A Complete Unknown is showing on New Zealand cinemas from January 23. Photo / @SearchlightPictures
The closed coffee shop in Santa Monica, California, was empty except for two men.
One was a then-56-year-old New York-born filmmaker and the other a Minnesota native in his late 70s who made his name as a singer and songwriter in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s.
That meeting in mid-2020 would be the first of four or five, each several hours long, between James Mangold and Bob Dylan.
Dylan would read the script for A Complete Unknown, make notes and then discuss them with Mangold, the biopic’s director and co-writer.
Timothée Chalamet had long been interested in playing Dylan, and he and Mangold had sealed the deal the previous year at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
And so when the talk in that coffee shop turned to Chalamet, Dylan “knew who Timmy was and knew he was quite good and knew that people thought he was quite good”, Mangold recalled.
“But his thing was just: ‘Can this guy do it?’
“And I said: ‘Yes, I believe he can’.”
The resulting film, in theatres in New Zealand on January 23, depicts Dylan’s struggle to reconcile his own artistic needs with the demands of others.
It opens in 1961 New York and culminates with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan “went electric”, turning off some flustered folk fans while turning on a noisy new generation of rock-and-roll-loving kids.
And Chalamet, 28, is a very credible and charismatic Dylan - both the early, folkie Woody Guthrie acolyte and the later Ray-Ban-wearing, Fender Stratocaster-wielding rebel.
The actor wanted to sing and play live - and he did - capturing the “spontaneity and authenticity” of the era’s folk scene, Mangold said.
“Getting to study and immerse myself in the world of Bob Dylan has been the greatest education I could receive,” Chalamet said this month at the Gotham Awards, where he and Mangold were both honored.
But Chalamet didn’t just emerge as a fully formed “voice of a generation”.
It took a village - and not just Greenwich Village - to get him there.
Chalamet got started with guitar lessons in November 2019 with Larry Saltzman. After he connected with his new student, Saltzman, a New Yorker like Chalamet, called his older sister right away.
“When I was 10 or 11, she brought Dylan records into the house. I became obsessed,” he said.
“I never fell out of touch with Bob’s music. Bob’s music is a religion to us.”
And so began a four-year relationship with Chalamet, who went from knowing how to play “just a little” guitar to mastering a compendium of roughly 30 Dylan songs.
Along the way, there was historical context from Saltzman, 71 - from explaining mimeograph machines to decoding song lyrics. In It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, Dylan sings about “Flaggin’ down the Double E,” a reference to the erstwhile EE subway line that stopped around the corner from his Village apartment.
The entire production was put on pause when Covid roared into the world in March 2020 and pushed back again with the 2023 actors strike.
“That’s a huge amount of prep time where Timmy was carrying his guitar and his harmonica and harmonica rack to London when he was shooting Wonka, and God knows where in the world when he was shooting Dune,” Mangold said.
Stephen McKinley Henderson, Chalamet’s Dune co-star, recalls a day in Budapest when the pair were off to the side while shooting a Dune scene.
“I heard Timmy singing Positively 4th Street or another one. He was singing stuff from that period,” Henderson said. “We chatted, and he and I were saying what a genius lyricist and poet Dylan was.”
Later on, Chalamet was in his trailer singing and strumming with co-stars Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, and Jason Momoa, and he called Henderson over to help with some lyrics he didn’t know. “That’s when I first found out that Timmy was doing prep for the Dylan movie,” Henderson said.
Eric Vetro is Hollywood’s go-to vocal coach, working with stars from Pamela Anderson to Renée Zellweger. When he and Chalamet were working on Wonka, Chalamet was already deep into his study of Dylan, on the side. Then it was all Bob.
“Dylan’s voice is a little more nasal, more raspy,” said Vetro, 68. One vocal exercise he taught Chalamet had him repeating, “Nay, nay, nay, nay, nay - five notes in a descending pattern, allowing it to sound nasal,” he said.
And Chalamet gave his teacher homework, too, telling him to check out, say, a certain documentary. The next day they would watch together.
“Timmy would repeat some of the lines that Bob would say, how Bob would say them, and that really helped him when he’d then go seamlessly into singing.”
It wasn’t all work, though. One tiring day, Vetro recalled, “Just for a second, as a joke, he sang a line from the Wonka theme, Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination, as Bob Dylan. We laughed and then it never happened again.”
Another singer-songwriter, executive music producer Nick Baxter, invited Chalamet to his Burbank studio in April 2023. “He came in bursting with energy. He’s incredibly well researched, a music lover and an absolute student of this character,” Baxter said.
They spent a lot of days together in the studio working on particular songs for particular scenes, trying to figure out the right sound on the guitar.
In 1961, Dylan arrived in New York lugging his 1946 Gibson J-50, “an incredible, priceless, beautiful instrument”, said Baxter.
