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30th April 2025
05:41pm BST
Disney+ has just added A Complete Unknown, the terrific music biopic released in cinemas in January that wound up being nominated for eight Oscars, including the Best Picture prize.
The movie stars Timothée Chalamet (Oscar-nominated for his role) as a young Bob Dylan. The film begins in 1961 with the troubadour moving to New York City and seeking to visit the bedside of his recently hospitalised idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy in a beautiful wordless performance).
At Guthrie's bedside, Dylan meets folk icon and social activist Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, also Oscar-nominated) - whom the youngster impresses with his original songs.
Soon enough, Dylan, with the help of Seeger, has a meteoric rise to fame. It isn't long, however, before the 'Blowin' in the Wind' singer starts to find the expectations and limitations of the folk music scene stifling.
Seeking to experiment with electric guitars and rock instruments, he sparks the ire of the folk community who once championed him, with this coming to a head at an infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival gig.
Co-written and directed by James Mangold (who famously brought Johnny Cash's life to the screen with Walk the Line), JOE gave A Complete Unknown a rave review upon its release.
In particular, we praised its rousing music performance sequences, its supporting cast (including Boyd Holbrook as Cash and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez), as well as Timothée Chalamet's "career-best" lead turn.
In regard to the latter, the young actor truly disappears into Bob Dylan, nailing his unique voice (both when talking and singing) and his eccentric, laconic persona.
We also wrote:
"A Complete Unknown is one of the better music biopics of recent years. This is partly because it's not a decades-spanning chronicle of an artist's life - the kind so thoroughly spoofed in Walk the Line parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story - where, because of the compression of time and events necessary for a film's runtime, every person who walks into a room is extremely important and must rattle off what feels almost like a Wikipedia entry of their most famous exploits.
"Instead, A Complete Unknown takes place over just four years. It eschews Dylan's pre-New York life, which makes the singer-songwriter more compelling. This is because the audience, like many of the characters, is entranced by his mystique and is trying to work out where he came from and what makes him tick.
"This four-year setting also allows Mangold not only to gorgeously recreate Greenwich Village in New York in the '60s but also properly luxuriate in it."
We concluded: "Even at a time of peak-music biopics, A Complete Unknown is a must-watch - both for fans of Bob Dylan, but also for anyone who just loves music."
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A Complete Unknown is available to stream on Disney+ now.
