(Updated 11/04/2024)
The word "iconic" gets thrown around entirely too often, but it certainly applies to Bob Dylan. The singer/songwriter has been a major part of the American music scene since the early 1960s, when he adopted the name "Bob Dylan" as he began to play folk music in New York City. Dylan's 1965 changeover from acoustic folk to amplified rock music was a major inflection point in his career, and for popular music as a whole.
The movie A COMPLETE UNKNOWN features Timothée Chalamet as Dylan. It follows the singer from his arrival in Manhattan through to the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance that became famous as Dylan's electric debut.
Here's the latest trailer for A COMPLETE UNKNOWN and loads of background info about the movie, which has been several years in the making.
What's the A Complete Unknown Release Date?
Searchlight Pictures will release A COMPLETE UNKNOWN in movie theaters on December 25, 2024.
Watch the New Trailer for A Complete Unknown
This trailer for A COMPLETE UNKNOWN gives you all the introduction you need for the movie. We see Chalamet as Dylan at a few key points in his life. We get to see some of the actors who play significant key people, including singers Joan Baez, Dylan's mentor Pete Seeger, and Johnny Cash. And we get a hint of that infamous Freeport performance that changed the trajectory of Dylan's career.
Who's in the Cast of A Complete Unknown?
This movie has a huge cast, not least because the script takes time to portray many other major figures in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s. We begin, however, with Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. He's the movie's central figure, clearly, and also one of the prime movers, as a producer. Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, a somewhat fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo, Dylan's girlfriend in those years. (Director James Mangold has said that he and the real Bob Dylan agreed that, since Rotolo is the one main figure in the movie "who wasn’t a celebrity and an icon in and of themselves with a kind of public persona," that changing her name was a sort of protection for the real Rotolo.)
Additionally, Edward Norton appears as Pete Seeger, the folk singer who counted Dylan as a fan, and whose mentorship helped the young musician establish himself as part of the New York folk scene. Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez, who by the time of the film's opening is already a well-known performer. Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash, who was obviously a significant musical figure, but who was also a good friend to Dylan, as letters written between the two men have shown.
And Dan Fogler plays Albert Grossman, Norbert Leo Butz plays musical archivist and documentarian Alan Lomax, and Scoot McNairy plays Woody Guthrie, the godfather of the folk music community.
Do the Actors Sing and Perform the Music in A Complete Unknown?
The musical performances you see and hear in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN are performed by the actors. James Mangold told Rolling Stone that "If Timmy’s brave enough to stand out there and make himself vulnerable, throwing himself at this, I should be brave enough to stand behind the camera and shoot."
The director explains that Chalamet "very much wanted to" provide the voice of Dylan — and play his instruments, too. And since the movie was originally set to film before Covid shut everything down, the actors who stuck with the production had a lot of time to learn to sing and play. "Timmy really had a kind of incubation as a musician that was years in happening," Mangold says. "And Monica Barbaro as well. She was cast when we were gonna make the movie before Indy. So a lot of these people have been in place for an incredible amount of time, and used that time incredibly successfully in their own musical journey."
A Complete Unknown Is From the Director of Logan and Walk the Line
You'll have noticed in the trailer and cast list that Johnny Cash appears in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. That's a neat fact because the director behind this movie is James Mangold, who also directed the Johnny Cash movie WALK THE LINE, as well as LOGAN, FORD V FERRARI, and INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY.
A Complete Unknown Is Based on a Key Book About Bob Dylan
Screenwriter Jay Cocks based A COMPLETE UNKNOWN on the 2015 book "Dylan Goes Electric!" by Elijah Wald. That was the starting point, at least. Mangold talked with Dylan, even though the singer is not officially involved with the movie, and he did extensive research to attempt to find the truth about scenarios depicted in the movie, whenever possible.
Dylan is known for a mercurial, sometimes combative nature. So it makes a certain amount of sense that it's not always easy to find kernels of truth in decades-old stories about him. Mangold notes that "once you’ve read a few of these books, you realize there is no way to braid them all into harmony with each other. They’re in 100 percent contradiction about many things." So he leaned on film footage of concerts and backstage interactions, interviews — "the amount of interviews Bob did was immense" — and other primary documentation to "harvest whatever I could for the movie from them."
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN opens on December 25.
All images courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.