A Complete Unknown was released on Christmas day 2024 and it’s getting four stars out of five across the internet. As a guitar player myself, naturally I’m interested in the evolution of Bob Dylan’s early days so here I sat in Calgary’s Chinook Theatre for the 4pm Tuesday cheap seat.
Imagine being tasked the role of an eccentric who plays guitar but you don’t play guitar. You go to work and this is exactly what Timothee Chalomet had done very well in my opinion. He would have looked to the charisma or lack thereof in Dylan while researching his character. This of course was the most intriguing aspect of the movie for me. If you are familiar with Bob Dylan, you know of his monotone raspy delivery while being succinct in words. Bob Dylan has not been awarded a Nobel Prize in literature because of unpurposeful rhetoric. It is because of a capacity for drawing meaning from few words.
Critics may claim that plot was lacking but the appeal is in the persona. That is, that character who sits in the back corner of a bar with sunglasses on hoping to catch a nugget of inspiration from a mysterious fellow musician he had just met.
The volume of work is extraordinary and young ones bred on rap and raves stand perplexed by the intrigue but weren’t exposed to the political and social rawness of summer ’68. Folk was culturally more relevant then when metaphors were moving and norms had been evolving. This movie provides an imaginative glimpse into what it might have been like when a creative young man questioned values and tradition through song.
Time well spent in my opinion….but heh – I play guitar.