Dylan Biopic, ‘A Complete Unknown,’ 0 For 8 at Academy Awards
by Best Classic Bands Staff
Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (Photo: Searchlight Pictures)
Nearly five years after the film was first announced, the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, finally opened on Christmas Day 2024. Its reviews have been stellar and its box office receipts, well past $100 million, have been solid. The movie, from Searchlight Pictures, is directed by James Mangold, who also wrote the screenplay with longtime film critic Jay Cocks, based on Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan Goes Electric! It stars Timothée Chalamet, who was 28 years old during the filming earlier in 2024. On January 23, 2025, the film earned eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. But at the Oscars ceremony, held on March 2 at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, A Complete Unknown was shut out.
The film and its director were defeated by Anora and its director, Sean Baker. Chalamet lost to Adrien Brody, the star of The Brutalist, who pollsters had as a slight favorite to win.
Chalamet is joined in A Complete Unknown by Edward Norton, who earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Pete Seeger. (Kieran Culkin won for his role in A Real Pain.) Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, a character based on Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend in those early days in the Village. Actress Monica Barbaro has also been singled out for significant praise, earning an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Joan Baez. (Zoe Saldaña won for her role in Emilia Perez.)
Also at the Academy Awards, Mangold and Cocks lost to the screenwriter for Conclave for Adapted Screenplay. A Complete Unknown also lost for Best Sound to Dune: Part Two.
Chalamet won for Best Leading Actor at the SAG Awards on February 23. In his acceptance speech that night, the actor said, “I know the classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me, but the truth is this was five and a half years of my life. I poured everything I had into playing this incomparable artist, Mr. Bob Dylan, a true American hero. And it was the honor of a lifetime playing him.”
Watch Chalamet’s complete SAG Awards speech, in which he says he’s inspired “to be one of the greats”
A Complete Unknown is set during Dylan’s days as a Greenwich Village folk singer in the New York City music scene of the early ’60s, culminating with his decision to play a transformational electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which at the time was seen as one of popular music’s most shocking events. The film takes its title from the iconic lyric from 1965’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Dylan himself commented on the movie on December 4. See it below, along with the trailer, several on-set featurettes, clips, Chalamet’s performance of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and an extended making-of feature. Through March 1, the film had earned $111.1 million at the box office and ranks as the 8th biggest music biopic of all-time. (It was reported to have cost $60 million to produce.) To reach #7 it’ll have to surpass the $124 million that 2004’s Ray attained. More recent comparisons are 2019’s Rocketman at #4, which earned $195.3 million and 2022’s Elvis ($288.7 million). The all-time champ is 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody with an astounding $910.8 million.
A Complete Unknown will be released on 4K and Blu-ray on April 1. It’s available for pre-order in the U.S. here. It’s available for streaming on Prime Video here.
Mangold is no stranger to directing music biopics, having filmed 2005’s Walk the Line, with Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter. His impressive resume also includes directing many Hollywood blockbusters and stars: the fifth Indiana Jones movie in 2023 (with Harrison Ford), several films in the Marvel universe, Ford v Ferrari (with Matt Damon and Christian Bale) among his prestigious filmography.
Reviewers of A Complete Unknown immediately began touting Chalamet for an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. (He was nominated for the Golden Globe but lost to Adrien Brody for The Brutalist.) Chalamet does his own singing and reportedly hired the same coach who prepped Austin Butler for 2022’s Elvis. (The latter was nominated, but did not win, for his performance as the King.) The New York City native has shown considerable growth in the past decade in big roles in Wonka, Little Women and Dune and Dune: Part Two. Chalamet also received an Academy Award nomination for 2017’s Call Me By Your Name. The actor was the host and musical guest of the January 25 episode of Saturday Night Live.
Reviews for A Complete Unknown began posting on December 10, with the ranking, as of March 2, at 81% based on 303 reviews on the film’s Rotten Tomatoes page. (The audience rating is a whopping 95%.) In its five-star review, The Guardian called Chalamet “an electric revelation.” The National Board of Review named the film one of the Top 10 of the year. Variety wrote, “The film, with its beautifully haphazard song-cycle structure, truly is about Dylan and his music, and how the music changed everything.” Deadline called Chalamet’s performance “remarkable” and “astonishing.”
Related: Best Classics Bands’ review of the film
One “fairly prominent” observer is Dylan himself. And while many have been fleeing the social media platform Twitter/X, the Bard has been posting there relatively frequently since Sept. 25 with some curious observations. None was more striking than his comments about the movie on Dec. 4.
There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from Elijah…
— Bob Dylan (@bobdylan) December 4, 2024
Several hours later, Chalamet acknowledged Dylan’s tweet.
Floored.
I am so grateful.
