A Complete Unknown
Overview
A 19-year-old nobody shows up in Greenwich Village with a guitar, a harmonica, and a past he keeps lying about. Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan arriving in early-1960s New York, in the middle of a folk music revival, mysterious and guarded about where he even came from. The legendary Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) takes him under his wing, the art student Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) falls for him, and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the Queen of Folk herself, becomes his friend and peer. Then the songs start coming — "Blowin' in the Wind," "The Times They Are a-Changin'" — and Dylan goes from curiosity to the voice of a generation almost overnight. The movie's real story, though, is how quickly he starts fighting the crown. Dylan rejects the "protest singer" label, gets restless, and reaches for an electric guitar, alienating the faithful who made him. It all funnels into the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he plugs in with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the crowd boos, and Seeger — his own mentor — tries to cut the power. Chalamet performs every song himself, having learned guitar and harmonica for the role, and that matters: you watch an artist refuse, in real time, to be defined by anyone but himself.
