Avis des critiques

Eschewing the often-shallow approach of the cradle-to-the-grave biopic to tell a formative chapter in music and world history, Mangold’s film fluidly captures the intersection of art and fame with solid performances, unshowy direction, and organic editing.

Timothée Chalamet inhabits the loose-limbed, live-wire physicality of the young Bob Dylan and makes an impressively good fist of capturing the frayed hessian of his distinctive voice... What A Complete Unknown shows brilliantly is the way that music in the right hands becomes a weapon.

[A Complete Unknown] has some thoughtful and poignant performances... But it does still suffer from the same issues that plague musical biopics of this nature: obtrusive appearances from other famous people... clanging expository lines... constant shots of dewy-eyed women’s impressed faces. The result isn’t unenjoyable, but the string of musical set pieces gives little new insight in to Dylan as a musician or person.

[A Complete Unknown] is a dream - as accessible to newcomers as it is rewarding for die-hards, with a rivetingly lived-in performance from Timothée Chalamet, a keen eye for immersive detail, and a gorgeously tactile, five-o-clock-shadow-rough surface.

A Complete Unknown takes a reverent stance to Dylan’s artistry, populated by technically accomplished musical performances (Chalamet’s voice isn’t perfect, but it’s undoubtedly impressive), and shot with a real sensitivity to the emotional landscape of each track. It’s dutiful work. But dutiful doesn’t really cut it with Dylan.

Mangold and Jay Cocks’ script... is weirdly thin... [A Complete Unknown is] not sophisticated enough to intuit Dylan’s discomfort with his skyrocketing fame or chafing at expectations to stay in line, which the film dramatizes with all the subtlety of a hammer to the hand. Uniformly, the picture is admiring of Dylan, and entirely unilluminating.

"A Complete Unknown" pulls too many punches and elides too many facts to show us how it feels to be Dylan, a master at staying masked and anonymous and too slippery to pin down. It’s the dynamite actor playing him who reveals this shapeshifter in flashes of lightning and enveloping darkness.

The most pleasant surprise in “A Complete Unknown,” and why it works as well as it does, is that even as it builds a realistic world with sweep and detail... it doesn’t try to make Bob palatable, nice or, finally, comprehensible in the usual dreary biopic fashion.

In shaping the material for a script, Mangold and Jay Cocks... have landed on a counterintuitive but brilliant organizing principle, one that no great-man biopic has, to my mind, ever tried.

[A Complete Unknown] is a brisk, tuneful and very entertaining two hours and 20 minutes of bog-standard Hollywood biopic... [Chalamet] is excellent, even if he gives the second-best performance in the movie... I enjoyed Chalamet’s [turn], but [Edward] Norton’s made me giddy, so perfectly does he capture Pete [Seeger’s] generosity, piousness and near-total incomprehension at what’s happening — his entire generation made passé, overnight.

There are points to quibble... but “A Complete Unknown” is utterly fascinating, capturing a moment in time when songs had weight, when they could move the culture — even if the singer who made them was as puzzling as a rolling stone.

“A Complete Unknown” simply celebrates brilliance... Mr. Mangold and Mr. Chalamet don’t expound on the man’s talent; they simply, exuberantly, show it.