Thank you Bob https://t.co/u9tuAE1vpf— Timothée Chalamet (@RealChalamet) December 5, 2024
Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (Photo: Searchlight Pictures)
Such key figures in Dylan’s sphere are portrayed, including Albert Grossman, Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax, Bob Neuwirth, Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield and others.
In its review, the Hollywood Reporter raved about Barbaro’s portrayal as Joan Baez. “She gives the character the radiant self-possession of a woman who never loses sight of who she is, even — or maybe especially — when she falls into an unsatisfying relationship with Bob. Barbaro and Chalamet’s duets on stage are among the movie’s standout musical moments, not least because Joan transmits such joy in her rapport with both Bob and the audience.”
Listen to Chalamet and Barbaro perform “Girl From the North Country”
[The film’s soundtrack is available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.]
“It was important for me to sing and play on set,” says Chalamet, “because it was in the spirit of the movie to do it live.”
“I had goosebumps,” says Fanning. “You can see how much love and how hard he’s worked and how much he cares about getting this right.”
A Complete Unknown‘s other Academy Award nominations are for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design and Best Sound.
Listen to Chalamet perform “Like a Rolling Stone”
Related: Our interview with author Elijah Wald on his book, Dylan Goes Electric
Wald’s book is available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.
Watch an extensive making-of feature for the film
13 Comments so far
Jump into a conversationFinally something worthwhile to see on the big screen .
This looks and sounds, beyond my wildest expectations quite simply GREAT!
I took a medical school classmate to hear Bob Dylan sing in 1964.
His immediate response was “This guy get’s paid to sing like that !!”
He bought a copy of the record as we left the store.
For all the naysayers that always quote ‘but he can’t sing’ go and get educated. It’s what he says…not how he sings! The man is a stone cold genius!
At least in the early days, Dylan always hit the notes on key and you could understand every single word he sang. That’s more important than vocal quality sometimes.
And he’s responsible for Hendrix deciding HE could sing, because as Hendrix once said, if THAT guy can get out there and sing, I can too.
Zimmerman is a magnificent songwriter. No one can question that. However, he is a horrible singer and, by all accounts, a lousy performer who ignores his audiences, plays weird versions/arrangements of his songs in concert (almost to the point where they’re unrecognizable), and basically doesn’t care about what people want to hear even though they’ve paid their money to see him. Screw that. That’s just contempt for his audiences. I will not subsidize that. In fact, I wouldn’t walk across the street to see him perform for free. However, and once again, he’s a wonderful songwriter whose songs will live forever. Full credit to him for that.
That was my exactly experience seeing him several years ago. I know his voice wasn’t going to sound good but I figured all together it would be a nice show. It was truly terrible. At times, even the band looked lost trying to figure out what he was doing. We’re not big fans but definitely knowledgeable about a lot of his music and couldn’t figure out 90% of the time which songs we were hearing.
I have never been able to stand to listen to Dylan’s voice. He “sings” like a dog with its hind leg caught in a barbed wire fence. I’ll give him his due, though: he’s a terrific songwriter. A horrible singer, but a great songwriter.
People repeat but can’t sing. Bob Dylan is one of the best singers in the world, better than Whitney Houston, said Leonard Cohen. Rolling Stone magazine voted Dylan the 7th best singer of all time. It’s good to get to know the artist better.
I can’t believe you got beat tonight, 0-8! I never even heard of the other movies. One is even in Spanish
We loved “A Complete Unknown” too, but with all due respect, there are many movies in languages other than English that are superb. The awards shouldn’t just be for English-speaking films. And several of the other nominated films this year were very good. Maybe check some of them out when they come to streaming.
I have written elsewhere on one of these BCB features re how me/my Mpls jewish friends went completely fan-wild for Dylan from 1st folk/folkie albums and then 1st electric albums, and we all knew his song lyrics and tried to ‘out dylan’ each other, top each other, and those who could play harmonica or guitar, might command slight edge…his poetry, lyrics and persona were what mattered, even if we did not understand exactly what all of it meant..!!??
He was us, a Minnesota brilliant jewish boy, who represented an artist, a poet, a musician, a singer…we saw ourselves in him, aspired to be as wise, literate, and happy that he represented us, and the times, becoming the voice of our/that generation…yes there are songs/albums that I can not listen to, but much of his work I can, the bulk of it I can!
And once I went fully into rock of brit invasion and thereafter, and somewhat lost interest in woody, pete, other folkies, and took long time to find my way back, I did and love and appreciate all music, finding appreciation of leadbelly and so many others as well…will close by sharing 3 remarks: eric burdon’s comment that ‘its all meat on same bone’, unrecalled author’s remark that ‘all music is spiritual’, and pete seeger’s remark, ‘the point is to sing, (esp in groups), not how well, you sing….
while again, some of dylan’s tunes I can not listen to, and never will, the bulk I can and it’s overall a huge soundtrack of my life!
I hope Dylan stays forever young and forever musically forthcoming!