I’m a Baby Boomer. Of course I’ve seen ‘A Complete Unknown’ and like nearly everyone else I know, I loved it. I didn’t realize how much the background soundtrack of my life is made up of Bob Dylan songs- songs that other people had covered that I didn’t realize had been written by Dylan. I’m astounded that Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan, sang all the songs himself. The movie covers the early 1960s from Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961 and ends with the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival where Dylan ‘went electric’, which seems a particularly mild crime looking back sixty years later. (My God. Sixty years. How did that happen?)
That said, I could barely understand a word the Bob Dylan character said, and his mumbling seemed to become worse as the movie went on. I was a bit disappointed in the Joan Baez character too, who seemed too ’rounded’ instead of the rather pointy person I’ve always thought of her as being, and Monica Barbaro, who also did all her own singing, didn’t capture that crystalline, soaring voice- although few probably could.
I haven’t particularly been a Dylan fan, but I have a new appreciation for him now. However, doesn’t stretch as far as thinking that he was a worthy winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
5 stars from me.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 