Off-kilter chocolatiers, desert messiahs, civil war-era heartthrobs, lone-wolf cannibals. Thus far, Timothée Chalamet’s career has been defined by being cast in thrilling roles by thrilling directors. His latest challenge is no different: playing Bob Dylan in the James Mangold-directed A Complete Unknown.
“I got approached with this project five or six years ago,” Chalamet explained in a recent interview with Zane Lowe. “Let’s say, this is 2018, and I had just done Call Me By Your Name. Bob Dylan was this name I knew was held in reverence and I knew I was supposed to respect. If you were in the in-crowd, that’s a name you get behind. But truthfully, I didn’t know anything about it. [...] I am now deep in that Church of Bob. I feel like that’s my mission for the next three months, until the movie comes out. I feel like I’m in the Church of Bob, I’m a humble disciple, and I feel like I got this opportunity to kind of be a bridge to this music, or this period.”
Here’s everything we know about the project so far.
Is there a trailer for A Complete Unknown?
Yes! There are two, and you can watch both below.
What’s the plot of A Complete Unknown?
While the plot is still largely under wraps, we know that the film will follow a 19-year-old Dylan as he arrives in New York City from Minnesota, seeking a career in music and ultimately becoming the stuff of rock and roll legend. “It’s such an amazing time in American culture and the story of a young 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with, like, two dollars in his pocket and becoming a worldwide sensation within three years,” Mangold told Collider during a red-carpet interview in April 2023. “First being embraced into the family of folk music in New York, and kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises so beyond belief.”
Who else is in the cast of A Complete Unknown?
Elle Fanning stars as Sylvie Russo, Dylan’s fictional girlfriend, a character inspired by Dylan’s real-life former girlfriend and muse Suze Rotolo. Edward Norton will play Dylan’s fellow folk musician Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro will play a young Joan Baez, and Boyd Holbrook will be Johnny Cash.
Is Timothée Chalamet recording his own vocals for A Complete Unknown?
He can act, he can dance and, yes, he can sing—Chalamet confirmed in a December 2023 interview that 70% of the soundtrack had already been recorded in a California studio with Nick Baxter, the film’s music supervisor. In the same interview, the actor also revealed that Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, sent Chalamet 12 hours of unreleased Bob Dylan music from 1959 to 1964. “This might earn the ire and wrath of a lot of Bob fans, rightfully,” Chalamet pre-warned. Later, Chalamet revealed that he wept after singing for the first time in the film. “It was ‘Song to Woody,’ which is one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs ever,” Chalamet told Zane Lowe. “It was the first one we shot in the movie. You couldn’t do it to a playback because it’s such an intimate scene. It’s in a hospital room with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. And I did it live. I went home and I wept that night. Not to be dramatic, but it’s a song I’d been living with for years and something I could relate to deeply. And I also felt, I come back to this word a lot, I felt like it was the most dignified work I’d ever done.”
Where was A Complete Unknown filmed?
Local New Jersey news outlets reported that Mangold and team were recreating Woodstock, New York, in various parts of northern New Jersey. For example, it was in Cape May, NJ, that the scene for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island (Dylan’s first time performing with an electric guitar) was filmed.
When is A Complete Unknown being released?
The film is officially confirmed to hit theaters in the US on December 25, 2024
How should I entertain myself until A Complete Unknown premieres?
Listen to Bob Dylan’s back catalogue, watch Todd Haynes’s experimental Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, and revisit some of Vogue’s best portraits of the 1960s courtesy of Peter Rand, including one of Bob Dylan from 1963.