Bob Dylan is a musician who has, over the course of a six-decade-plus-long profession, staunchly defied categorization. For that motive, Todd Haynes’s experimental 2007 biopic, I’m Not There—which tells the legendary singer’s story in six segments, with a string of actors adopting his mop of curly hair and signature darkish shades—felt like a fittingly unconventional method to convey his life to the large display screen.
James Mangold’s A Full Unknown, alternatively—the brand new musical reimagining of Dylan’s early years in New York, wherein he’s performed by a soft-spoken, hollow-eyed Timothée Chalamet—is, for higher and for worse, much more easy and accessible, inserting the Nobel Prize-winning icon right into a extra acquainted, old-school narrative construction. In some ways, the outcome isn’t fairly worthy of its enigmatic material, but it surely additionally calls for to be seen, if just for the virtuosic efficiency at its heart, in addition to the unbelievable, regularly goosebump-inducing music which permeates this story. Collectively, they make this flawed movie fairly irresistible.
We first see Chalamet’s curmudgeonly, withdrawn younger Dylan in 1961, as he’s stuffed into the again of a automobile hurtling in direction of Manhattan, aged 19. He’s left his midwestern hometown on a pilgrimage: His idol, the pioneering folks singer Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), is recovering at a psychiatric hospital in close by New Jersey, and he’s decided to satisfy him. Earlier than you understand it, he does, enjoying him a easy tune on his guitar—the elegiac “Track to Woody,” which might find yourself on Dylan’s self-titled debut album only a yr later—and blowing him away, alongside together with his visiting good friend and fellow luminary, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).
