Review: A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

1961 and a young Bob Dylan hits New York, guitar and handwritten songbook in hand. He visits the ailing legend Woody Guthrie in hospital where he also meets another living legend, Pete Seeger. Bob asks to play Woody a song written for him. It impresses both of them. He's on his way. Back in New York he meets a student who takes an equal shine to him and they shack up long enough for Bob's eyes to wander over to the rising Joan Baez who also thaws before him. A break here and a push there, and he's playing the Newport Folk Festival to an adoring crowd. There's just one problem. He's young and heavily creative and needs to keep moving forward. It's just before rock music spread out into its own traditionalism and the folk scene that Bob was ruling was feeling tight around his neck.

If you've seen any fictionalised movies about The Beatles you'll know how much of a risk this one was. If the guy playing him doesn't look exactly like him, he'd better play him to perfection. Any straying from the minutely rendered timeline of facts is up for the punishment of the greater world. Dylan is still alive and so is even the oldest of his fanbase. The recent biopic of Brian Epstein Midas Man had the Beatles community raging, not because of the muddled execution of Epstein but that the actor playing John Lennon was too short!

This Dylan is clearly intended for the Millennials and Gen Alpha rather than anyone who went to Newport. It's a linear take on fame, progress within a popular culture determined to keep it in stasis, and the value of contrarianism in the face of that. As such, it works a treat. I've never been able to get into Dylan to any real depth, despite the encouragement of friends and siblings who anything but Dylan bores. They tried and I honour the effort. It's just not for me. What is for me is the spectre of an artist who goes where he will, logs his bad decisions in an ever expanding repertoire of expression.

Timothee Chalamet doesn't quite resemble Dylan but he gets busy with studiously observed physicality, solid blue-eye acting and the commitment to do his own playing and singing. What he conveys might look a little too like the result of a lot of '60s interviews but Chalamet does appear to be crafting character for the purposes of cinema rather than the approval of the experts. As such, he comes across as a person before he's a famous person. Add to this the general persona he has already cultivated publicly with turns in Dune or Call Me By Your Name. He has a career duty to appear also as himself. If this seems a cheat consider that he is playing the kind of figure who needed to blend persona with self skilfully as a matter of occupational mental health. Chalamet works.

Apart from knowing already that the infamous "Judas" heckle happened on a U.K. tour and not at Newport, I couldn't easily tell you how much is got wrong here. I determined to relax what little I do know to see if it works as a film. All biopics, particularly of music stars, commit the great moments sin whereby a portent of greatness to come is heralded as part of normal life. People who might have good parts to play as characters are named in full the way they never would be in reality. There are a lot of these (as there were in the same director's Walk the Line) and they do annoy me as a concentration on such moments as genuinely quotidian would be more impressive. But it's not a big flaw, being so ubiquitous and when the cast that includes Ed Norton, Elle Fanning and a terrific turn as Joan Baez by Monica Barbaro is so consistently engaging. Is the electrified gig at Newport overplayed? Not as much as every concert scene in The Doors and the most sensational myth (Seeger axing the electricty) is curtailed. I liked it .It made me want to listen to Dylan and Baez and Pete Seeger. It did that job, if nothing else.