A COMPLETE UNKNOWN – How Timothée Chalamet became Bob Dylan

Paul Byrne examines Bob Dylan’s origin story & looks at how Timothée Chalamet embodied one of the greatest songwriters of all time. An artist who started battling his own mythology right from that very first wave of fame in the 1960s, Bob Dylan has spent the last 60 years hiding in the shadows. It’s been up to others to shine a light on the man, the music, the myth.

The latest brave explorer being director James Mangold (Cop Land, Walk The Line, Logan), ‘A Complete Unknown’ presenting itself as an origins story, attempting to capture Dylan’s breakthrough on the New York folk scene in the 1960s. Mangold is ably aided and abetted by Timothée Chalamet, who has two major advantages going into the ring of fire here; 1/ he’s a fine actor, and 2/ he looks an awful lot like Bob Dylan at the beginning of the 1960s.

“There’s a movie about me opening soon called ‘A Complete Unknown’ (what a title!)” wrote Dylan himself on Twitter/X. “Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s ‘Dylan Goes Electric’ – a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book”.

As is always the case with musical icons, Dylan’s ascent had a lot to do with timing. The Cold War was looming, with the Cuban Missile Crisis bringing the world to the brink of catastrophe, followed by the death of America’s innocence with the 1963 assassination of JFK. A few months earlier, Dylan had performed at the civil rights movement march on Washington, just before Martin Luther King Jr delivered his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. Change was in the air, and it was becoming increasingly charged.

“There are two versions of a Bob Dylan movie you could make,” says leading man Chalamet. “You’ve got a version that is a behavioural master class on a guy who didn’t really make eye contact that often, and the mystery that surrounded him, or you could do something that could be disingenuous to his life and work, a greatest-hits compilation that sort of ignores the fact that his career wasn’t a straight trajectory. “Jim was quick to walk a fine line between demystifying Bob and not doing a sycophantic thing.”

Chalamet is one of the few people in the world who is thankful that Covid came along, the world going into limbo in 2020 suddenly gifting him a huge amount of time to submerge in the Zimmerman zone. Once embedded this twilight world, Chalamet was hooked. “Once I was in it, there was no coming back,” he says. “I was fully in the Church of Bob.”

And once there, the actor realised that using his own voice – as all the actors singing in the movie do – meant that he was inevitably creating his own version of Bob Dylan. Just as Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw had done in Todd Haynes’ ambitious, suitably nonlinear 2007 Dylan biopic, ‘I’m Not There’. Haynes’ approach reflects the fact that Bob Dylan clearly likes being an unknown. Is he really the Messiah, or just a very naughty boy who merely followed the wind and his whims over his long and winding career? Answers on the back of a Rizla paper to the usual address.

Whether it’s going electric in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival or going ecclesiastical in 1979 with ‘Slow Train Coming’, whether it’s shooting lingerie ads in his early 60s (having quipped at one 1960s press conference that that’s just the sort of commercial he would do) or turning late night radio DJ for 75 hours with his ‘Theme Time’ Radio Hour (go find that, now!), it would be hard to unearth a Bob Dylan masterplan here.

There’s no question that the man has written some of the most powerful songs of the last six decades, but having every single utterance – no matter how trivial, tricksy or throwaway – dissected and decorated as yet more cryptic, crystalised words from the wise must have had Sir Bob feeling at times like he was the Chauncey Gardener from ‘Being There’.

Over 39 studio albums and approximately 4.8gazillion live concerts, the man has always stubbornly danced to his own drum. Even when he’s too old to get up from the piano stool. And you get the impression that through it all, the audience Robert Allen Zimmerman has always been most eager to please is himself.

So, perhaps ‘A Complete Unknown’ will remind us all that, behind the songs, there’s just a kid from Duluth, Minnesota who wrote in his 1959 high school yearbook that his goal in life was simply to join Little Richard’s band. So, a man just like all the rest of us…

Hey, even Bob Dylan sometimes must have to stand naked…

Words – Paul Byrne

 

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is at Irish cinemas from January 17th