01/01/25 - A Complete Unknown (2024) - 6+/10

A quality music biopic that probably reaches a bit higher on the charts than its recent brethren but still falls into the same anchors and trappings of its subgenre. Really, it's the script that keeps it at bay, stiflingly tidy and focused more on hitting beats than letting it weightlessly breathe as something wholly original. It is still good but it just keeps it in a box and only allows it to garner so much accolades in my putrid pot of a movie review brain.

The direction is adept and the performances exceedingly noteworthy. Timmy brings it and gets blown away in the gusty wind of the mysterious Bob Dylan. His cagey eloquence, his magnetic stifled jaw, and his mysterious chain-smoking “hidden behind glasses at all times” affect really worked to capture the spirit of the folk legend. He wasn’t alone, as Norton’s Seeger’s “Revolutionary Mr. Rogers with a banjo” killed, Barbaro’s Baez was able to capture both the gaze and our fascination with emotion filled eyes, and GOD DAMN was Boyd Holbrook awesome as the fiery presence of Johnny Cash - I literally didn’t even recognize him and was prepped to praise this “amazing newcomer who embodied the Man in Black so well”.

The music is electric (pun intended) and provides for some magical movie moments that I think will really work for an older audience. It is weird to see Dylan portrayed as such a volatile and revolutionary aura by singing something akin to “Like a Rolling Stone”, which seems so base and folk…times sure do change. It was also interesting to make a film about a mysterious pop culture icon where you don’t actually try to explain him, cover a short span of their life that is entirely adulthood, and doesn’t get wrapped up in drugs, sex, violence, etc.

A great film to watch with your grandparents. They might have some interesting tidbits to expound upon for you.