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‘A Complete Unknown’ Review: Timothée Chalamet Is Uncanny as Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s Offbeat and Incandescent Biopic

James Mangold's entrancingly offbeat biopic has the feel — the effect — of a musical, as Dylan's songs become the story it's telling.

“A Complete Unknown” is a drama of scruffy naturalism, with a plot that doesn’t so much unfold as lope right along with its legendary, curly-haired, sunglass-wearing coffee-house troubadour hero. He gets dropped off in New York City on a cold winter day, wearing his cap and coat and scarf and backpack, carrying the guitar case that feels like it’s part of him, and he immediately heads for the hospital in New Jersey where Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) is lying in bed, unable to speak due to the ravages of Huntington’s disease. The script, by Mangold and Jay Cocks, is delicately engineered so that all the points a conventional biopic would cover are there: the way Dylan, at Folk City, captivated early-’60s Village audiences as well as the New York Times; his push-pull bond with Baez and the gentler connection he forms with Fanning’s political-minded Sylvie (the film’s the-same-in-everything-but-name version of Suze Rotolo); the deal he strikes with the cunning manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler); and the camaraderie he forges with Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), a country upstart who fuels Dylan’s bad-boy impulses, and with the banjo-wielding Seeger, played with spot-on whimsicality by Norton as a twinkly-eyed, truly folksy activist utopian saint.

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