Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In 2005, Bob Dylan was the subject of No Direction Home, an epic documentary by Martin Scorsese. The title came from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, the film a portrait of the young artist from arrival in the New York folk scene in 1961 to the scandal of the reborn rock god “going electric” four years later. The very next line in the song is now lent to A Complete Unknown, a biopic that takes place in the exact same timeframe. Three words make a world of difference. Scorsese’s title conjures something wild. The new movie sounds like what it is — the engaging tale of a star busy being born, and here played by brooding moppet Timothée Chalamet.A number of Dylan fans have asked me sceptically about the film, as if nervous of the thought of getting their own Wicked. The short answer is that it is often very good, starting with the cowboy movie opening of a stranger riding into town. Here, though, he is a scraggy teenage hitchhiker, and the Old West a bitter winter Greenwich Village.Directed by James Mangold, the movie frames itself as more than a one-man show. Peers and inspirations abound: dying talisman Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy); fellow old timer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton); fast-rising Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Still, a dramatic point is made by Chalamet’s charisma, which always claims a little more of our attention. So too the Dylan songbook. Alongside the scowl and smirk, the star has worked up a rasping likeness of his character’s familiar voice — but the music reclaims the shock of the new. Kudos. For anyone under 75, 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. The same goes for the spiky, gifted kid behind them. New ears and life-long fans may both relish the raw novelty. Still, A Complete Unknown is not an art film. A safe pair of studio hands, Mangold also told the story of Johnny Cash in 2005’s Walk the Line, a model Hollywood musical biopic whose basic user-friendliness echoes here. Even jagged edges have function. Much of the movie is a love triangle involving Baez and Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie Russo. (Played by Elle Fanning, she is an alias for the real-life Suze Rotolo.)The actors are solid, but the characters aren’t strong suits. Deep down the script treats them as plus ones. Then again, so does Dylan.“You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” it is said. Bob doesn’t disagree. Chalamet’s presence sugars the pill, but this Dylan is still brusque and brattish. And yet, for an American studio movie, the lack of niceties is bold and refreshing: part of what cranks the movie into excellence. Likewise, Mangold leaves open how much is artistic genius, pointed individualism — or simply being, in fact, kind of an asshole. Maybe change just isn’t there to be likeable. If you have always been baffled by the big deal around Dylan plugging in his Stratocaster, here the stakes are made plain — they are wrapped up in Oedipal conflict with Norton’s Seeger, presented as earnest surrogate dad.The proxy family drama is a neat Hollywood flourish. But it also highlights how little we know of Dylan’s actual parents, or anything of the former Robert Zimmerman before that cold New York day in 1961. Score another win for the film. A duller movie would make some secret childhood memory rocket fuel for the adult life. Here, the closest thing is the subject’s belief none of that matters. He is whoever he says he is — unknown indeed, and on principle. ★★★★☆In UK cinemas from January 17 and in US cinemas now
