Review: Timothée Chalamet delivers show-stopping performance in 'A Complete Unknown'

Come gather round Dylanologists: Timothée Chalamet is a surefire Oscar contender for best actor as the young Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown."

It’s a great, soon-to-be legendary piece of acting, with Chalamet channeling Dylan in looks (that curly hair!), sound (he did his own singing), and iconic smirk without ever stooping to party trick mimicry.

Now, for the troubling part. "A Complete Unknown," the film that contains Chalamet’s lit fuse of a performance, blows into theaters with the full intention of living down to its title. After 141 minutes of screen time, you won’t know more about Dylan than you did going in.

No wonder the famously withholding Dylan, now 83, approves of this fragile membrane of a movie from James Mangold, who directed the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line," and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks, who used Elijah Wald’s 2015 book "Dylan Goes Electric!" as source material.

Surprise! Mangold has sketched a portrait of the artist as a young jerk. Petulant, boorish and full of himself, the future Nobel Prize winner comes off as a real pain, even from the early days when the former Robert Allen Zimmerman, born to a tight-knit Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, hitched a ride to New York in 1961 ready to make his name. He was 19.

"A Complete Unknown" wraps up in 1965 when Dylan outraged folk purists at the Newport Folk Festival by plugging in an electric guitar and roaring into the rock phase of his career. His friend Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) urges Dylan "to make some noise, track some mud on the carpet." Dylan didn’t need reminding. His genius is all there in the music.

It’s the music that "A Complete Unknown" gets triumphantly right, with 40 songs, some in frustrating snippets, that power the film to glory. Chalamet prepped years on guitar and harmonica, singing live in a raw Dylan rasp that had me from his first bleating "Hello" to the show-stopping "The Times They Are a Changin." You won’t see a better example of interpretive art this year than Chalamet’s total immersion as Dylan.

So frequent are the music interludes you could justifiably call "A Complete Unknown," a concert film with dramatic interludes that regrettably don’t come close to matching the music.

The film trips up badly on biopic banality, notably when Dylan hooks up with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a pseudonym used at Dylan’s request for art student and political activist Suze Rotolo, pictured with Dylan on the cover of his breakthrough album, "The Freewheelin’ Bob Dyan" and the muse for his "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right."

Sylvie complains that Dylan rarely lets her in and is dismissive and arrogant when she asks questions. The same is true when Dylan enters into a tempestuous relationship with folk goddess Joan Baez, sung and acted with crystalline clarity by Monica Barbaro ("Top Gun: Maverick"). In a heated moment, Sylvie seethes with jealousy as Dylan and Baez duet on stage.

These scenes are the stuff of sudsy soap opera and sanitized into tired cliches that rebuke everything Dylan stands for as a no-bull lyricist. Screen time is better spent watching Dylan immerse himself into the Greenwich Village music scene, vividly recreated on screen. It’s easy to understand the envy Baez feels when she first hears Dylan’s "Blowin’ in the Wind."

It’s folk icon Pete Seeger, played with sly ease and banked fire by an exceptional Edward Norton, who introduces Dylan to a wider audience and to his musical idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), now hospitalized and near mute from the ravages of Huntington’s disease. "I wanted to catch his spark," says Dylan. Mission accomplished.

Guthrie can’t speak when Dylan plays his musical homage, "Song for Woody," but pounds his nightstand in response. Dylan’s caress of Woody’s cheek is a rare display of love. And it hits hard. Dylan meant it when he said that Guthrie’s music "struck me down to the ground."

"A Complete Unknown" pulls too many punches and elides too many facts to show us how it feels to be Dylan, a master at staying masked and anonymous and too slippery to pin down.

It’s the dynamite actor playing him who reveals this shapeshifter in flashes of lightning and enveloping darkness. Chalamet’s transporting performance, one for the time capsule, catches Dylan in the exhilarating act of inventing himself as multitudes, a fugitive troubadour and poet who’s always creating and always in the wind.