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A Complete Unknown Review — A Biopic of One of The Greatest Musicians Ever, Relegated To People’s Problems With Genres
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Biopics are rather hit and miss these days. Ridley Scott got it terribly wrong with Napoleon. But Elvis was on-point. However, with brash optimism, I was looking forward to this Bob Dylan biopic more than any other movie that had been released over the past six months.
Just like TVs in the ‘60s and computers in the ’90s came to India with a considerable delay, A Complete Unknown also came late to India despite having released on Christmas Day 2024 in the US and pretty much everywhere else worldwide.
I’d been skimming the film ticket booking websites ever since I saw the trailer in November of last year, but this flick only came to India in February of 2025 and ran for, well, about a few weeks at best.
James Mangold’s biopic of perhaps one of the most pivotal figures in music in the last century somehow worked its way from a promising beginning to an ending that just didn’t seem to do justice to the greatness & elusive genius of Bob Dylan.
The movie had a lot of things going for it as it started. Dylan playing a song to the ailing Woody Guthrie, set the tone & served as a fitting opening sequence that was also moving. Shots cutting to Dylan hitchhiking from Minnesota, and then staying at Pete Seeger’s place where Timothee Chalamet briefly debuts ‘The Girl From North Country’… it was building up into some spectacle from the early exchanges at least. I was hooked.
Seeger’s brief conversation about folk music & the kind of music Dylan liked to play in a car ride was a hint or rather an ominous sign of the p*ss poor ending that would contrive to culminate in the movie’s end, but you didn’t know it then.
Against the backdrop of the varied burgeoning crises of the ’60s and a mishmash of shots on B&W TV screens & news cuttings from newspapers about politics and change, i.e. everything from nuclear armament to Malcolm X, it seemed like Mangold was driving home the theme that Bob Dylan’s songwriting & music was pretty much a byproduct of the era he was in.
