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A Complete Unknown review – Timothée Chalamet radiates charisma in evocative Dylan biopic
James Mangold’s handsome portrait of the enigmatic singer’s stratospheric early career boasts a barnstorming lead performance yet often slips into heavy-handedness
As such, there’s a curious kinship between this handsome if formulaic period piece by music movie veteran James Mangold (he also directed the Johnny Cash portrait Walk the Line) and Michael Gracey’s recent Robbie Williams-as-monkey biopic, Better Man. It’s a world thick with pipe smoke and poetry readings, ripe with possibilities – a neat counterpoint to the Coen brothers’ depiction, in Inside Llewyn Davis, of a Greenwich Village paved with petty disappointments and humiliations. Better still are the sweetly savage harmonies between Dylan and his former lover Joan Baez(Monica Barbaro, whose note-perfect performance is the film’s secret ingredient) as they trade the lines of It Ain’t Me Babe like bitter recriminations.
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