‘A Complete Unknown’ reviews: Timothée Chalamet is ‘hypnotic,’ but does the rest of the film rise to his level?
The Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” opens on Christmas, but critics are already weighing in on the film, which follows the folk singer-songwriter from the early days of his career to his infamous use of electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Is the reception for the film friendlier than it was for Dylan and his electric guitar?
SEEInside ‘A Complete Unknown’: Recreating the 1965 Newport Folk Festival
As of this writing the film has a MetaCritic score of 68 based on 26 reviews counted thus far, including 15 positive reviews, nine somewhat mixed reviews, and two negative reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, which classifies reviews as merely fresh or rotten, the film rates 75% fresh based on 48 reviews. There is no critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes yet.
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Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) gives the film its most effusive praise, saying that “[Timothée] Chalamet is a hypnotic Dylan, performing the tracks himself and fabricating to a really impressive degree that stoner-hungover birdsong … Chalamet is also good at Dylan’s insolent comedy in art as in life: puckish, witty, insufferable, and yet wounded.”
Tomris Laffly (The A.V. Club) adds, “Now, with his signature Hollywood touch — a brainy story, accessibly, rousingly, and energetically told — ‘Walk The Line’ and ‘Ford V Ferrari’ director [James] Mangold offers the astonishing A-side through the life and times of a generational talent.” As for Chalamet, his is “no traditional biopic performance where an actor disappears into the role. Instead, Chalamet goes to a place several octaves deeper. His performance is both startlingly accurate, and something playfully off-kilter and of his own.”
And Owen Gleiberman (Variety) calls it an “entrancingly offbeat drama” in which “Chalamet rises to the challenge of capturing the prickly charisma of Dylan’s inchoate, anti-matter, read-between-the-lines personality. It’s a transfixing performance that’s true to Dylan and, just as important, true to the logic of movies.”
Clarisse Loughrey (The Independent) is more critical of the film as a whole, saying that director Mangold is “sturdy” and “reliable,” but “A Complete Unknown” “lacks the same ignition point of Mangold’s Johnny Cash biopic ‘Walk the Line'” and “struggles to fully engage with Dylan’s relationship to that intersection between politics and music.”
David Ehrlich (IndieWire) argues that the film is “admirable yet deeply frustrating,” with Mangold taking an approach that is “far too straightforward” to capture the musician’s enigmatic persona. The film also shows an “unwillingness to engage with its political context,” “clumsily” incorporating historic moments from the ’60s as if Dylan were Forrest Gump.
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And Jake Cole (Slant) dismisses the film by saying, “The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.”
Despite the somewhat divided takes, the film is off to a great start this awards season, earning a Best Film Drama nomination at the Golden Globes and named one of the top 10 films of the year by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute. Musical biographies tend to make awards voters swoon, whether critics are behind them or not (e.g. “La Vie en Rose” and “Bohemian Rhapsody“).
It helps this film that Chalamet’s performance has mostly been spared the criticisms of the film’s elusive characterization of Dylan and its workmanlike filmmaking. Even William Bibbiani (The Wrap) calls the actor’s performance “flawless” despite the film as a whole being “corny.” It’s clear how much work the actor put in since he does his own singing and plays his own instruments to play Dylan. And so much of the film revolves around that performance that if Chalamet can carry it into the Oscars’ top 10 for Best Picture, he may be an even stronger bet for Best Actor than we think.
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