A Complete Unknown (USA, 2025)
Original title: A Complete Unknown
Director: James Mangold
Screenplay: James Mangold, Jay Cocks, Elijah Wald
Main cast: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Joe Tippett and Heriko Hatsune
Running time: 141 minutes
Making films about famous people has never been easy, but the job became even more complex when Bohemian Raphsody (2018) became a huge phenomenon, winning awards as much as it pleased the public – but not the specialized critics. Then, several projects like this were made: from the best, such as Rocketman (2019) to the worst, such as Back to Black (2014). So, even though it isn’t a great novelty to tell the lives of great people through the cinema screen, there has certainly been an increase in the popularity of this type of production.
It seems like an almost obvious step to make a film about Bob Dylan, one of the most important figures in American history in the last century. Not only is he the only composer to receive a Nobel Prize in literature, but he also had a huge impact in creating a fusion of sounds between the country’s classic folk and the newborn rock and roll. The film covers exactly this period, from Bob Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) arrival in New York to his famous concert in 1965 – which, in case you don’t know the story, I won’t give any spoilers because it’s the climax of the film.
Despite being very attached to traditional script structures, with well-specified narrative arcs and even little room for more creative ways, everything works very well because it doesn’t try to explain the artist’s entire life in just one work. For example, it doesn’t try to talk about the singer’s life before he got into music, or all the hits he released in his prolific career, moving away a little from the image of a biopic that needs to portray the artist’s life from its first breath to its last.
This is where the importance of a well-done casting of actors comes in, as does the director’s role. The trust James Mangold put on Chalamet was a great idea, and the result is shown on screen at all times. From his insistence on learning to play instruments to using his own voice in songs, the actor managed to achieve a truly impressive performance, both in terms of his resemblance to the real character and in his ability to advance the character’s development on screen, showing his conflicts and maturity. The character’s intensity is reflected on screen in the first few minutes, when we don’t see them speak – observation and introspection will be, as in the artist’s life, great allies. The work of Elle Fanning as his girlfriend Sylvie Russo and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez is also quite sensitive, showing the protagonist’s contradictions in his dealings with female figures.
The art direction is impeccable, recreating iconic looks from the time and transporting us to that moment through the objects presented in each character’s home. When this is combined with photography and editing that strive to capture the spirit of the time, showing, for example, the progress of the civil rights protests for black people in the US at the time and even behaviors that were common at the time – such as the absence of male domestic work – you have a perfectly credible work that allows you to immerse yourself in.
Perhaps its greatest difficulty lies in showing the nonconformity of the real Dylan in a more formal way, given that the film really has all the characteristics of the most classic American cinema. Ironically, it’s telling a story about innovations without using any of them itself. Even this creates a duality, at the same time allowing the story to be told and reach a large number of people, but also not seeming to reflect its own message of rebellion.
And thus, we have a film that clearly works for audiences and critics, but about which I would honestly like to know Bob Dylan’s opinion.
Translation by: Renata Torres
