A Complete Unknown is a 2024 biographical drama directed by James Mangold, adapted from Elijah Wald's 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! and depicting the formative years of Bob Dylan's career in New York City. The film begins in January 1961, when a nineteen-year-old Dylan arrives from Minnesota to seek out his dying idol Woody Guthrie, and ends four and a half years later with Dylan's infamous electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 — the moment that redefined rock and roll and alienated the folk movement that had made him famous.

Timothée Chalamet stars as Dylan, performing all of his own singing and guitar playing after more than a year of intensive training in Dylan's specific musical style. Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez, the folk queen whose artistic partnership with Dylan was both one of the great musical collaborations of the era and one of its most complicated personal entanglements. Edward Norton plays Pete Seeger, the folk patriarch whose mentorship of Dylan and eventual dismay at his electric turn gives the film one of its deepest moral tensions. Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, a character composite of Dylan's early New York girlfriends. The film was written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, whose screenwriting credits include Gangs of New York and The Age of Innocence.

A Complete Unknown was released on Christmas Day 2024, earning strong box office returns and generating considerable awards-season attention. Timothée Chalamet received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and the film was praised for Mangold's sure handling of a period richly documented in American cultural history. Critics highlighted the specificity of the early-1960s Greenwich Village recreation and the film's willingness to engage with Dylan's genuine evasiveness and complexity rather than offering a conventional heroic biography.