While Baxter was in possession of a couple of those, as well as other Gibsons from that time, they ultimately decided not to use them.
“We realised these vintage guitars were almost too warm and beautiful and nice-sounding, like an aged wine that’s complex and wonderful. We needed more of the raw grit of an instrument,” he explained.
And so Gibson built them two new J-50s modeled off Dylan’s, made with the same materials they would have used back then. “Then we could sort of grit ’em up - and not have to worry about breaking a collectible, nearly 80-year-old guitar,” he said.
As far as helpful research material, Baxter said Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, who is one of the producers of the movie, “gave us access to an archive of 16 or 17 hours of unreleased footage. Songs, pictures, recordings, old tapes, different versions we’d never heard before.”
“Timmy was voracious about research,” Mangold said. “He’s very earnest about trying to be a sponge, to absorb as [many], not just facts, but texture and feelings as possible.”
That research included a road trip to Dylan’s Hibbing, Minnesota, hometown in January “to just tool around in a rental car and go where Bob went to high school”, said Mangold.
That’s where Chalamet met Megan Reynolds, who is in her seventh year as the drama director at Hibbing High School.
The night before Chalamet’s visit, she was told that the actor was in town doing research for the biopic. And sworn to secrecy.
“Of course, Tim wanted to come see the stage where Bob had played - and was kicked off the stage because he was pounding on the Steinway too hard,” she said of his Little Richard cover for a talent show.
Speaking with some two dozen theatre students, on break from a rehearsal, the actor asked if they knew much about Bob Dylan. “The response from my students was not remarkable,” Reynolds said with a laugh.
Nonetheless, they spent about 45 minutes with Chalamet “in a shoptalk conversation about theatre and acting, which was wonderful - that is before word of his presence got around and he was quickly shuffled out”.
The actor also visited Dylan’s boyhood home, purchased in 2019 by collector and retired pharmacist Bill Pagel, who put together “a little museum” in the basement rec room.
On Chalamet’s drive up from Minneapolis, Pagel said, “every once in a while he’d slip on a little ice on the road and he’d have to slow down … He said he was trying to get the feel” of Dylan’s Minnesota.
The star of Pagel’s museum is a triple-disc Guthrie 78 set, Documentary #1, Struggle, released in 1945. Inside the back cover of the album’s book-like case is a drawing by a late-teens Dylan of himself holding a guitar facing a winding road leading to a city skyline and the words “Woody New York City”. On the bottom corner are handwritten lyrics to Dylan’s Song for Woody.
“He was pretty impressed,” remembered Pagel, “blown away”. Mangold said Chalamet immediately sent him a photo of the “absolute incredible object”.
Filming began in March 2024, and Arianne Phillips was charged with Chalamet’s wardrobe, from his Woody Guthrie-like carpenter jeans and plaid wool work shirts of the early 1960s to thinner Levi’s 501 jeans and then his Chelsea-style “Beatle” boots in 1965, after a visit to mod London.
“I was raised on Dylan’s music, pretty much the soundtrack of my childhood and my adulthood,” the 61-year-old head of the film’s costume department said, adding that Dylan and his girlfriend (Suze Rotolo, renamed Sylvie Russo in the movie) lived right around the corner from her family’s Village apartment on Cornelia Street.
As head of the hair department, Jaime Leigh McIntosh was charged with creating Chalamet’s Dylan coif.
She first met the star before one of his costume fittings with Phillips. “We cut his hair, not completely the Bob we see at the end of the film, but pushing it into that shape, so when he went in for his fittings, there was an essence and a vibe there just to help tell the story from top to tail,” McIntosh said.
His hair might look different coming in each day, depending on how he slept or how it had dried, so McIntosh would “try to give it a little continuity, but not so much because every time you’d see a picture of Bob Dylan, his hair is different. And that worked in my favour.”
Makeup maven Stacey Panepinto, who already knew Chalamet from a previous film, said, “We weren’t ever striving to make Timothée look like Bob. We were just striving to make Timothée look less like himself. We wanted the viewers not to be distracted by Timothée Chalamet in makeup to be Bob Dylan.”
Part of that striving included a prosthetic nose. “We always had a supply, at least a week’s worth of noses in our possession at all times,” she said. They also used nostril expanders for the entire movie, to broaden his nose’s shape.
In the film, not only does Dylan’s music change, but his face does, too. Chalamet wore cheek plumpers for the younger, round-faced Dylan - “a kind of combination of a retainer and plumping mechanism, molded around his teeth for top and bottom”, said Panepinto. Those came out for Dylan’s thinner, later years.
He also seems to have some unshaved patches and even a couple of pimples. This was intentional, according to Panepinto.
“Bob didn’t appear like a perfect guy,” she said. “I don’t think he was really taking the time to look in the mirror and groom himself. So we leaned into that.”
- Additional reporting by NZ Herald.
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