Parents' Guide to A Complete Unknown

This biopic is ostensibly all about a game-changing event in Dylan's career, but it's really a long, familiar origin story, albeit one that's boosted by fantastic performances and stellar music. Bob Dylan is a notoriously reticent figure, and no movie or book about him has ever been able to truly get inside his head or touch his genius. A Complete Unknown barely even tries. Director James Mangold previously made the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which was subsequently parodied (brilliantly) by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. And yet, this A Complete Unknown still returns to that same old biopic formula, skimming over the years and looking at what happened with little effort spent on why things happened. (In one scene, Bob and Sylvie watch the TV news about the Kennedy assassination, apparently for no other reason than to mark the date.) It might have been more useful or interesting to simply cut to the chase and get to the festival scenes.

That said, the work that Chalamet put into becoming Bob Dylan is beyond reproach. It's not just a canny imitation, it's a look inside the musician's brain; we can see his wheels turning, even if the miracles seem to emerge, fully formed, from virtually nowhere. Norton also completely transforms into Seeger, a man of an earlier generation being surpassed by the younger. And Fanning is ferocious as Sylvie, who tries harder than anyone to crack Dylan's facade. The climax at Newport is undeniably "electric," for want of a better word, and well worth waiting for. If A Complete Unknown had spent more time on why this moment was important or controversial and less time on the long buildup to it, then we might have had something great, rather than something great-adjacent.