Timothee Chalamet sings the 1960s Bob Dylan song A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall in an trailer for the upcoming biopic about the American singer-songwriter.
The US actor, 28, who is also a producer for the movie, has transformed into Dylan by wearing his folk singer-style clothing for A Complete Unknown.
The teaser begins with glimpses of Chalamet, with curly brown hair and dark glasses, walking the dark streets of what appears to be New York City, where Dylan’s career took off.
Fight Club actor Edward Norton as American folk singer Pete Seeger introduces a young Dylan to a small crowd in a venue.
He says: “I want to tell you a little story. A few months back my friend Woody Guthrie and I, we met a young man, he dropped in us out of nowhere, and he played us a song, in that moment we got a feeling we were getting a glimpse of the future.”
Chalamet then performs A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall, playing a guitar with his face still in shadow until his profile is revealed and he is seen wearing a tan jacket and shirt.
This is interspersed with clips of him at a church venue, where he looks at The Great actress Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a character based on Suze Rotolo, an artist who was part of the Greenwich Village scene along with Dylan and was his girlfriend in the early 1960s.
Fanning gives him a peck on the cheek, before Chalamet is also seen kissing Top Gun: Maverick actress Monica Barbaro as folk singer and counterculture figure Joan Baez, with whom he would sing duets such as With God On Our Side.
The movie is directed by James Mangold, who also directed the critically acclaimed Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, which was nominated for five Oscars, winning one for best actress for Witherspoon.
Its description reads: “Set in the influential New York music scene of the early 60s, A Complete Unknown follows 19-year-old Minnesota musician Bob Dylan’s (Timothee Chalamet) meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts – his songs and mystique becoming a worldwide sensation – culminating in his groundbreaking electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.”
During the early 1960s, Dylan was at the forefront of folk music being revived in the US through the albums Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’ which relied on acoustic guitar music.
In 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, he shifted to working with electronic instruments and his set at the Newport Folk Festival was criticised for being very loud, including from Seeger, who he had been close to.
Born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, he was the first songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, with the Swedish academy crediting him with “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
His songs have been recorded more than 6,000 times, with artists as varied as The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix and Adele finding both commercial and critical success with covers.
Dylan has to date sold more than 125 million records globally and won a best original song Oscar in 2001 for Things Have Changed, which he wrote for the film Wonder Boys.
He has been previously depicted in 2007’s I’m Not There, which saw various actors portray Dylan including Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere and the late Heath Ledger.
A Netflix documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese, saw him do an on-camera interview, thought to be his first in a decade for the film.
There is no release date yet for the new film.
By Charlotte McLaughlin, PA Senior Entertainment Reporter
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