Yesterday I went to see the new Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. I gave it five stars on Letterboxd and said:
Every star is for Chalamet. Off-the-charts incredible performance – especially when he’s singing, which is almost the entire movie – it’s almost a concert movie. There’s lots of typical biopic nonsense, but none of it really detracts because the music is so so strong.
Today I found that I really haven’t thought about it at all. There’s really not much to think about — it pretty much is just Chalamet doing fantastic versions of Dylan songs, which is great, but as a movie it’s pretty thin. But I went in knowing that it would be so was looking for a few great moments, which this movie has in spades.
The ABC did a piece on other cinematic versions of Dylan and it appears whoever was given the unenviable task of sitting through some incredibly bad movies was in a bit of a rush. The bit on I’m Not There names Alexander Payne as the director rather than Todd Haynes and also claims that Robert Redford played a part. Maybe they were thinking of Richard Gere.
Happily, unlike many sites, it was easy to send a message telling them of the errors. Interested to see whether they get corrected. I find it hard to believe I’m the first person to report them.