The New Yorker:

Timothée Chalamet’s performance is a remarkable act of mimicry that reveals little of the real Bob Dylan.

By Richard Brody

One doesn’t have to be a Dylanologist to know, or even to sense, that “A Complete Unknown,” which opens on December 25th, simplifies Bob Dylan’s early professional life and dilutes its furies. To a certain extent, it hardly matters: Dylan is such a distinctive artist and a fascinating personality that, even smoothed out, he’s still unusually sharp-edged, at least by Hollywood standards. The intrinsic pleasures of “A Complete Unknown”—a story of Dylan’s arrival in New York, in 1961, his rise to fame as a folk singer-songwriter, and his risking it all, in 1965, to become a plugged-in, noisemaking rock star—point to the purpose and the stumbling blocks of all bio-pics. If Bob Dylan didn’t exist, he’d be a persuasive protagonist of an absorbing but conventional drama about a musician who does what Dylan did. There’s just one catch: such mighty and manifold characters have never been invented by screenwriters. They are only adapted, in bio-pics—even in veiled ones, such as “Citizen Kane.”

The evasions and elisions that are inherent to the format—as here, with the cramming of four eventful years into just over two hours—are on view from the start of “A Complete Unknown.” Timothée Chalamet stars as the movie’s young hero, whom I’ll awkwardly call Bob, to distinguish him from the real-life Dylan. Bob hitches a ride to New York in the rear of a station wagon, the driver unknown, the small talk between them nonexistent, and is dropped off at the open maw of a tunnel. He soon finds his way to Greenwich Village, stumbles upon a bar where folk musicians gather, and gets instructions from one of them on how to find the hospital in New Jersey where the chronically ill Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is confined. But who does Bob know in the city? Where will he stay? How does he begin his musical career?

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