What We Know About Timothée Chalamet’s Upcoming Bob Dylan Movie

The biopic, which will be called A Complete Unknown, is being helmed by James Mangold, the director behind Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Ford v Ferrari, Logan, Walk The Line, and Cop Land. Mangold already has his hands full at the moment, with a range of upcoming projects on the cards — including a new Star Wars film!

Mangold told the movie publication, “It’s such an amazing time in American culture and the story of Bob, a young 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with $2 in his pocket and becoming a worldwide sensation within three years first being embraced and kind of into the family of folk music in New York. And then of course, kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises.”

Speaking in summer 2023 to the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Mangold claimed that the script for his Dylan movie had an especially important admirer: Dylan himself. The writer-director said, “I’ve spent several, wonderfully charming, days in his company, just one-on-one, talking to him.”

A good script is one thing, but the strength of the film will obviously rely heavily upon the performance of its main star. That will mean Chalamet will have to be on top of his game! But, from everything he’s so far said publicly about his preparation for the role, he seems to be taking it very seriously indeed.

Chalamet’s part in the movie has been a long time coming. He’s been preparing for many years now, having taken some pretty drastic measures to help get into character at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Back then, during the fall, the actor upped sticks from his home in New York City and rented out an AirBnB in Woodstock, where he hoped to get in touch with the real Dylan’s vibe.

Chalamet is undoubtedly A-list material nowadays, following his recent successes in Dune: Part Two and Wonka, but he’s far from the only big name slated to appear in A Complete Unknown. Elle Fanning, Edward Norton, and Nick Offerman are set to appear in the film.

You can’t have a Bob Dylan movie without the main character singing some of the artist’s most famous songs, and it seems very much like Chalamet will be doing that himself. Dylan has about as distinctive a voice as you can imagine, so Chalamet has had to put a lot of work in. As a matter of fact, he’s been working with a team that helped one of his co-stars from a different movie entirely. 

Eric Vetro, the vocal coach Chalamet mentioned, has spoken out himself about the actor’s preparation for the Dylan role. He said, “When that movie finally comes out, people are going to be shocked because you’re going to think you’re hearing Bob Dylan sing.”

Vetro went on to praise the versatility of Chalamet’s singing voice, given that he’d seen him transfer his talents from the Wonka movie into the Dylan one. The voices required for each film could hardly be more different, as Vetro pointed out.

The film is due to focus on Dylan’s rise from a “complete unknown” — hence the film’s title — to the star we know him as today. During his early days at the start of ’60s, Dylan had nothing to his name.

Mangold explained his thinking on Happy Sad Confused. He said, “The best true-life movies are never cradle to grave… they’re about a very specific moment.” In this case, the Dylan movie will focus on “this 17-year-old kid with $16 in his pockets [who] hitchhikes his way to New York.”

Zimmerman was the name Dylan was born with, arriving into the world in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He lived a fairly normal life as a youngster, but he was eventually drawn into the world of rock ’n’ roll thanks to stars of the age like Elvis, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Inspired by acts like that, young Zimmerman started putting together bands of his own.

Dylan decided to leave Minnesota at the dawn of the 1960s and he hitched a ride all the way to New York City. There, he met one of his absolute heroes, the main person who had driven him to begin playing folk music in the first place. It was Woody Guthrie, who unfortunately wasn’t doing great

Guthrie inspired Dylan to write his first song. “A Song for Woody Guthrie” was exactly that: Dylan’s tribute to his hero. Dylan once explained, “I just wrote a song, and it was the first song I ever wrote, and it was ‘A Song for Woody Guthrie.’ And I just felt like playing it one night, and I played it.”

Guthrie’s influence on the young artist can’t be overstated, but we can’t attribute all of Dylan’s subsequent success as a songwriter to this one man. New York itself was “a magnet for creative, even revolutionary artists” at the time, which rubbed off on the musician one way or another, as Sean Latham, who set up the University of Tulsa’s Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, explained to BBC Culture.

Dylan performed a lot around New York after he moved there, and during one performance in 1961 the press took note. A review of one of his sets appeared in The New York Times, which, in turn, caught the attention of Columbia Records. They signed the young artist, which is when he legally altered his name.

The following year’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan really marked the moment when people started to take note of this emerging voice. The record featured classics like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which are both undisputed classics these days.

In 1964 Dylan released an album consisting entirely of his own songs, without any covers. It was The Times They Are A-Changin’, and it set him up as the voice of a generation. This was a period, of course, in which protest was rife throughout America, and the artist came to soundtrack it.

Dylan was in awe of Baez, if his own words in the 2009 documentary Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound are to be believed. He recalled, “Joaney was at the forefront of a new dynamic in American music. She had a record out that was circulating in the folk circles, I think it was just called Joan Baez and everybody was listening to it, me included, I listened to it a lot.”

