Published: February 18, 2025 | Last Updated on February 24, 2025, 10:49 PM
It feels like every single year now, there’s another big music biopic set to tear up the screen and jostle for awards contention.
Well, the 2025 season is no different, and in fact boasts one of the longest-awaited and highest-profile music biopics on the development slate with “A Complete Unknown,” director James Mangold’s noble attempt to unpack the meteoric 1960s rise of Bob Dylan and his near-total rearrangement of American folk music.
Now, as one of the ten Best Picture contenders at this year’s Academy Awards, “A Complete Unknown” is finding itself rising in the odds to win the big prize, almost entirely because of the same sense of safety and easy expectations that the film’s subject so rails against.
It’s a solid effort all around, anchored by some deeply impressive performances and saved by a genuine curiosity about its subject that mostly avoids falling into the hero-worship hang-ups of too many of its biopic brethren.
See, there’s a formula to these films now: misunderstood genius shows up alone in a new place, connects with the right musicians/producers/muse, drops jaws with the sheer unbelievable talent of their musicianship, and falls to any of the common pitfalls of fame before finally pulling themselves out and enjoying lifelong acclaim.
In fact, Mangold himself arguably perfected and galvanized that exact formula with “Walk the Line,” helping to catapult Johnny Cash back into superstardom for a new generation.
And that’s what makes “A Complete Unknown” so interesting, actually. Mangold spends the full runtime almost openly refusing and sidestepping the very formula that he helped to create.
True to the movie’s title, Dylan remains a tightly guarded mystery throughout, with none of the childhood traumas and overbearing backstory scenes that have become a kind of running joke about the whole biopic genre.
To be honest, “A Complete Unknown” really isn’t a biopic at all.
It’s definitely not a biography. It’s a snapshot of four years in the 60s during which rock and roll exploded, activism-minded folk music began to recede, and everyone in America sat around in front of televisions for the first time fretting over the state of the world.
And at the center of it all, Bob Dylan comes in from the wilderness just to meet and pay respect to his hero Woody Guthrie before taking off on his own cryptically lyrical folk writing and quickly tiring of the boxes his handlers want him to fit into.
Dylan is surely the main character and we’re with him in practically every scene in the film, but we’re given no backstory or glimpse at all of his life before hitchhiking into New York City in 1961.
Our only way into “’A Complete Unknown” is through the people in Dylan’s orbit, people like Joan Baez, activist folksmith Pete Seeger, and Dylan’s early girlfriend Sylvie (a renaming of his real early-60s partner that he asked not be named in the movie.)
They all spend the film desperately trying to understand or predict Dylan’s moves and his unwavering insistence on bucking every trend and refusing every expectation.
At every turn, Dylan is almost pathologically contrarian. He’s never content, always argumentative, and is automatically bored the moment something is expected of his music.
Which is to say that he’s portrayed exactly like the real Bob Dylan.
As Dylan, the inescapable Timothee Chalamet once again stands out as the most impressive player in a film full of impressive performances.
Everyone does all of their own playing and singing, and that’s already a remarkable feat for memorable voices like Baez and Seeger, but it’s nearly astounding that Chalamet actually pulls off Dylan’s iconic vocal so closely that you really never think twice about it.
He’s able to make all of the impenetrable mystique and spiky jerkiness of the Bob Dylan character irrepressibly watchable, and he’s able to keep the audience from ever tipping into outright frustration with his decisions and his unwillingness to compromise, no matter how little explanation the film gives it.
But that still remains the biggest issue with “A Complete Unknown.” It’s so committed to not pulling back the curtain on Dylan – to always framing him and his talent and his choices through the non-understanding eyes of the surrounding traditionalists – that it struggles to really say what it wants to.
Ultimately, we’re just told a lot about the world of the 1960s without really seeing much of it. We’re told about the power of traditional acoustic folk music, of the era’s political upheaval, of the disdain for electric rock and roll, and even of the importance and influence of Woody Guthrie, but we’re really never shown any of it.
It becomes tough to know just why Dylan’s decision to “go electric” was so hated and so controversial, or even why it was so important to him, because the film is committed to never exploring his thoughts or his reasons, only his actions that confounded the world around him.
So while it’s refreshing to see one of these music biopics that doesn’t just fawn over the genius and angelic nature of its subject, it does spend admittedly too much time slowly pushing in on the faces of people listening to Dylan sing with dumbfounded wonder.
They’re blown away by his songwriting, but they don’t understand him.
You don’t understand him.
The film itself doesn’t understand him, because it clearly believes that the real Bob Dylan is unknowable and his intent to keep burning everything down just to watch it burn is surely just the mark of a true iconoclast hell bent on forging his own path.
The film honestly handles those elements remarkably well, and the performances all around are fantastic, as are the songs, which remain undeniably powerful even now.
It all comes together in a competent, solidly enjoyable, and even subtly unique film.
It’s a story you don’t often see, one about the enemies you have to make in order to change and the things you have to break in order to break away.
But its many refusals to dig at Dylan’s radical inspirations or the implications of his political songwriting or even the chaotic worldly anger that drove his apolitical electric turn all just end up keeping “A Complete Unknown” safe and digestible and non-controversial.
Those are all the things that Dylan never wanted to be, but in a year of spiraling controversies and subversive turns hindering the Best Picture hopes of multiple former frontrunners, that safety and accessibility that the man so hated could be exactly what wins “A Complete Unknown” the big award.
“A Complete Unknown” is in Oklahoma City theaters now.
The 97th annual Academy Awards will take place Sunday, March 2nd.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
