At The Movies: Timothee Chalamet mesmerises in A Complete Unknown, The Monkey is a tiresome horror

A Complete Unknown (PG13)

141 minutes, opens on Feb 27
★★★★☆

The story: Star-producer Timothee Chalamet channels American folk poet Bob Dylan in a Hollywood musical biopic up for eight Academy Awards, including for best actor, director, picture and screenplay.

In 1961, a 19-year-old from Minnesota hitches a ride to New York City with his guitar to meet his folk singer idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and establish a career.

By 1965, amid a climate of civil rights and anti-war activism, he has been anointed “The Voice of a Generation” for his raw protest songs Blowin’ In The Wind (1963) and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) until he scandalises the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival by blasting electric instruments: Dylan, even now at 83, continually reinvents himself.

American indie film-maker Todd Haynes’ answer was to cast six characters as the multifaceted minstrel in I’m Not There (2007).

A Complete Unknown is nowhere so innovative. An adaptation by American director James Mangold and his co-writer Jay Cocks of the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, this account of the musician’s four formative years – ascending from scruffy vagabond to cultural force – is a straightforward celebrity origin story like Mangold’s Walk The Line (2005) on American country legend Johnny Cash.

The actors are excellent, singing and playing their instruments, their passion for the material palpable. Edward Norton plucks his banjo as benevolent balladeer and Pete Seeger – a Dylan mentor – and Monica Barbaro’s dulcet songbird Joan Baez is the lover-cum-rival making Dylan’s girlfriend (Elle Fanning) jealous.

Both, too, have been Oscar-nominated, while Chalamet mesmerises in his subsuming of his subject’s vocals and mannerisms as well as shifty, prickly opacity. His Dylan is unknowable, which is the only Dylan there is. Whatever one may assume, it ain’t him, babe.

Hot take: The troubadour remains ever elusive, but his mystique and music captivate through Chalamet’s bravura performance.

The Monkey (PG13)

95 minutes, now showing in cinemas
★★☆☆☆

The story: Sensitive teen Hal and his bullying twin Bill (Christian Convery in a dual role) find in dad’s closet a wind-up toy monkey that kills at whim each time the key in its back is turned. Twenty-five years later in present-day New England in the United States, it resurfaces for a fresh cycle of violence.

“Everybody dies,” says the boys’ mum (Tatiana Maslany), and how. Some in The Monkey have their heads set ablaze, while the babysitter (Danica Dreyer) loses hers at a teppanyaki restaurant: the latter freak accident, too, the monkey’s mischief, no lapse of the chef.

American director Osgood Perkins, whose Longlegs was the most terrifying movie experience of 2024, knows about unhappy endings. Aids claimed his actor-father Anthony Perkins of Psycho (1960) fame, and his mother was a victim in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Humour may be the only sane response. In this splatter comedy adapted from American author Stephen King’s 1980 same-titled short story, the cruel randomness of providence is therefore but a cosmic joke – an empty one.

King’s 42 pages have been stretched to a feature film just so more unfortunates can be shot, harpooned, electrocuted, detonated, lawnmower-ed and trampled by wild horses as the estranged adult brothers (Theo James) return to their home town to destroy the malevolent mechanical chimp, this generational family curse that is a manifestation of their father’s abandonment and their shared hostility.

The movie has no build-up nor payoff, much less any interest in the characters. It is a repetitive string of shock-value creative kills, cartoonishly gory, and as arbitrary and meaningless as death itself except without the emotional toll.

Hot take: Death is no laughing matter in this tiresome splatstick horror.