‘A Complete Unknown’ trailer: Timothee Chalamet enters the awards race as Bob Dylan [Watch]
On Wednesday, Searchlight released the teaser trailer for director James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet as young Robert Zimmerman in the early years of his career. The film will arrive in theaters in December, an unexpected entry into the 2025 Oscars race.
As you watch the trailer, your experience may be similar to mine. When the vocals in “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” started, I thought, “Oh, they’re using an old recording of Bob Dylan.” A few seconds later, I went, “Wait, that’s Timothée…right?” A couple more seconds, and I settled on “That’s definitely Chalamet singing, but he sounds just like Bob Dylan. Good job, Timmy.”
“A Complete Unknown” tells the story of the culture-shifting folk singer’s meteoric rise from when he arrived in New York City from Minnesota as a teenager in the early 1960s to his notorious electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and his relationships with Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning, playing a composite character) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).
The cast also includes Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, Dan Fogler as Albert Grossman, Norbert Leo Butz as Alan Lomax, and Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie. Mangold wrote the screenplay with Jay Cocks, based on Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric!”
Mangold said that Dylan blessed the film and gave notes on the script. “I’ve spent several, wonderfully charming, days in his company, just one-on-one, talking to him,” Mangold said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I have a script that’s personally annotated by him and treasured by me. He loves movies. The first time I sat down with Bob, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘I love ‘Cop Land,’’” Mangold’s 1997 film with Sylvester Stallone and Ray Liotta.
“A Complete Unknown” rolls into theaters in December.
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