Review: A Complete Unknown (2024) – Entertaining, but Missing the Mark

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown takes a shot at capturing the lightning-in-a-bottle era of Bob Dylan’s early career — and for the most part, it’s an entertaining ride. The film digs into corners of Dylan’s story that usually get glossed over, and the performances are solid across the board. The actors portraying Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and especially Suze Rotolo deserve a standing ovation. Rotolo — one of Dylan’s first serious girlfriends, famously pictured with him on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan — gets a portrayal here that feels surprisingly real and tender.

The scenes at the Newport Folk Festival are some of the film’s best — raw, believable, and stripped of the usual Hollywood gloss. For once, it felt like you were really there, catching the electricity and confusion of Dylan’s genre-busting moment.

But now for the bad news:

The movie drowns itself in tobacco smoke — clocking an eye-popping 183 tobacco incidents — most of them involving Dylan looking impossibly cool with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Yeah, Dylan smoked. So did half the planet back then. But here it’s so relentless that it feels less like realism and more like an unpaid ad campaign. Given what we know about tobacco’s damage, it’s flat-out irresponsible — whether or not anyone got paid off under the table.

Then there’s the motorcycle thing. Dylan did own a 1964 Triumph Tiger 100, and he liked to ride. But it wasn’t like he was James Dean on two wheels. The movie leans way too hard into the cigarettes-and-motorcycles rebel myth, cranking it up until it starts to feel cartoonish.

Most frustrating of all, the film only flirts with Dylan’s political fire — the very thing that made him a voice of his generation. Masters of War gets a brief, powerful performance early on, but the broader activism of legends like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie is mostly left on the cutting-room floor. Even the pivotal first meeting between Dylan and Guthrie is fictionalized into a hospital visit that never actually happened (they met at a private residence in New Jersey).

Bottom line: A Complete Unknown is a slick, watchable film that captures some of Dylan’s mystique — but misses the soul that made him matter. Fun for a night out, but if you’re looking for the real Dylan, you’ll have to keep digging.