A Complete Unknown

I may wait until it is streaming, but I will see A Complete Unknown. From a Wall Street Journal review of the film:

Among the many music greats who’ve gotten the biopic treatment, Bob Dylan presents an especially tough multiple choice problem. He’s an artistic deity whose output made a real mark on history. He’s also a living cartoon character with a rasp and patter that has inspired countless bad impressions. And he’s a shapeshifter with many musical phases and a habit of tweaking his own mythology. ....

“[Timothée Chalamet] was really excited to be the one to be able to introduce this music and these lyrics to a new generation.” Chalamet, who has said he knew little about Dylan before landing the part, got good enough with the material to do some 35 songs live on camera, including guitar and harmonica work, and for those on-set performances to make the final cut, the filmmakers say. ....

He’d been practicing the music since 2018, when he was cast in the role, and had extra time to get better thanks to pandemic and Hollywood strike delays. Along the way, he became the movie-star equivalent of that dude in your college dorm who was always noodling on a guitar. His “Dune” co-star Oscar Isaac has said that Chalamet demonstrated his stuff by playing “Girl From the North Country” for cast-mates. ....

“When someone does an impersonation of Dylan, what they’re often missing is the sincerity with which he sings those lyrics,” Vetro says. “He was getting a message across, and that’s what people gravitated to, not because they were like, ‘Oh, I love that nasal voice.’”

Chalamet studied Dylan’s vintage performance footage as well as his body language and his attitude in press conferences. “We’d be watching an interview and Timmy would start speaking the lines just like Bob did. So then he would go into singing it like Bob, but the Bob of that specific time period” ....

...“A Complete Unknown” focuses on four precipitous years. The story starts with a 19-year-old Dylan’s arrival in New York City and ends with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he rocked out with a band and blew up his image as a lone prophet with an acoustic guitar. ....

Dylan, who is now 83, never got involved in Chalamet’s performance, Mangold says, but the singer reviewed the screenplay. He circled instances of people calling him “Bob” in the script, and changed that to “Bobby” for most characters. Dylan also crossed out a section of lyrics to “Masters of War” that he would skip when singing it live, the director recalls. “He was like, ‘Oh man, I never did this verse.’”

When they met (in a Santa Monica coffee shop that was closed to the public during the pandemic), Dylan said the decision to go electric at Newport had been less about shaking up the music scene than his craving for the camaraderie of playing in a rock band. .... (more)

John Jurgensen, "How Timothée Chalamet Learned to Sound Like Bob Dylan," The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 24, 2024.