Review: 'A Complete Unknown' lets Timothée Chalamet explore the enigma of Bob Dylan, in a movie that nicely captures his turbulent times

Come gather ‘round, people, wherever you roam, because director James Mangold has an engrossing story to tell in “A Complete Unknown.” about the impending revolution in music and the nation in the early 1960s, and the man who personified by it — a young singer-songwriter who goes by the name of Bob Dylan.

What Mangold, co-writing the script with Jay Cocks, figures out pretty quickly — as any rock critic of the era could probably tell you — is that getting a definitive profile of Dylan is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. Dylan wriggles out of such a biographical movie treatment, even one where Timothée Chalamet so perfectly captures his performance style and vocal tics. (Chalamet actually sings Dylan’s songs on the soundtrack here.) Chalamet’s Dylan is a vessel for what others try to make of him, until he rebels against that.

One of those others is his folk-music mentor, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) — whom Dylan meets in 1961 in a New Jersey hospital, where Seeger is visiting the legend, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), left mute by a stroke but still as ornery as ever. Dylan plays for Guthrie a tribute, “Song to Woody,” to receive a blessing that he’s got something in him that others need to hear.

The other characters who come into young Dylan’s orbit are the women who became closest to him. One is Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a composite of several early Dylan girlfriends and lovers — notably Suze Rutolo, his girlfriend from 1961 to 1964, who was immortalized holding Dylan’s arm on the album cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” (which featured “Blowin’ in the Wind” and other classics). The other is Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), already a folk-singing star when Dylan came on the Greenwich Village scene when they began a torrid love affair.

Mangold marvelously distills the feeling of those ‘60s performances, the fan frenzy generated by Dylan’s success, and Dylan’s irritation at being asked to meet expectations — placed by the record label, the public and the folk-music establishment, embodied by Seeger and historian Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) — to become “the spokesman of a generation.” It all comes to a head at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when Dylan does the one thing the old guard didn’t want him to do: Plugged his guitar into an amp.

It’s not a spoiler to describe this. Mangold and Cocks based their script on Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties.” And the phrase “Dylan Goes Electric” has become an indelible part of Dylan’s legend. (Todd Haynes, in his impressionistic 2007 Dylan biopic “I’m Not There,” depicted the moment and its impact by having Dylan — played by Cate Blanchett in that section — and his band pull out machine guns and fire them at the audience.) 

What Mangold captures best through “A Complete Unknown” is the tension — in Dylan and in society in the days of JFK’s assassination and the ramping up of the Vietnam War — that led to that electric moment. Mangold and Chalamet, a chameleonic collaborator, show how Dylan managed to be both outside those arguments and in the heart of them, to the consternation of mentors, lovers and fans.

The great irony of “A Complete Unknown” is how perfect the title is. There may never have been anyone as famous as Dylan who, at the same time, has been as unknowable. Was he the troubadour for an unsettled age, or (as Don McLean pegged him in “American Pie”) a “jester … in a coat he borrowed from James Dean and a voice that came from you and me”? Mangold entertains both ideas, and Chalamet brings them alive.

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‘A Complete Unknown’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, December 25, in theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 141 minutes.