Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN
Directed by James Mangold
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆

A FILM about the only song writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature faces options: go heavy on the music, or explain how such a talent could emerge.

James Mangold’s Bob Dylan tale tries to do both.

It achieves it musically – this is an indulgent celebration of Dylan’s works.

But how and why he managed to change the world with his drawl-of-a-voice and fingerpickin’ guitar is less apparent.

Leads Timothée Chalamet and Edward Norton sung the songs and played the guitars and banjoes.

Not only does it sound terrific, we don’t get those distractingly dodgy shots of an actor pretending to play.

And hearing Blowin’ In The Wind, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, Mr Tambourine Man, Like a Rolling Stone, The Times They Are A-Changin’ and a beautiful version with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) of It Ain’t Me Babe is worth the ticket price alone.

How he became a voice for an era is fairly glossed over – we learn he is moody and holds his cards close to his chest. Chalamet’s hangdog act feels true to Dylan’s persona. It creates a man whose emotions are stuck in a spaced-out nightmare about the state of the world and a feeling that he must write about it.

Mangold uses historic moments to show the background to Dylan’s rise – the civil rights movement, the Cuban missile crisis, the murder of JFK.

We follow the troubadour as he arrives in New York to visit his hero Woody Guthrie in hospital.

He finds another folk legend, Pete Seeger (perfectly played by Norton) at his bedside.

Bob plays for them and Seeger realises a new voice has arrived to take folk further.

We follow Bob as he stuns various Greenwich Village dives, falls for Sylvie (Elle Fanning, based on Bob’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo) and then conducts a tempestuous love-hate relationship with Baez. We watch as he takes the beatniks by storm, and reaches a climax at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan showed up with a band, a Fender Stratocaster guitar, and went electric.

Just as the row between trad-jazzers and bee-boppers was seen as a huge culture war, that them folkies got so riled over Bob going electric, and that it should have caused such a schism, feels rather quaint.

No matter. This slick bio-pic, which looks and sounds terrific, is a nostalgia-saturated reminder of genius.