I walked into James Mangold’s new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, which adapts Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!, with low expectations, largely because it seemed unthinkable that any film could do justice to Dylan’s towering legacy. But to my surprise, it quickly became not only one of my favorite films of the year but one of the best musical biopics I have seen to date.
Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Dylan is so eerily accurate that in moments like the scene on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Dylan plays a raw and sparse rendition of “Masters of War” in a dingy New York pub, you can close your eyes and almost hear the bard himself — just listen to the original on Dylan’s Bootleg Series. Opposite Chalamet, Monica Barbaro delivers a similarly flawless portrayal of Joan Baez, completely vanishing into the role and capturing Baez’s…
