“A Complete Unknown” Star Timotheé Chalamet & Director James Mangold On Authenticity And What They Love About Bob Dylan

It takes a lot of guts for an actor to play Bob Dylan, though a handful have tried. Among them are a cast of A-listers, including Cate Blanchette and Richard Gere, in 2007’s I’m Not There. On Christmas Day, Timotheé Chalamet will join this rarefied cast as the lead in A Complete Unknown. 

The James Mangold-helmed new biopic, takes another crack at the Minnesota native’s origin story. With Timotheé Chalamet wholeheartedly embodies the singer in voice, mannerisms, and musicality in the new James Mangold-helmed biopic. And where I’m Not There used Dylan’s songs and story as the basis for imaginative flight, A Complete Unknown is one of the more accurate and effusive cinematic looks at Dylan’s time in New York. 

The enigmatic musical icon has been charming and confounding audiences since the mid-’60s, when he broke onto the scene through the Greenwich Village folk clubs. He’s been through countless new phases in his career since, from electric guitar-slinging rock and roller to Nobel Prize-winning poet, and he’s been portrayed several times in movies over the years to varying degrees of success.

Chalamet reportedly spent five years preparing for his time as Dylan, taking guitar, piano, and harmonica lessons to be able to not just mime Dylan’s songs on-screen but get them note for note perfect. He tells GRAMMY.com he studied literally "everything" about Dylan, and found a connection to him the way anyone might to "any artist, like a great dancer on stage or a great actor you see in a film or a great basketball player who moves poetically" 

“There’s something that touches your humanity [in Dylan] and a sense of relatability,” Chalamet says. “The amazing thing about Bob is that, over the scope of his decades-long career or even the film’s ‘61 to ‘65 window, his level of human insight could range from the sociopolitical issues at the time to very sincere, intimate love songs that were extremely personal to him. That was one of my major ways in [to who he was], because like any great music artist you love, your way in is the way they make you think about your own life, but also just the really raw way they make you feel, which is hard to put into words.”

Read more: Why Did Bob Dylan Change His Name? 8 Questions About The Legendary Singer/Songwriter Answered

Chalamet went so hard into the world of Dylan that he even grew his nails long so that he’d be able to use them to effortlessly pluck his acoustic guitar. “They got stronger over time, too, which was fascinating to me, seeing my body like that" he says. "By the end, they were like claws.”

Mangold and Chalamet were on the same page when it came to getting Dylan as close to accurate as possible both on-screen and on the movie’s soundtrack. Mangold filmed Chalamet singing live as often as possible, as in a scene where a very young and new to New York Dylan visits an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in a New Jersey hospital and wins him (along with Pete Seeger, played by Ed Norton) over with an off-the-cuff song. 

“We knew that would be a very intimate scene,” Mangold says, “so we wanted that to sound entirely naturalistic and it was. We recorded that sound live on set, with Timmy playing and singing live, too.”

Every track in the movie was generated completely anew from the ground up, though whether they were recorded live or in-studio depended on how they’re depicted in the movie. A live show at Cafe Wha?, for instance, might yield a live, on-set recording, while scenes of Dylan in studio recording with the players who would become his band at Newport were recorded in a sound studio. While Mangold, Chalamet, and team aspired to come as close as possible to the source material, there’s as much room for human error on A Complete Unknown as there would be on any official Dylan project.

“We always wanted something originally tied to Timmy so that it didn’t feel like playback, like some kind of confection or recreation,” Mangold says. “When we were making the movie, I’d often say, ‘We’re not making the Disney Hall Of Presidents.’ We’re not animatronic figures recreating great moments in rock and roll. If you want to hear the original song exactly as it was played, then go buy the original.”

Dylan’s music has always been raw and very personal, just like the creative process that birthed it. Mangold says that, more than anything, A Complete Unknown is about capturing that authenticity. That’s evident not just in recording scenes but also in live shots, like where Dylan and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) deal with the tumult of their love-hate relationship during a duet somewhere like the Newport Folk Festival or while out on the road together. 

A Complete Unknown, Mangold says, is "defined not by its polish or recording quality or production level, but by its authenticity, emotional and otherwise" It’s raw and magnetic, and the way it holds you, he says, is often because of the intensity of the performance itself. 

“I wanted to feel the danger and excitement that whatever [Chalamet as Dylan] decides to do at this moment is going to happen,” Mangold says. “Just as any live artist would, what’s happening with the audience and the tensions of the scenes that have proceeded are all reflected in his performance. What eye contact he might be having with a loved one in the wings, someone jeering him or or or cheering him in the audience… that’s what makes a performance exciting, the feeling that it is reactive and alive and present within the current situation.”