Timothée Chalamet stars in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic. But how are critics reacting to it?
The Guardian: ***** “Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance.”
Rolling Stone: ” Chalamet seems to understand the abundance of charm and divine gift of songwriting chops that allowed Bob to exert a pull on everyone around him, as well as the cipher mask and hipster aloofness that kept everyone at a safe distance, and gives you both in spades. He’s also smart enough to underplay these elements just enough so they don’t slip into caricature, which is even more impressive once a post-fame Dylan enters his prickly, “I wear my sunglasses at night” phase. (You wonder how much of Chalamet’s own feelings about overwhelming fame are being stirred into the pot here.)”
Coming Soon.net: “Another exceptional directorial choice from Mangold is not using a lot of non-diegetic music. The songs are performed live, and the decision not to drown out anything in a musical score allows the vocals to speak for themselves and show the beauty of the song. But that sums up all the positives about this movie. About a half-hour into the film, you realize that this story is not going anywhere emotionally resonant.”
The Independent: *** “It’s dutiful work. But dutiful doesn’t really cut it with Dylan. A Complete Unknown opens with the musician’s arrival in New York City in 1961, a puppyish enthusiast searching out his heroes, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). It ends with the moment he bid them adieu, creatively, by performing with electric instruments, thus stretching his hand out to the rock scene, at 1965’s Newport Folk Festival. People booed, allegedly. Others stood in silent awe. The scene, as scripted by Mangold and Jay Cocks, and based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, is pure Hollywood mythmaking.”
Variety: “digs into the elemental power of what Dylan created during this period, tossing off songs for the ages as if he’d pulled them out of the ages. That the Dylan we see is kind of a cad becomes part of the film’s power. It’s ruthlessly honest about what an obsessive artist is really like.”
IGN.com: “the moments in which people respond to Dylan’s work (positively or otherwise) are the best possible versions of these scenes. Across the movie’s 140 minutes, Chalamet’s Dylan searches for, well, something. Honesty? Integrity? A coherent worldview? It’s hard to say, and it’s just as hard to know whether he finds it, or if he views his musical evolution as selling out, or as a defiant leap toward the future.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “Any Dylan fan or indeed anyone with a fondness for the music coming out of New York City in the first half of that tumultuous decade will find ample pleasures in Mangold’s expertly crafted film. The period recreation is impeccable, and the many music performance sequences could not be more transporting, benefiting enormously from lead actors doing their own singing with estimable polish.”
Indie Wire: ” Chalamet shines brightest whenever the film stops time to let him sing, which it does so often that “A Complete Unknown” turns into a kind of backdoor musical. Chalamet plays the hits to soulful perfection, but he can’t hide as much of himself in a song as he can in a piece of dialogue, and the bits where he performs “Girl from the North Country” or whatever are so entrancing precisely because of the fertile distance they open between the actor and the part he’s playing — a distance that allows us to see them both more clearly for how they reflect back at one another.”
Deadline: “a remarkable performance by Chalamet, who performs all the songs himself in astonishing and authentic fashion. There is no lip-syncing or blending of voices between actor and subject. It is all Chalamet in the same way Walk the Line was all Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, and Coal Miner’s Daughter was all Sissy Spacek. Done the right way as it is here, it adds immeasurably to this film without turning into an imitation.”
Roger Ebert: ***Mangold’s approach demands a great deal of Mr. Chalamet, and he nails it. Not only does he sound like Dylan when he’s singing, he somehow captures the newness of these moments. When he plays “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the first time in a great scene, it’s a song that a lot of people in the movie audience know by heart. Still, Chalamet and the production somehow convey the immediacy of that moment at Newport when these people are hearing a masterpiece for the first time. It gives the film an electricity that biopics almost always lack, feeling urgent instead of merely like a jukebox that’s been played a hundred times.”
Den of Geek: “A Complete Unknown plants some seedlings that gesture toward this idea, but never gives them enough water or light. In the end, this is just another gospel about how cool its chosen messiah is. Alas, preaching to the choir has never been Dylan’s bag.”
The New York Post: “Carrying his indie roots with him like a membership card on every frame, Chalamet has Dylan’s same art-before-fame persona, his New York cool, his hair that’s blowin’ in the wind. Most vital, he ably handles the singer’s signature nasal twang in both song and speech. Some 40 tunes, all told.”
NME: **** “Chalamet is undeniably brilliant – and you can see his dedication in every sardonic eyebrow raise, every careful pluck of a string.”
The film will be released in cinemas on the 17th January.