A Complete Unknown

Superfans aren't necessarily going to love this. It's a movie made with affection, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can sometimes be jerks.

The actors, by and large, are first-rate. And the songs don't hurt.

Will younger people relate to this picture or even care about its central figures? I can't predict that, but I know when I've watched a beautifully-crafted period piece. This is my favorite film of the year

"A Complete Unknown" never feels like much of a movie and certainly not a biopic. Rather, it comes across as subpar, reality-adjacent fan fiction.

It is not that the movie tries and fails to help us understand Bob Dylan; on the contrary, it recognizes that Dylan defies that kind of simplification. And that he doesn't need it and we should not attempt it. Anything we need to know is in the songs.

Forget the thin membrane of a soap opera plot- Timothée Chalamet acts and sings the young Bob Dylan to showstopping perfection, catching the mystery man in the exhilarating act of inventing himself as multitudes, always creating and always in the wind

A Complete Unknown is utterly fascinating, capturing a moment in time when songs had weight, when they could move the culture -- even if the singer who made them was as puzzling as a rolling stone.

Timothée Chalamet does excellent work striking Dylan's balance of unworldliness and humanity. Yet no movie about unconventionality should be as blandly conventional as this one is.

There's something about A Complete Unknown that pushes against traditional Dylan worship and cuts a path toward something far more beautiful, flawed, and human.

I have no idea whether the movie will renew his legend for the next generation. But I can't imagine a better cinematic effort to remind all of us who are Boomers or Gen X why we adore the man.

So many things could have gone wrong with a Bob Dylan biopic that it's a small miracle that James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown" is not just watchable but actually slyly observant and surprisingly compelling.

... A maddeningly enjoyable piece of pop cinema.

Even as it builds a realistic world with sweep and detail... it doesn't try to make Bob palatable, nice or, finally, comprehensible in the usual dreary biopic fashion.

Problem is, it's an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances - onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song - which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke.

"A Complete Unknown" isn't a complete success, but it does have musical moments that soar and performances to match.

A film that, despite the magnitude of its undertaking, is accessible and exciting, but never tries to idolize an artist who is presented both at the height of his genius and his most egocentric, contradictory and even unpleasant. [Full review in Spanish]

A Complete Unknown offers solid renditions of iconic music, but it ultimately plays it too safe in its depiction of a daring artist.

On rewatch, some of the usual biopic sins are [still] there... but it was also clearer that the film is consciously constructed around a central question, which, in Dylan's case, is 'the' central question.

Chalamet gets in his performance the arrogance, the narcissism, the studied cool...

The people who made this movie plainly love Bob Dylan, but they allow the Bob Dylan who comes through to be who Bob Dylan is: insecure, overly confident -- all kinds of things.