Noodling Bob Dylan Biopic ‘A COMPLETE UNKNOWN’ Riffs On the Myth of the Unknowable Artist

I’ve never seen Bob Dylan live. In theory, I would love to, but I’ve been convinced that the artist whose music was such a beacon of personal resistance and revolution for me in my college years isn’t what he once was. As if by design, he deprives his audiences of the freewheeling early breakouts that largely define his career, favoring newer material—predominantly smoky R&B tracks with even smokier vocals. And yet, Bob Dylan, as presented in James Mangold’s smartly constructed and slippery biopic A Complete Unknown, has always, almost instinctually, rebelled against our expectations of him, bristling at the idea that his value as an artist is tied to his willingness to embrace any outmoded form of who he is. The Bob Dylan of today and the Bob Dylan of yesterday may be in conversation with one another, but the living continuum is not a hostage of the past. He doesn’t seek to be known, but he wants to be understood, especially for who he is in the here and now.

Perhaps the key to understanding Mangold’s film is unearthed in a line of Dylan’s dialogue, delivered in the midst of a stuffy fundraiser event in 1965: “There’s a hundred people in there, and all of them want to meet a different version of me.” This idea of Dylan as a many-faced myth was explored at length in Todd Haynes’ 2007 experimental biopic I’m Not There, where the musician was played by an impressive cast of actors at different points in his life. Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw all portrayed vastly different iterations of Dylan—the beatnik poet, the bad boy rebel, the disillusioned sell-out. In A Complete Unknown, Dylan is trapped by this fracturing. He’s a man who plays up his own self-mythology while simultaneously resenting the obligation to inhabit those fragmented versions of himself. He doesn’t want to be known, but bristles at not being known. This dichotomy is hard to swallow, let alone live with.Timothée Chalamet may have more angular cheekbones than Dylan, but otherwise, he’s a dead ringer for the singer-songwriter – floppy hair, hawklike face, and stony eyes. Though his casting was met with a fair bit of resistance, Chalamet, a rising French-American superstar, mostly nails the role, learning and spouting over 40 Dylan songs convincingly, all while playing Dylan almost like the Joker. Dylan’s background is teased and ad-libbed into oblivion: a slippery origin crafted to obscure the ordinary. Tales of time spent as a circus traveler buckle against evidence of a deeply normal upbringing. Pieces of mail addressed to “Robert Zimmerman” hint at Dylan’s obsession with radical rebranding and are warmly obscurely by those who grow to care for him, such as on-again-off-again girlfriend Slyvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and – to a lesser degree – rising folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). It’s not that Chalamet’s Dylan is so much a character of dubious origin as one who leans into the myth of the unknowable artist, often at the expense of the relationships he seemingly wants to nurture.

In Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), we see a folk hero cut from a different cloth than Dylan—a stalwart champion of collective resistance, who views music as a unifying force for social change. We meet him in a court hearing, humbly protesting with all the calm grace of Mr. Roger’s washing Officer Clemmons’ feet. Seeger recognizes Dylan’s raw talent during their first encounter, appreciating his knack for performance but only grasping his true brilliance after a second, more striking song. Later, he ushers Dylan onto a New York stage for the first time, introducing him to the folk community that will both celebrate and challenge him. While Dylan’s vision gravitates toward shattering boundaries and reinventing himself, Seeger remains anchored to tradition, believing in the power of music to uplift communities rather than disrupt them. Their friendship endures, but the divide between their artistic philosophies casts a shadow over the film, underscoring the tension between rebellion and unity that defines Dylan’s journey.

A Complete Unknown is fundamentally about the struggle to define yourself, even as others try to tell you what you should be—whether for a specific art form, a cultural movement, or as a friend or lover. This irony feels especially sharp coming from a folk music community that ostensibly champions working-class protest songs. The rigidity and hypocrisy of their corner of the industry is exposed early on: Dylan is discovered and heralded as a fresh voice and talented songwriter, yet the studio demands that his first record consist entirely of folk classics, stripping away the poetic originality that defined him and made them take notice in the first place. As Dylan’s music evolves, he collides with those who helped elevate him, including Seeger, their insistence that he remain true to “the cause” asking him to champion a single, narrow box of artistry, often just to further their own cause. These selfish attempts to restrain their breakout icon ultimately deliver a blow to the evolution of the form itself.

Mangold’s biopic is untraditional in the way a biopic about Bob Dylan demands to be. Rather than mythologizing a man who has already been mythologized half to death, the film uses Dylan as a lens to explore a more compelling story: how institutions try to shape artists to their own ends and how true artistry is, at its core, rebellion. Working off a screenplay co-written with Jay Cocks and based on Elijah Wald’s history “Dylan Goes Electric!”, Mangold rejects the traditional cradle-to-grave biopic. Instead, A Complete Unknown zeroes in on an inflection point, this transition from acoustic folk ballads to plugged-in folk-rock, offering a serious, unsentimental film that clearly admires its subject without lapsing into fanboy adoration.

A Complete Unknown manages to be a hangout movie with a message—the cinematic equivalent of spending time with a musician friend who can’t stop compulsively noodling on an acoustic guitar and occasionally dropping inspired beads of poetry. As both an act of formal rebellion and a piece of compelling filmmaking, it’s a sharply realized portrait of the duality of man, the anti-artistry of complacency, and the tangled beauty and contradictions of self-mythology. It’s dense but seeded with clarity—like Dylan’s best works. His music underscores it all, bristling with the same defiance and self-reinvention that define Dylan’s myth, a reminder of why his voice and music have endured for generations.

CONCLUSION: ‘A Complete Unknown’ refuses to mythologize Dylan, instead embracing the contradictions that define him. With Timothée Chalamet’s layered performance and James Mangold’s sharp direction, the film captures an artist in perpetual rebellion, refusing to be known yet demanding to be understood.