A Complete Unknown

Timothee Chalamet gives a fully committed performance that manages to capture the interiority of Bob Dylan – his talent, his prickliness, his distance from people, and his quiet ambition.

The people who made this movie plainly love Bob Dylan, but they allow the Bob Dylan who comes through to be who Bob Dylan is: insecure, overly confident -- all kinds of things.

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... New ears and life-long fans may both relish the raw novelty. 

Chalamet gets in his performance the arrogance, the narcissism, the studied cool...

[A Complete Unknown is] five stars of pure entertainment underpinned by a 10-star performance by Timothee Chalamet...

I think Mangold knows what he’s doing, abandoning the pretence of realism the way Dylan abandoned the small pond of folk music, thus letting us see the film as a parable.

Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton singe the screen in beautiful but anodyne musical drama

You don’t need an excuse to drag out your old Dylan records, but don’t be surprised if after watching this you do a deep dive into the catalogue.

The screenplay...can be too on the nose, particularly in its handling of historical context...Overall, however, the filmmakers steer clear of the usual musical biopic hagiography by taking a deliberate and bracing distance from their subject.

The Newport climax threatens to be a bit of a letdown, until the performances start. The opening piano chords to "Like A Rolling Stone" still give you chills 60 years after they first dropped. And the look of betrayal on those beatniks' faces...beautiful.