A Complete Unknown

How do you prevent a biopic from becoming a hagiography? Filling it with stereotypes and melodrama. James Mangold's A Complete Unknown deals with Dylan's formative years l961-The overly earnest Pete Seeger (Ed Norton) refusing to name names, the tubercular Woody Guthrie in a Jersey Sanitarium, the competitive and self-serving Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and an alternately debauched and detached Dylan (Timothy Chalamet) who is literally and metaphorically, the Riddler. Not since Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt has any character smoked so insistently as Mangold's Dylan.The camera pans back and forth from the face of a renamed Susan Rotolo (Ellie Fanning) the girl on the cover of the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan--as her lover becomes a legend at Newport before her eyes. They well up. Then they well up, more. What's Dylan's great cause? Not civil rights or war, it turns out, but rock. It's a war between Folkways and John Hammond at CBS. What's missing is nuance. The director makes his larger than life characters real by making them trite. The result is an ignoble portrait of a Nobel prizewinner.

and listen to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan