‘A Complete Unknown’ review: Timothée Chalamet makes a killer Bob Dylan in biopic

movie review

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Running time: 141 minutes. Rated R (language). In theaters Dec. 25.

Like a rolling stone comes the best musician biopic since “Elvis.”

It’s “A Complete Unknown,” director James Mangold’s transportive movie about a young Bob Dylan trying to make it as a scrappy folk singer in New York.

You’re probably shouting, “Another ‘Behind the Music’?!”

If you, like me, are sick and tired of this overstretched genre after clunkers such as “Back to Black” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” the answer, my friend, is Timothée Chalamet.

The 28-year-old “Dune” actor, who convincingly does all his own singing here, was the perfect choice to play Dylan. Really, the only choice. He makes the movie.

Carrying his indie roots with him like a membership card on every frame, Chalamet has Dylan’s same art-before-fame persona, his New York cool, his hair that’s blowin’ in the wind. Most vital, he ably handles the singer’s signature nasal twang in both song and speech. Some 40 tunes, all told.

And, because Mangold has made a quiet and intimate film — not a cliche, showboating one of tears and tragedy — Chalamet never pushes these traits into a silly tribute act. Far from an animatronic impersonator, the actor is always honest and believable.

While Mangold and Jay Cocks’ screenplay doesn’t go too deep into what’s going on in Dylan’s head and heart, Chalamet fills the void with a layered, magnetic and unexpectedly relatable portrait of a music genius.

“A Complete Unknown” is smartly contained to 1961 through 1965, from Dylan’s “three bucks, two bags, one me!” arrival in downtown Manhattan to him being booed off the stage at the ‘65 Newport Folk Festival. A four-year span was the right call. Depicting a consequential period is almost always preferable to cramming in cradle-to-grave.

Dylan’s first stop after getting to New York is a hospital in Queens to meet his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). He plays a song for Woody, who’s bedridden and can’t speak, and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and they immediately know the unwashed kid is the genuine article.

The most engrossing half of the movie is about mentorship — and killing your idols. Seeger and the folk powers that be (Norbert Leo Butz plays a cranky Alan Lomax) love Bob’s acoustic songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” but to them his 1965 rock fueled album “Highway 61 Revisited” is practically Satanic.

When an angsty Dylan performs “Like A Rolling Stone,” what many consider the greatest rock song ever, in an electrifying climactic scene at Newport, Seeger and Co. are terrified that the times really are a-changin’. How often does a biopic end with the hero being pelted by food?

The other, thinner side is about how Dylan’s personal life butts heads with stardom. He lives with his doting girlfriend Sylvie (Elle Fanning) in a grungy Greenwich Village walk-up even after his face is plastered on LPs and he’s being accosted at bars. Bob is a conundrum in that he behaves like an alien and also craves normalcy, a contradiction Chalamet unsurprisingly nails.

Wanderin’ Bob is instantly attracted to singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, absolutely marvelous) after a set at Gerde’s Folk City, and cheats on Sylvie (a stand-in for Suze Rotolo). Bob is not particularly kind to either woman — more obsessed with music and lyrics than with Sylvie and Joan — and “A Complete Unknown” is not anyone’s idea of a romantic film.

It is one that sweeps you up, though, in its beautifully detailed vision of an analog New York where stars eat at greasy spoons below 14th and future music legends pass the hat in basement clubs. Scrounging for their next meal.