Review: Timothée Chalamet delivers an impressive performance in ‘A Complete Unknown’

Come and gather around Dylanologists: Timothée Chalamet is a sure Oscar candidate for Best Actor as the young Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown”.

It’s a stunning, soon-to-be-legendary performance, with Chalamet channeling Dylan in look (the curly hair!), sound (he sang his own), and iconic smile without ever stooping to party trick mimicry.

Now for the worrying part. “A complete unknown,” the film, featuring Chalamet’s lit fuse of a performance, blows into theaters with the full intention of living up to its title. After 141 minutes of screen time, you don’t know any more about Dylan than you did going in.

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

Surprise! Mangold has sketched a portrait of the artist as a young fool. The future Nobel laureate comes across as resentful, sullen and full of himself, even from the early days when the former Robert Allen Zimmerman, born into a close-knit Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, took a trip to New. York in 1961 ready to make his name. He was 19.

“A Complete Unknown” concludes 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) encourages Dylan to “make some noise, track some mud on the carpet.” Dylan didn’t need to be reminded. 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 give the film great credit. Chalamet spent years preparing on guitar and harmonica, singing live in a raw Dylan rasp that had me from his first bellowing “Hello” to the show-stopping “The Times They Are a Changin.” You won’t see a better example of interpretive artistry this year than Chalamet’s total immersion as Dylan.

So frequent are the musical interludes, one could rightly call “A Complete Unknown”, a concert film with dramatic interludes that unfortunately do not come close to matching the music.

The film falls badly into biopic banality, especially when Dylan contacts 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 seminal album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dyan” and the mouse 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 stormy relationship with folk goddess Joan Baez, sung and performed 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 clichés that rebuke everything Dylan stands for as a no-bull lyricist. Screen time is better spent watching Dylan immerse himself in 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 is folk icon Pete Seeger, played with ease and 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 nearly mute from the ravages of Huntington’s disease. “I wanted to catch his spark,” Dylan says. Mission accomplished.

Guthrie is unable to speak when Dylan plays his musical tribute, “Song for Woody,” but bangs on his nightstand in response. Dylan’s caress of Woody’s cheek is a rare display of affection. And it hits hard. Dylan meant it when he said that Guthrie’s music “knocked me down to the ground.”

“A Complete Unknown” pulls too many punches and drops too many facts to show us what it feels like to be Dylan, a master of remaining masked and anonymous and too slippery to pin down.

It is the dynamite actor who plays him who reveals this shape-shifting in flashes of lightning and enveloping darkness. Chalamet’s transporting performance, one for the time capsule, captures Dylan in the exhilarating act of reinventing himself as crowd, a fugitive troubadour and poet, always creating and always in the wind.