Dylan and Baez were a couple for about two years, during which time the former’s popularity went into overdrive. Ironically, it was this fame — which Baez had helped to generate — that drove the couple apart in the end. Their respective music careers had helped each other, but success ultimately tore their relationship apart.

By ’64 Dylan was in high demand, playing something like 200 gigs within a single year. But performing the same songs day in, day out, as you might imagine, became tiresome for the artist, and before long he wanted to try something new. He wanted to move away from being the voice of the anti-establishment movement, so he released Another Side of Bob Dylan.

Dylan alienated his folk fans by going electric. On July 25, 1965, he took to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival with the Butterfield Blues Band backing him up, plugged in his electric guitar, and performed 17 minutes of rock. His audience was not pleased. They even booed him, which, looking back now, seems crazy.

It’s difficult to put our feet into the shoes of those early Dylan fans, who so obviously felt betrayed by their hero’s pivot into rock music. But it’s important to try and appreciate what it really meant. In essence, it signaled the end of the folk movement’s dominant position within the counterculture.

On the other hand, Dylan’s actions during that performance showed that rock music had matured into a serious genre and movement. He played a classic that night, one which is remembered to this day. He played “Like A Rolling Stone,” which soon became a radio hit in spite of its six-minute duration.

As any Dylan aficionados will know well, the moment the star went electric was absolutely pivotal to his trajectory and that of the wider pop-music scene. As Latham explained to BBC Culture, “When Dylan picked up an electric guitar, he was initially met by a cascade of boos, whistles, and catcalls.”

It seems safe to presume that the time Dylan went electric will likely play a pivotal role in the upcoming biopic. After all, it was central to the real Dylan’s life and career. And, of course, it was a watershed moment for the wider cultural lives of so many others around at the time

After he had gone electric, Dylan’s career continued to evolve, and the man is still going strong today. Covers of his songs have been recorded in excess of 6,000 times, with artists as varied as Jimi Hendrix, Guns N’ Roses, Stevie Wonder, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, U2, Bob Marley, Pearl Jam, and way, way more trying their hands at his music.

And President Clinton wasn’t the only U.S. leader to give Dylan a prestigious award. In 2012 President Barack Obama issued him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest honor a civilian is entitled to receive in the United States. But even that is arguably less impressive than the award Dylan picked up in 2016.

Given what Mangold has said about his biopic, it seems safe to say we won’t explore Dylan’s later career and honors. But that’s fine, as there’s more than enough material to work with from his experience throughout the ’60s. Some of his greatest ever songs and albums came out during that decade, and Dylan himself will always be such an important part of its history.

“It’s Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)” features on Dylan’s 1965 record Bringing It All Back Home, and it serves as an expression of its songwriter’s disgust at American culture at the time. Consumerism, hypocrisy, war-mongering — the song tackles all these subjects, but, grimly, you could say his critique is as valid today as it was then.

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was penned in response to the disaster that was the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came frighteningly close to the brink of nuclear war. While the song, ostensibly, sounds like an easy-going folk ditty, attention to its lyrics exposes the apocalyptic terror at its heart.

You can listen to “Chimes of Freedom” as a straight-up account of Dylan and a companion’s attempt to hide out during a vicious storm. The song loses none of its beauty if you take it that way, but, as with every Dylan composition, there’s another reading to be had.

It’s believed Dylan literally wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a matter of minutes, which is a wild thought. It’s a protest song, one of the world’s most famous, in which Dylan asks rhetorical questions about war, peace, and freedom.

There are lots of ways to interpret “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but there are plenty of people who jumped to conclusions when it first came out. Its out-there, trippy imagery made lots of people presume it was about LSD, but there are definitely other interpretations.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’” is a timely song, representative of the mid-’60s and Dylan meant it that way. He once explained to filmmaker and journalist Cameron Crowe, “This was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced of course by the Irish and Scottish ballads.” 

Dylan wrote the love song “Girl From the North Country” for his 1963 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan record, and it’s a classic in its own right. But the song took on a new life entirely when Dylan recorded it again six years later with none other than Johnny Cash. Two legends and admirers of each other’s work had been brought together.

“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is a straight-up song, lyrically speaking, almost a word-for-word description of the events surrounding the murder of an African-American woman named Hattie Carroll. Her white killer, William Devereux “Billy” Zantzinger, was from a wealthy tobacco farming family and was sentenced only to half a year in prison.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” is notable for being one of Dylan’s first ever electric songs, but it’s important for more reasons than that. It covers a lot of ground, lyrically, discussing the tension between members of the counterculture during the ’60s and “squares,” while also touching on the Vietnam War, drug use, and the civil rights movement.

To call “Like a Rolling Stone” an influential track would be understating it a bit. Listed as the greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine, it was a pivotal moment in Dylan’s career, when he truly transformed from a beloved folk into a true rock star. And without it, the world might have been deprived of decades of Dylan’s music, as he had been on the verge of quitting before he penned it.