THB #633: A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown delivers one cycle in Dylan’s remarkable life. He drifts into New York, with his guitar and a bag and barely any money in his pocket, and in less than 5 years achieves what for anyone else would be a lifetime of work. He is, from the start, maniacally passionate about the work he hopes to do and in this short run, before he turns 25, he achieves all he sought to achieve when he arrived and is ready - forced, really - to move on to the next phase of his life.

That’s the movie. No spoilers… just the simple fact.

The hardest thing to do when making a biopic is to find the right boundaries of the story. Telling the story of a complete lifetime - Gandhi, Chaplin - rarely works. Even Lawrence of Arabia, though opening with a flash-forward, focuses on a limited time and place and focus of T.E. Lawrence’s life, about 8 years.

The best biopics usually pick a segment of a life that reflects on the entire life in some way. From Amadeus to The Social Network, filmmakers pick t…