Review: Timothee Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan in ‘A Complete Unknown’ sings, but movie hits some flat notes

What would it have been like to be around when Bob Dylan hit it big?

If you’re in your 70s, you may remember but for the rest of us, that’s the feeling “A Complete Unknown” wants to capture. The movie opens as teenaged Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in New York from his native Minnesota. Almost immediately, he meets folk legends Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), whose “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” is both the first and last song in the film.

In a blink of an eye, he has released “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” an album so packed with enduring songs that it now feels like a greatest hits record: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Girl From the North Country,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” are all on it.

“A Complete Unknown” is about the milieu in which those songs were created and the enigmatic man who created them. Writer/director James Mangold, who also made the Johnny Cash/June Carter Cash movie “Walk the Line,” uses creamy, burnished visuals to suggest the recent past and re-create the potent Greenwich Village scene that produced so many memorable artists (Joan Baez floats in and out of Dylan’s circle, too).

Dylan wasn’t yet famous and Mangold manages to capture a feeling of freshness and discovery with a smart musical tactic. Many of the iconic songs are sung not in performance scenes, where they might appear to be already carved in stone, but in Dylan’s apartment, singing either to himself or to an audience of one. It feels almost like we’re discovering the songs as he does.

Chalamet, whose range and confidence keep growing broader, is sensational as Dylan. He shares a slightness with the singer but, other than that, doesn’t look or sound much like him. Still, he gets at some essence that makes us believe. His voice (it’s all Chalamet’s singing) sounds more trained than Dylan’s but smoothly suggests the conversational, slightly nasal quality that helped the folk singer capture the music world’s imagination.

Another smart Mangold choice is to avoid the cradle-to-grave approach of most biopics. In “Complete Unknown” (the title comes from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”), we know next to nothing about Dylan’s first two decades in Minnesota, other than a shot of a Gophers pin in his scrapbook. The movie covers about four years, ending after, controversially, the future Nobel Prize winner “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival.

“A Complete Unknown” doesn’t pretend to have answers about where Dylan’s sound came from but, by focusing on a tight frame, it’s able to hint at the influences and ideas the songwriter was taking in. It also has room to include formative people, starting with Seeger — who, in Norton’s sweetly self-effacing performance, introduces him to folk movers and shakers (Seeger memorably refers to Dylan as “a glimpse of a new road”).

There’s also Baez (Monica Barbaro) and girlfriend Sylvie Russo (her real name was Suze Rotolo; she’s the woman on the cover of “Freewheelin’” with Dylan). As movingly played by Elle Fanning, Sylvie ignites Dylan’s social conscience and tries, unsuccessfully, to keep him from becoming dazzled by fame.

Although Dylan has endorsed the movie in a viral tweet and lent it his music rights, “A Complete Unknown” is not a sunny portrait of its hero. At times, he’s depicted as selfish, rude, disloyal and unprofessional. Mangold, and the uncanny Chalamet, remind us that the Dylan of the movie is very young and very much still figuring things out.

That’s all to the good but it’s hard not to wish that a biopic of an enigmatic, unconventional performer weren’t so utterly conventional. Dylanologists will think, inevitably, of the other biopic — Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There,” which required seven actors (three of ‘em Oscar winners) to wrap its head around the slippery persona of Dylan.

A movie doesn’t need to be as bold as “I’m Not There” to tell the Dylan story. But it’s telling that the best scene in “A Complete Unknown” is one in which, like “I’m Not There,” our view of the protagonist comes via fractured reflections off other characters. It’s the Newport Folk Festival scene where, during a performance of “The Times, They Are a-Changin’,” Mangold cuts to the faces of those in attendance — baffled audience members, heartbroken Sylvie, dejected Seeger, dazzled Cash, fiery Baez — to suggest the doors that Dylan will be blasting open next and the damage he may leave behind.

It’s another glimpse of a new road for Dylan, who would travel down many of them in the years after 1965. And, like the rest of “A Complete Unknown,” it’s a bracing reminder that there was a time when these old familiar songs were brand new.

A Complete Unknown

**1/2 out of 4 stars

Rated: R.

Where: In theaters Dec. 25.