Best Actor 2024: Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet received his second Oscar nomination for portraying Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. 

A Complete Unknown is largely your run of the mill musician biopic this time about Bob Dylan. 

Timothée Chalamet has been making a name for himself as both an actor and a movie star. Taking the momentum from his Oscar nominated role in Call Me By Your Name right to several other daring roles or at least collaborations with remarkable filmmakers. Chalamet continued this trend in 2024 with his blockbuster performance in Dune Part II, and his performance in this film, which actually has been doing okay relatively speaking at the boxoffice as well. But the film seems like a required part of a notable actor’s career, and it is something that will come up at some point where they take on the role of a well known figure. Chalamet takes on a particularly well known figure in Bob Dylan, which goes into an even less remarkable trend of the musician biopic, to the point that this is retread from Mangold himself having done an extremely similar film with Walk the Line about Johnny Cash, who is also featured in this film. All that was parodied by Walk Hard successfully, and unfortunately Walk Hard had very little impact apparently when it comes to self-awareness as it failed to make many filmmakers change their ways and make their musician biopics more inventive, as except for some elements of the first act we get yet another run-of-the-mill Dewey Cox tale here. 

I will begin with the positives, Chalamet’s musical performance as Dylan is reasonably convincing, I would say he does go slightly too nasally towards the overt impression closer to John C. Reilly’s Dylan impression to be perfectly honest, but for the most part it is a believable enough approximation of Dylan’s musical performance style. Of course Chalamet doing his own singing and guitar playing is most of it, as Dylan’s stage presence is all about very little in terms of overt showmanship as he’s very minimalist when compared to say a Ray Charles or a Freddie Mercury especially. There’s not too much to imitate in that sense, but Chalamet more or less brings what he needs to in the musical performances. However in his non-singing Dylan voice he actually makes a critical error in doing his singing voice as Dylan’s talking voice, which while not dramatically opposed like Freddie Mercury’s two voices, it is still a more subdued voice with even less of that nasally extreme that is the focus for a Dylan parody. Chalamet makes this error as his speaking voice of Dylan is as much with nasal and does feel like a put on, particularly if you compare what Chalamet is doing here to what Blanchett did as her version of Dylan in the vastly superior I’m Not There, which notable given Blanchett is a woman playing a man yet felt far more natural despite even having room to be overt in her style given the film’s more impressionistic take on Dylan. 

So there’s one thing that I don’t quite believe him as Dylan, as it does feel like an actor with the too nasally voice, and his arching of his back, are all actions to create Dylan but don’t make me believe Dylan. Even within this there’s a strange choice by Chalamet where he always brings this intense glare at times, even in some of the musical performances, which is not really at all the presence you get from Dylan from that period. But the film, and Chalamet fall into what I suspected could be a pitfall of the film and the performer going in, which something I’m Not There brilliantly played with, which is that Dylan is such a mythic figure to so many, a living legend, that the filmmakers might be too timid to treat him as a person. And the film immediately makes this failure, as Dylan is looked at through the broadest of strokes to the point that we even get a character noting that he’s just this mysterious musical man. To be fair you can have a character that lives in ambiguities and the gray areas, but then at least the actor playing the part needs to know the essential truths of the character to give us hints into what might be going on behind that curtain. Unfortunately Chalamet is as lost as anyone else when it comes to who Dylan is as an actual person. He instead squarely performs into playing into the stoic mystery man who starts as the seeming young drifter just there ready to perform masterpieces, with random asides of a seeming sage wisdom at a young age, and there’s little in terms of a real build up towards a man creating an image of himself, or even letting us know just a hint of who this guy really is behind that image. 

The biggest difference between the early scenes of Dylan and the later scenes is less of anything that Chalamet does, and really all of his arc is defined by him now wearing sunglasses most of the time. Chalamet plays into the mysterious man from the opening scenes, and just goes even harder into it. When he reacts or interacts within a scene, we don’t get the sense of internal logic in his performance, something I’ll admit becomes even harder when sunglasses are blocking the window to the soul, but regardless, we get a lot of mumbling from Chalamet and general posturing as his form of Dylan. We don’t cut deeper other than he is this mystical man who will do his own thing no matter what, and the most we get is his quiet frustration. The frustration though even too comes out in just random mumblings of the mystic man still and it doesn’t allude to the real man getting annoyed by being put in a box. When he starts to expand his repertoire, builds his band, using an electric guitar, Chalamet puts no commentary on any of this within his performance, he just does it within the same Dylan “cool” as the rest of his performance. Even the climactic sequence which is causing a near riot for playing with his band at the Folk Festival, where much of the crowd boos him and calls him “Judas”. Chalamet plays all of it like it doesn’t phase him and he is just doing the same Dylan thing as the rest of his performance. It is all just the surface of Dylan and as though none of it impacts him whatsoever, which even in the real footage of Dylan’s reaction to being called Judas, you can see more emotion and more layers than Chalamet’s perfunctory note we get here. 

The aspect that theoretically should be Dylan at his most personal are when he’s with his two love interests the artist Sylvie (Elle Fanning) and fellow folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Notably both Fanning and Barbaro give the most naturalistic performances out of anyone in the film, which is particularly notable for Barbaro given that she too is playing a known figure though her realization of such is convincing without being overt. I mention that because they both seem like real people against Chalamet who even in these scenes still is doing his Dylan impression with too much of it just being that impression. When interacting with them he maybe brings a bit more overt charm, if rather minute, within the mannerisms but it speaks very little to anything going on internally with Dylan. He has a relationship with each woman who questions him about things, and his response is always some mumbling or to play songs. In both reactions Chalamet does little to convey whatever is going on beneath just being the wandering mysterious musician. How’s he really feeling about both women? He likes them I guess. How’s he feeling about basically betraying both of them? Unknown. How’s he feeling about relationships on the whole? Unknown. He just kind of does “I’m Dylan and I’m above it all” and calls it a day. There’s no real hidden vulnerability, there’s nothing nagging at the edges, there’s no transition for the man from his pre-fame phase to his post-fame phase. It’s just the impression of an unknowable image. The ending scene sums it up pretty well for me where we see Dylan visit the dying Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and we don’t see the fan, the grieving loved one, the artist looking for comfort or closure, the mentee looking for a last bit of wisdom, no what we get is just Chalamet looking above it all like Dylan as though he’s a superhero. It honestly wouldn’t have been too out of place if as Dylan was riding away from the folk festival if a kid went up to Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and asked “Why’s he riding away” and Seeger says with his sage wisdom “Because he's the hero folk music deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll criticize him. Because he can take it. Because he's not our hero. He's a mumbling guardian, a watchful poet. He’s a Bob Dylan.” I joke because there’s not a person here that Chalamet plays; it is a vague image of a man that the filmmakers, and Chalamet fail to give earnest life to. He makes no commentary on this icon, offers no insight, just delivers an impression, not the worst ever, but also not a particularly good one.