A Complete Unknown

“A Complete Unknown is really about a few white men dueling over the fate of folk, with little room for the Black artists who created the genre in the first place.”

Title: A Complete Unknown (2024)
Director: James Mangold 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writer: James Mangold 👨🏼🇺🇸 and Jay Cocks 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Clint Worthington 👨🏼🌈🇺🇸

Technical: 4/5

James Mangold is old hat to sumptuous snapshots of American pop culture history—2005’s Walk the Line, after all, served a soup-to-nuts account of Johnny Cash’s life in folk and rock music. So it stands to reason that his latest, A Complete Unknown, similarly soaks itself in midcentury American politics and music. This time, viewers spend six years in the life of impish troubadour Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), from his arrival in New York City to “going electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

To its credit, A Complete Unknown is a solid work, a down-the-middle biopic that at once adheres to and avoids some of the pitfalls associated with the genre. It’s handsomely put together, with impressive period detail in the cars, costumes, set dressings, and even in the microphones and guitars Robert Zimmerman and his cadre use. Chalamet’s turn as Dylan is suitably lauded, all shrugged shoulders and mumbled aphorisms; his Bobby is a mercurial figure, a man who just wants to sing songs and evolve himself, but who bristles at the massive fame and expectations placed on him by both his mentors (including Ed Norton as a gentle, sing-songy Pete Seeger) and the public at large.

Granted, the mystique that Chalamet brings to Dylan makes A Complete Unknown a bit narratively lifeless: We all know Dylan’s story, and the gentleness of his antagonists make his quest to go electric and conquer the world of folk with his own sound becomes a bit of a foregone conclusion. But there’s something intriguing about the matter-of-factness with which Mangold approaches the material. It’s as if history is pulling Dylan down a road he must, in fact, walk down, whether he wants to or not. And the ease of his beatnik persona is part of that shield he puts up against the expectations people have of him to walk down said road.

It’s really a showcase for the musical sequences, which are numerous and make up much of A Complete Unknown’s technical prowess. For all Chalamet’s reediness, he captures the mannerisms and tone of Dylan’s voice quite well, and Mangold gives us many renditions of Dylan’s faves, and those of his contemporaries, to let us enjoy their elegant recreations. As a stealth jukebox musical, it’s perhaps most successful.

Gender: 2/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

However, as is common for biographies about the men who shape pop music, A Complete Unknown is decidedly male-centric. The film’s version of Dylan is a womanizer through and through, a man closed off to all, even his closest friends. As such, the women in his life also struggle to break through that smirking shell.

We see that most closely with two figures: Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), Dylan’s contemporary with whom he shares a tempestuous romantic and creative partnership, and Sylvie (Elle Fanning), the “normal” girl who loves him and provides stability, but who struggles to handle his rising stardom. Both Barbaro and Fanning turn in strong performances, but they’re not quite enough to overcome the script’s handling of them as the angel and devil on Bobby’s shoulders.

Sylvie, a fictionalized version of Dylan’s real-life girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, is gradually unmade by Dylan’s infidelity (with Baez, no less) and the increasing demands of the public. We see Fanning mostly from off-stage, jealous eyes glaring at Dylan and Baez’s on-stage chemistry. Eventually, she runs from him at Newport, eventually telling him she feels like “the plate” being spun by a circus performer. But the film treats her like that, too, less a full-fledged figure than another lens through which we see Dylan.

Same goes for Baez, though her confrontational and competitive nature helps her hold her own. Their duets on stage feel like arguments, Tracy-Hepburn banter sung into a microphone. Dylan is a poor partner to both of them, but the film ultimately vindicates that attitude. After all, we’re not watching the Joan Baez biopic.

Race: 2.75/5

Just as A Complete Unknown is a very male movie, it’s also a very white one—supremely focused on the white figures that uplifted folk in the 1960s, with little real estate dedicated to the genre’s history as a Black art form. Black people are abstracts in the film, either nurses at hospitals or nameless civil rights figures that exist in the background. Lead Belly is mentioned in passing, but of the three folk figures we look up to, he’s the only one who isn’t an actual character in the film. We see the Texas Prison Worksong Group sing “Hammer Ring” in the background of the Folk Festival before Dylan comes on in the climax, but otherwise it’s few and far between when it comes to actually seeing musicians of color take the stage.

That said, the half-Mexican Baez—played by Barbaro, who also has Mexican heritage—has a prominent role in the film. She offers up the most potent counterargument against Dylan’s tortured-artist presentation. While her ethnicity is never openly discussed in the text of the film, Baez nonetheless puts up the biggest fight against Dylan’s (and the film’s) marginalization of her. She’s supremely confident both on stage and in private with Bob, calling out his quirks and manipulations with supreme ease.

The two most prominent speaking roles for Black characters include Becka (Laura Kariuki), a one-scene girlfriend for Dylan who’s the latest to realize he’ll never love her as much as she loves him (and perhaps the only Black woman we see on screen). The other is Jesse Moffette (Big Bill Morganfield), depicted as a gruff, outspoken, drunken Blues guitarist who embarrasses Seeger on his public access show until Dylan comes along to speak his language and impress him with his own guitar skills. There’s a charm to the performance, but his role in the scene is to humiliate the prim and polite Seeger by showing deference to Dylan’s style of blues. This also implies permission for Dylan to take a superior position in the annals of folk music (bestowed, subtextually of course, by a Black blues guitarist).

Deduction for LGBTQ: -0.25

The film has even less time for queer people than it does women or racial minorities. Nary a mention of queer people in this at all, save for some potential undertones of homosocial care Dylan has for heroes like Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and friends like Bobby Neuwirth (Will Harrison). One gag involves Seeger mistaking Sylvie sleeping in Dylan’s bed, only to see that it’s Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) sleeping next to Bob instead; the joke’s given only a passing glance.

Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.83/5

An accomplished, if insubstantial, music biopic as assured in its technical prowess and musical brio as it is deeply white and male. This is really a movie about a few white men dueling over the fate of folk, with little room at the table for anyone else. Not the Black artists who created the genre in the first place, nor the women who serve as competitors at best and empty vessels for inspiration at worst.

Like A Complete Unknown? Try these other films directed by James Mangold.

*Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)*

Grade: CLiFebruary 26, 2025