A Complete Unknown (2024) review

Aspiring singer-songwriter Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in NYC from his native Minnesota with just a guitar and a backpack, visits legendary musician Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in the hospital, befriends Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), lands a few gigs around town, juggles "relationships" with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), becomes "the voice of a generation" and then has the audacity of bringing a Fender Stratocaster with him for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, thereby ticking off the crowd.  Although the performances are commendable, especially Chalamet doing his best Bob impersonation, Norton as a benevolent father figure (and mentor) and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash (the "parking" scene is hilarious), it's another jukebox "drama" (not unlike Bohemian Rhapsody) where a minute can't go by without a song playing, as if the movie doesn't want to bother having the audience know any of these individuals as actual humans who have full conversations with each other.  To its credit, it doesn't try to "soften" Dylan's image - when not on-stage, he's aloof, dismissive and basically a self-absorbed jerk - but the way it tries to "explain" his "process" is clumsy: right after he learns about the Cuban Missile Crisis, he's performing an anti-war song in a club and immediately makes out with the politically-motivated Ms. Baez.  Or maybe that's how it goes for geniuses: don't look back at the people you pissed off, they'll appreciate you in the long run.