Starting off in 1961 as a young Bob Dylan turns up in New York with guitar in hand and covering the first half of the Sixties, this music biopic places him in the context of the folk/protest music community and his contemporary icons/heroes (Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez), exploring his rise to fame and musical development, his complex personal relationships and politics/activism in the early 60s. Music performance is very much foregrounded, luxuriating in a long run time (if occasionally wallowing in it and slightly one-note), and the film recreates its time period and milieu to good effect. Timothee Chalamet portrays Dylan with a genuine sensitivity and a quiet charisma and intelligence, with notable support by Elle Fanning as Sylvie, his early true love, Edward Norton as the mild but committed Pete Seeger, and Scoot McNairy as the incapacitated Woody Guthrie. The film does a good job of portraying the transition from acoustic singer-songwriter to electric instruments/full band set-up and its resulting tensions and Dylan's own disdain of superstardom. A Complete Unknown is a generally well-crafted film that mostly succeeds in making its subject fairly interesting, with a heartbreaking wordless final scene to wrap it up.
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