Review

 "A Complete Unknown"

Directed by James Mangold

Starring  Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan

The story of Bob Dylan's rise to fame is well known. I have been well aware of the broad details of it for fifty years. How - as a nineteen year old he left his home state of Minnesota  and travelled to New York City. How - soon after his arrival - he went to visit  Woody Guthrie - one of his musical heroes - in a New York state hospital. How - by good fortune as much as talent - he found a way into the New York folk music scene and earned a recording contract.

This is pretty much the course that  the bio-pic film "A Complete Unknown" covers - with the title being filtered from  one of Dylan's most timeless numbers - "Like a Rolling Stone":-

How does it feel, how does it feel?

To be without a home

Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

And of course when he arrived in New York, he was indeed "a complete unknown".

To this day, Bob Dylan remains a rather mysterious, enigmatic figure who has never enjoyed playing by other people's rules. I think that the actor, Timothée Chalamet captures some of that unknowable, rebellious quality very well. 

In the middle of the film, there's an exchange between Dylan and his girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Suze Rottolo) in which she tells him that she has told him everything about herself but “I realise I don’t know you.” And I must say that I have always found it interesting that in the hundreds of songs that Dylan has written , he has never harked back to his early life in Minnesota. It is as if all of that has been deliberately blanked out.

I didn't know how I would feel about "A Complete Unknown" when I marched to our city centre this morning. I was prepared to be underwhelmed.

However, I was pleasantly surprised. There were moments when tears ran down my cheeks and there several belly laughs too. I was engaged throughout even though there were one or two scenes that I would have constructed differently for the sake of authenticity.

The songs themselves were nicely bedded within the storyline - not overbalancing it. And it was interesting to be given a renewed sense of New York life in the sixties. Nobody is glued to a smartphone . There are no computers and a lot of people, Dylan included, constantly smoke cigarettes.

The man is a legend in our time and Mangold's film helps to confirm that. I suspect that if you like Dylan you will enjoy this film.