All You Need to Know About ‘A Complete Unknown,’ the Bob Dylan Movie

Is Timothée Chalamet about to win his first Academy Award? He is definitely vying for it in his upcoming movie A Complete Unknown, in which he plays folk-singer Bob Dylan. The film will premiere in theaters in December, but critical buzz is already brewing and fans are eager to see the young actor take on one of music’s most beloved and complicated figures.

Anticipation has been building around the project since paparazzi pictures leaked earlier this year of Chalamet with the crooner’s iconic frizzy hair and carrying a beat-up guitar case. Now the first teaser trailer has been released, showcasing Chalamet’s vocal ability, and the hype has reached a new high. Here’s everything we know about the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.

A Complete Unknown doesn’t have an exact release date yet, but it will be released in the United States in December 2024.

Timothée Chalamet is playing the central role of Bob Dylan, following the singer through his discovery by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie through his storied career and complicated love life.

Edward Norton plays fellow folk singer Pete Seeger, who was one of the first people to promote Dylan’s music. Seeger also famously put Dylan on the bill for the Newport Folk Festival and then blew a gasket when Dylan and his band performed with amplified instruments.

Elle Fanning is playing Sylvie Russo, who was inspired by Dylan’s real-life ex-girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Rotolo is featured on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Monica Barbaro plays fellow folk musician Joan Baez, who had a very close romantic and collaborative relationship with Dylan in the early 1960s. Her cover of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” is infamous, but she may be most known for her political activism during the turbulent decade and beyond.

Boyd Holbrook, who most recently appeared in The Bikeriders and Justified: City Primeval, plays country rocker Johnny Cash who was a friend and collaborator of Dylan’s during the late ’60s and ’70s.

Walk the Line and Ford v Ferrari director James Mangold is the man behind A Complete Unknown. He certainly knows his way around a biopic full of popular figures.

A Complete Unknown will not cover Bob Dylan’s entire career or life. It is based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald and will focus on how Dylan ushered in the rise of electrically amplified instrumentation. So it will cover the singer’s early rise to fame, his infamous performance at the Newport Folk Festival and the aftermath.

The first teaser trailer for A Complete Unknown was released on July 24.

Yes, Chalamet will do his own singing in the film. Director James Mangold said in an interview with Collider in 2023 that Chalamet would take over crooning duties for the film. The actor revealed during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that Dylan’s manager and A Complete Unknown producer Jeff Rosen sent him 12 hours of unreleased Dylan songs made between 1959 and 1964 to help him nail the singer’s signature warble.

Yes, Chalamet can play piano. He spent four years learning guitar and how to sing like Dylan for this role.

If Chalamet is singing, then it is expected that Monica Barbaro and Boyd Holbrook will be singing as Joan Baez and Johnny Cash respectively. It remains to be seen if Edward Norton will actually sing as Pete Seeger.

A Complete Unknown will be released in theaters in the United States in December 2024 and worldwide in January 2025. It is distributed by Disney-owned Searchlight Pictures, so fans can expect it to stream on Hulu or Disney+ when it completes its theatrical window.

Source: Searchlight Pictures