A Complete Unknown

Timothee Chalamet gives a fully committed performance that manages to capture the interiority of Bob Dylan – his talent, his prickliness, his distance from people, and his quiet ambition.

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.

Dylan’s greatest hits have always been heirlooms: somehow just there. Amid the recreated past, the movie restores a sense of how seismic they would originally have been... New ears and life-long fans may both relish the raw novelty. 

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

[A Complete Unknown is] five stars of pure entertainment underpinned by a 10-star performance by Timothee Chalamet...

I think Mangold knows what he’s doing, abandoning the pretence of realism the way Dylan abandoned the small pond of folk music, thus letting us see the film as a parable.

The Newport climax threatens to be a bit of a letdown, until the performances start. The opening piano chords to "Like A Rolling Stone" still give you chills 60 years after they first dropped. And the look of betrayal on those beatniks' faces...beautiful.

The picture, with its protagonist who did not want to fit the typical music star image, carries us along on a journey of ups and downs, always emphasizing the power of music.

Unfortunately, while the film has elements to explore far beyond the obvious,...it only accomplishes what is necessary. [Full review in Spanish]

Mangold develops a very straight laced portrait of the artist as a young man in this biopic on Bob Dylan's early days, but Chalamet, who is flanked by charming co-stars Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro, channels the restless, contrarian energies of...