I know this about A COMPLETE UNKNOWN: Timothee Chalamet nails it. The new biopic charts poet, musician, Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan’s subterranean landing in the middle of the last century, like a depth charge still rippling through time and cultural space.  Just voted BEST ACTOR by the Boston Society of Film Critics, Chalamet delivers the performance of the year conveying with astounding authority Dylan’s solitary, one-off intensity, free floating rebelliousness, elusiveness,  wisdom and wiseass humor, snarky persona, and extraordinarily convincing vocals without caricaturing the artist. No easy feat given Dylan’s idiosyncrasies.  Chalamet reveals the flesh and blood beneath the mysterious persona and makes these disparate parts cohere. There are also, reportedly, 40 songs in the movie. I didn’t count, but each one sounded fresh when Chalamet sang and played them. And he sings and plays them all. And the actor disappears. Watch the trailer HERE.

While the film breaks no new ground stylistically, it makes believable the arc of Dylan’s initial fame, the tenor of the times, and the poetic/universal impact of his music. Superb among this ensemble is Ed Norton’s exceptional performance as Pete Seeger, the kindly but self righteous old guard folkie who took 19 year-old Dylan under his roof and wing– but didn’t quite see him coming. The performance won Norton the BSFC’s BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR award. In the film, Seeger meets Dylan in the dying singer/songwriter/activist Woody Guthrie’s (Scoot McNairy) hospital room when Dylan suddenly appears at the threshold, and declares Guthrie’s music “shook me to the ground.” When Chalamet’s Dylan picks up his guitar and proceeds to sing an ode to his hero “Song to Woody,” I’m sizing up Chalamet’s performance while watching Seeger and Guthrie in the scene patiently humoring the young musician. I was sold. So are they, but unlike me, Seeger and Guthrie don’t know they’ve just ushered the next generation though the door.

Dylan will eventually shift the ground beneath their feet, the earthquake and Pete Seeger erupting as Bob takes the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Grandma  Seeger hangs on for dear life as Dylan shocks the crowd with his now electric guitar– some stunned, some cheering, some booing, torn between defiance and defensiveness. It’s a thrilling and almost hilarious scene made new and exciting, as we watch these artists in this moment reshaping the terrain, redefining what folk music –any music– is, and who exactly “the folks” are anyway. They now include a generation coming of age during the 60’s, folks who witnessed the Vietnam War, political assassinations, race riots and protests on campus and in the streets–all broadcast on Television.

This climactic scene is dramatically loaded as a bellwether of the upheavals to come, lucidly directed by James Mangold who pulls together all the strands of this multi-faceted, adapted screenplay co-written by Mangold, Jay Cocks, and Elijah Wald who wrote the book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties.” Dylan’s splintered love life is interwoven, beginning with a striking Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (a fictionalized version of Dylan’s real life girlfriend Suze Rotolo) a sophisticated painter and early muse who wants to pin down the mercurial Dylan until she lets go.

Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez without the solemnity, but convincingly approximating her delicate soprano which Dylan offhandedly declares “maybe a little too pretty.” More famous initially than Bob, Baez is too calculated for the rebellious Dylan who’s constitutionally incapable of playing the game. Boyd Holbrook is a swaggering, hard drinking, big-hearted Johnny Cash who had more to do with the nascent Dylan than I’d realized, and urged him on as he approached that electric moment.

The iconic songs happen organically, and there are musical asides which illuminate Dylan’s sensibilities ripe for anything or anyone who rings true. I especially loved a scene where Dylan, Seeger, and a blues musician spontaneously riff during a live broadcast cracking open the template for a fusion of sound. There are a few hiccups–the final Guthrie scene is pat and corny– Dylan might cringe. And there’s a girlfriend named Becka (Laura Kariuki) who comes out of nowhere, stays for minute, then disappears after setting up the punchline for a joke. These are minor quibbles in a film that held me for 2 hours and 21 minutes.

The impact of Dylan’s capacious musical curiosity and observational genius is at the heart of the movie, as well as the musical diversity of the day which continually sparked him. The irony of the old folkies who prided themselves as benevolent forces for love, inclusivity, and peaceful revolution against the establishment, are here seen here to have fallen victim to their own self-satisfaction. They’ve become the establishment, stuck and smug, blind to the musical revolution right in front of them, somehow not getting it–Dylan’s mythic ode “The Times They Are A Changin’.”

But the movie is about more than Dylan– it’s about stasis and change and letting go. It puts a lens on how artists both channel and challenge the times, and where folks might go when, unshackled by precedent, we open our ears and follow Dylan’s “Tambourine Man” into a complete unknown:

“Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves
The haunted frightened trees
Out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow”

Dylan himself weighed in on X today. No better imprimatur on the film, the book, and “Timmy’s” performance:

Bob Dylan

@bobdylan

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 Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric – a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.