Timothée Chalamet’s fame overshadows ‘A Complete Unknown’

On the heels of a massive Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Contest In New York City, an event so popular that even the actor was in attendance, the audience is confronted with what is now impossible: believing that he is a virtually unknown artist with a complex relationship with fame.

This is what the new film “A Complete Unknown” by author and director James Mangold relies on. In it, Chalamet portrays a 20-something Bob Dylan from the early 1960s, a time when the musician performed small, folky gigs in pubs in the Big Apple with his guitar and harmonica at the same time – just a few short years before he became a legend became.

It kind of makes sense that Chalamet would play this role. Despite being just 28 years old, he hasn’t gone a year in the last decade without starring in a film, garnering multiple Oscar nominations and evidently building up a devoted fan base, largely made up of Generation Z, in the process. But he didn’t actually win an Oscar. And aside from one or two films like 2018’s “Beautiful Boy,” he hasn’t portrayed many real-life people, which has been like catnip to awards voters in the past.

With “A Complete Unknown,” he does a few things that the Academy just loves — portraying a real person, targeting an older audience more like voters, and engaging with (particularly white) Dylan fans. Whether awards motivate the actor or not is clearly visible the media hype surrounding this film (more on that in a moment) that it is what the studio is interested in and what much of the press surrounding the film confirms.

This seems to be working so far, as the numerous committee nominations show the Golden Globes. But that’s not always a good indicator of the quality of performance. In the case of A Complete Unknown, Chalamet has become so famous at this point in his career that it overshadows his entire potential.

It’s difficult to even pay attention to his performance since he looks like Chalamet as Dylan almost every step of the way; not just…Dylan, as it should be. From the schlocky, boyishly disheveled wig he wears, which only vaguely resembles the real Dylan’s hair at the time, to his awkward charm, much of the performance feels like an act. The same goes for the many scenes (most of the film, in fact) in which Chalamet performs Dylan’s music acoustically.

A lot has been written about the actor learn to sing and play the guitar for the role, so that it actually looks believable in the film. And it definitely deserves recognition for that. It is a testament to his commitment to the role and his approach to authenticating it.

A bigger problem, however, has to do with the fact that Chalamet’s performance seems far too contemporary for the time. Sure, the costumes and hairstyle are generally appropriate for the time. But it always looks and feels like a Generation Z star is wearing a mask – one so thin you can see through it.

That raises a difficult question posed by the film, its performances (Elle Fanning, as one of Dylan’s love interests, suffers the same problems as her co-star’s) and its advertising. Is the film that Mangold and co-author Jay Cocks adapted from Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric!” Is “Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Divided the Sixties” a good one, or is it just a way to introduce the now 83-year-old Dylan to a younger audience who may not be familiar with his work?

To hear it from the overwhelming praise and publicity narrative, Chalamet’s performance is “transformative.” Additionally, a widely shared social media post from the real Dylan feels like an additional attempt to validate his work in the film:

“There’s a film coming out about me called “A Complete Unknown” (what a title!),” said the musician Posted on X. “Timothée Chalamet plays the lead role. Timmy is a brilliant actor, so I’m sure he’ll be as believable as I am. Or a younger me. Or another one of mine… It’s a fantastic retelling of the events of the early 1960s that led to the Newport fiasco. After you see the movie, read the book.”

For what it’s worth, two things are true there. The film is called “A Complete Unknown” and Chalamet Is He was a great actor in other films, but you probably wouldn’t know that in A Complete Unknown. The film doesn’t do him any favors.

However, its excellence is just one of its many problems.

The drama traces Dylan’s path to the aforementioned Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where he caused a stir among the audience and his team, including musician and festival board member Peter Seeger (Edward Norton), because he had chosen the electric performance. This controversy clearly meant something at the time, and certainly still means something to Dylan devotees, but in the film it comes across as melodramatic, chaotic and empty.

Because as the title suggests, the nearly two and a half hours of “A Complete Unknown” is much more about the legend of Dylan than an examination of the actual person – or even the musician. How can you present an obviously monumental controversy over the titular issue as a climactic plotline when you haven’t built up the character or his story well enough for the audience to even recognize it as controversial?

It’s impossible. Dylan, the character, moves mostly as a shadow throughout the film. When the audience meets him, he is sneaking through the streets of New York City with his guitar on his back. A moment where he meets and befriends his idol Woody Guthrie should Likely to give the audience a sense of who he is or what he wants to say with his music. But it doesn’t.

All we get is a stiff admission from the character that he is unusually nervous about meeting and playing for Guthrie, who at this point in his life was in the hospital with Huntington’s disease. Otherwise it would be a throwaway line, but since “A Complete Unknown” offers no actual depiction of Dylan’s humanity, the audience is forced to cling to every moment of self-awareness.

But there’s hardly any of that in the film. Is Dylan usually a quiet or confident person when you don’t get to know his musical hero? The film seems completely indifferent to what kind of person he is. Instead, it glides through his romantic relationships with Fanning’s character Sylvie, portrayed in the story as Dylan’s true love, and folk star Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), her well documented and the tumultuous affair with Dylan is reduced to a thinly drawn bullet point.

In one scene in the film, Sylvie angrily complains to Dylan that it’s strange that he doesn’t talk about who he is, where he comes from, what he stands for, or what his music is about. That’s correct. While time is somewhat blurred throughout the film (the timestamps are sparse), the two are together for a significant amount of time, even living together at one point, and they don’t really seem to know who the other person is – and neither does the audience . This is just lazy storytelling.

Even the transitions in this brief era of Dylan’s career, such as when he’s at an industry party complaining that everyone in the room wants something different from him, are so quick and poorly constructed that the film leaves the audience with more questions than answers .

It’s crazy that a film with such a long running time can fill its minutes with such thin characterization and story that Mangold and Cocks try in vain to make up for it with one mock live musical performance after another. “A Complete Unknown” never feels like a movie, much less a biopic. Rather, it seems like an inferior, realistic fan fiction.

Because it focuses too much on superficially luring fans – both Dylan and Chalamet – with numerous musical performances and romantic interludes than telling a more complicated story that actually examines the facts, including the few who actually make it to end up in the film.

Barbaro’s role presents the opportunity to do this. This is the actress’ most outstanding film performance to date and her relative anonymity helps elevate her performance. Not only can she at least disappear into the role a little and let Baez’s character shine within it, the performance comes across as serious, sincere and fascinating even when the film isn’t.

One of the reasons Baez and Dylan’s careers became so complicated is that she was very politically active in those early years of her own career, but he was less so at the time. This is something “A Complete Unknown” doesn’t take into account; Instead, he portrays their relationship as a more or less pompous, nefarious musician and his equally talented lover.

For a film so impressed by Dylan’s rebellion, it does little to portray him as a revolutionary – not in his music, his politics, or otherwise. He actually seems typical; a man and unfaithful lover whose music makes him a superstar, who apparently gets bored with his women and his music and then gives a wacky performance that upsets a lot of people.

The real Dylan got one thing right with his assessment of “A Complete Unknown”: “It’s… another version of him.” And it’s unfulfilling.