A Complete Unknown

James Mangold had every musical performance recorded live on set. Timothée Chalamet sings 40 Dylan songs, and Edward Norton, Monica Barbaro and Boyd Holbrook play and sing their own parts. The sound team used period microphones and no earpieces. They had almost 16 hours of unreleased Dylan recordings and old Columbia session notes listing the vintage microphones he had used. Gibson lent guitars from its archive and built two custom J-50 copies. Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo is really Suze Rotolo; Dylan asked that her real name be kept out. The chronology is loose as well. The “Judas!” shout from the hall in the closing Newport scene actually happened in Manchester in 1966, and Johnny Cash was not at that festival. Pete Seeger went to Benedict Cumberbatch first; Norton took over when the schedule failed. The Academy nominated the film in 8 categories and gave it none. Chalamet won the Screen Actors Guild award for lead actor, and the sound crew won at the Cinema Audio Society. A good fit if you want the songs carried by what the actors do in the room rather than by a studio track, and accept events moved and merged. Not for viewers sensitive to flashing light; the BBFC attached a photosensitive epilepsy warning to this release. Smoking is frequent and sometimes framed as romance.