A Complete Unknown

This is a strange movie. It's a lot of music performances that fill its 140 minutes. One doesn't know if James Mangold is trying to say the music is too sacred to interrupt it (which would be a little silly) or if he is just trying to stay very close to the music with the belief that it's ultimately the best vehicle to tell the story.

Either way, one comes out of the movie feeling like you didn't learn much about Bob Dylan. But you do understand he was a mystery, a man full of contradictions, surfing between naïveté and genius. And you feel a little like his girlfriend Sylvie: right there during the performances but not any closer to him than any of the members of the audience.

The result is the movie stays with you for days, and that is much to its credit. Timothée Chalamet delivers a strong performance as Bob Dylan, but he is one of those actors, like Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise, where it's hard to see the character behind the actor. Despite the prosthetics, you still see Timothée Chalamet more so than Bob Dylan.