by Gill Pringle in Los Angeles
Speaking with Timothée Chalamet and his A Complete Unknown cast-mates on James Mangold’s biopic about Bob Dylan, there’s an odd word that frequently comes up: “bobbed”.
That’s how they all describe the before and after of Chalamet’s process as he began to embody the 19-year-old Minnesota musician whose meteoric rise from unknown folk singer, via New York’s clubs and concert halls, to the top of the charts during the early ‘60s, is the stuff of legend.
At the outset, during initial table-reads, he was just “Timmy”, only to later become “bobbed out”.
Certainly, they were all in awe of his transformation – not just the physicality and the voice – but particularly his insistence to sing all the iconic songs himself.
If it may seem like a huge task for an actor who wasn’t even born when Dylan’s music became a touchstone for a cultural revolution, then his youthfulness and relative lack of reverence for the enigmatic troubadour allowed him to unleash his inner “Bob”.
Ask Chalamet if he was daunted, he pauses … “Well, yes and no. It was daunting because it is Bob Dylan. And no, because at the beginning of the process, I wasn’t in the Church of Bob the way I am now, the way I’m a humble disciple now,” says the actor who began his preparation back in the Covid era, when the whole world stopped.
“The years I got to prepare for this role is unlike the time I’ve had for any other role. At some point, it stopped becoming work and it just became a process of osmosis and just living in the material, living in the world of the sixties,” says Chalamet, 29.
With Edward Norton cast as folk singer Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash and Elle Fanning as Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie Russo, Chalamet had his ensemble around him.
“When it came time to shoot with Edward, Monica, Elle and Boyd, we were constantly throwing around little facts or tidbits or video clips or letters we were finding about these characters from the period. And yet, we weren’t really academic about it. And that’s kudos to James,” he says of director Mangold (Walk the Line, Logan).
“He really had his eye on the fact that this is a story. It’s a fable. If you want to listen to the real music, you listen to the legend that is Bob Dylan or the legend that is Joan Baez. We were humble interpreters trying to bring life to something very special that happened 60, 70 years ago.”
Determined to dig deep into the young Dylan, Chalamet spent months in Minnesota – birthplace of Robert Allen Zimmerman who, aged 18, started using Dylan as his last name – learning to get his intonation just right, even though the film only focuses on four years of Dylan’s life.
“I wasn’t trying to excavate the exact places that he walked or understand what homework was assigned on a specific day,” says Chalamet. “I really just wanted to put myself in the environment, the weather, the roads, the iron ore of it all that gives him that grit in his voice, that to this day makes it so surprising and impressive that he wrote songs like ‘North Country Blues’, or ‘Rocks and Gravel’ and stuff that was beyond a 19 or 20 year old at the time. It was a process of osmosis. It wasn’t anything prescriptive.”
Having inhabited Dylan for almost four years, one wonders what kind of an understanding he has of who the singer songwriter was trying to be then or now, or in between?
“I think Bob is focused on his rhythm, his art in a sense, and sort of had the mystic wherewithal to not feel the need to explain himself. When people maybe question his behaviour, I always think it’s important to note that from the start, he’s engaged with his art. He doesn’t feign total engagement with other characters. He’s about his work and his music and getting to the crux of why or how or who, the man who’s alive and well in Malibu today, actually, would be very strange to do. American pop culture icons like Bob or Frank Ocean, these people that are as talented as they are unknown, no pun intended, leave them be,” says Chalamet who may just as easily be describing himself in his quest to pursue a career where so much interest is placed on his personal life.
If Dylan, now 83, remains somewhat of an enigma, rarely explaining the meanings behind his songs, then A Complete Unknown doesn’t seek to answer any of those questions.
Pete Seeger came probably as close to anyone back in those heady days of the ‘60s in understanding the young Bob.
In playing Seeger, Edward Norton admits he was glad that he wasn’t required to peel back those layers. “I don’t want to know. There’s got to be some people who we want the mysticism, we want the power of the magic trick, not the behind the scenes. I’m not interested in the behind the scenes. Next to the songs themselves, the thing I admire the most about him is that somehow, as a 22-year-old, he understood that there was no value in answering these questions, that asking him about meaning and to be 22 and flip it back on people and say, ‘I don’t know what it means’. Like, ‘I wrote it’. What do you think it means? You know what I mean?
“That’s a mystic, that’s a shaman. People don’t have the density at that age to understand those things, and he did. I don’t want to meet him. I don’t want to know him, and I don’t want to know anything about what’s in his mind or makes him tick because it’ll only reduce the potency of what he’s given me,” Norton says.
Mangold agrees: “How many of us can answer that question. I mean, what do I want to be? I have no idea. It’s almost a trick question and I think his best answer he gave only a few years ago, which was just, ‘I contain multitudes’.”
What interested Mangold even more about this four year arc in Dylan’s life were the personal questions the material raised – notions of inherent genius and talent which certain artists are simply born with – and the blessings and burdens of that talent which can, at the same time, make you wildly popular yet utterly alone.
While Mangold felt fortunate to spend real time with Dylan throughout the screenwriting and pre-production process, one of the things that became clear to him was the burden of what to do with your dream once you have manifested it.
“This is a story about a specific moment in a person’s life, not their whole life. And it is about a world where so much is communicated with song. You can be really good at writing songs and you can be really good at recording them and singing them and playing them,” says the director/writer who based his screenplay on Elijah Wald’s book, Dylan Goes Electric.
“But that doesn’t make you necessarily good or receptive to what stardom or fame brings, or the burdens of putting a shine on and being available to millions of people who love you or hate you or resent you or have expectations for you.”
For Chalamet, it was an opportunity to study and absorb one of the most iconic artists of our times. “Lots of things are inspired by Bob without people really knowing about it. So, this is like a humble entreaty to create a bridge to Bob Dylan, for not only a younger audience, but for audiences that don’t know him,” says the actor who was immediately drawn by Mangold’s take on Dylan.
“There are two versions of a Bob Dylan movie you could make,” he suggests. You’ve got a version that is a behavioural master class on a guy who didn’t really make eye contact that often and the mystery that surrounded him, or you do something that could be disingenuous to his life and work, a greatest-hits compilation that sort of ignores the fact that his career wasn’t a straight trajectory. Jim was quick to walk a fine line between demystifying Bob and not doing a sycophantic thing.”
A Complete Unknown is in cinemas 23 January 2025
