely unknown person," or "a person nobody understands."
The first interpretation corresponds to the film's setting in 1961, when Bob Dylan, alone with his guitar, traveled from Minnesota to New York to find his idol, the folk singer Woodie Wuthrie.
The second interpretation corresponds to the bottomless, untouchable depths of Bob's being—not even his friends, lovers, benefactors, or confidants.
But the way Mangold tells a linear story and then tries to decipher Bob Dylan in the familiar style of a biographical film makes us mistakenly believe we understand Bob Dylan, that his decision to switch to electric guitar – a pivotal moment in the history of popular music – stemmed solely from a desire to become the person that all the audience didn't want him to be.
Bob Dylan is portrayed in the film in a way that is complex yet… simple, simple enough to be summed up in a few words: he is a rebel, a breaker, an eccentric. All of that is exactly what one would expect, and that's precisely what makes it disappointing.
The constant internal conflict within Bob Dylan is inexplicable, which is why the best works about Bob Dylan always break down conventional structures: Todd Haynes's *I'm Not There* fragments Dylan's six personalities among six actors of varying ages and genders;
Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue, while presented as a documentary, is infused with fictional details, challenging the notion of distinguishing between truth and falsehood, fiction and non-fiction, official history and unofficial history.
Bob Dylan
I sleep with life and death in the same bed.
From the very beginning, those works established that one should never look at Bob Dylan's true face, because there is no such thing as a "true face" of that person.
Of course, A Complete Unknown also has its own audience. The film serves as an introduction to the legendary musician, and those new to learning about him will likely enjoy it, with its beautiful visuals seemingly cut from musical memory:
Bob Dylan strolls through the streets with Suze Rostolo (played by Elle Fanning) under the orange New York sun; or Bob Dylan on stage with Joan Baez (played by Monica Barbaro), sharing a microphone, singing "It Ain't Me Baby" while gazing lovingly at each other at the Newport Festival.
The actors' faces were all vibrant and beautiful – this was the 1960s, a decade of dreams, of rebellious culture, of a time when young people dared to stand up against an old, outdated world.
The most poignant moment in A Complete Unknown is when Joan Baez calls Bob Dylan. Before that, like everyone else, she didn't want him to give up folk music to pursue electric guitar. He persevered, despite all the objections, and he succeeded. She told him he had finally found his freedom.
Then there's a scene of Bob Dylan riding a high-powered motorcycle, embodying that freedom. The story of a hero (or anti-hero) gaining freedom is always captivating, but at the same time, it makes this a rather bland success story.
At age 80, Bob Dylan wrote a song with the line: "I sleep with life and death in the same bed." In other words, as long as you're alive, you have to struggle. A Complete Unknown , however, makes it seem as if Bob's struggle was completed in his twenties. If Bob Dylan achieved enlightenment and freedom so early, what else did he have left to pursue?
Bob Dylan is a troubadour and a star, a poet and a believer, a lover and a philosopher, a revolutionary and a "fugitive," an original storyteller and also a scavenger, or as he himself portrays: "I'll play both Beethoven's sonatas and Chopin's preludes. I have many faces."
Source: https://tuoitre.vn/timothee-chalamet-ban-lai-dien-muc-cua-bob-dylan-20250119084213336.htm
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