A Complete Unknown trailer | First look at Timothée Chalamet in Bob Dylan biopic

by James Harvey |
timothee chalamet as bob dylan
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Timothée Chalamet embodies the Nobel Prize-winning legend in James Mangold’s 60s biopic. Check out the A Complete Unknown trailer below.

It’s been no secret that Timothée Chalamet and James Mangold have been working on a Bob Dylan biopic for what feels like a lifetime, so it’s refreshing to discover that A Complete Unknown will be arriving in cinemas sooner than we originally thought.

With the year quickly passing by with no word on the film, the safe bet was to assume Searchlight would go for a release sometime in 2025. According to the release alongside the film’s first trailer today though, it’s opening in the US this December – just in time for young Chalamet to get on his awards campaign.

Check out the A Complete Unknown trailer below.

Narrated by a thoroughly bald-capped Ed Norton as folk singer Pete Seeger, the trailer finds a young Dylan arriving in New York with naught but a hat on his head and a song in his heart. The parallels with Wonka end there though, because – unlike the Roald Dahl musical – this look seems very keen to show us Chalamet’s singing voice, taking us through most of a rendition of Dylan’s second album hit, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.

James Mangold of course is no stranger to the musical biopic formula, having directed Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in 2005’s Walk The Line. According to existing synopses, A Complete Unknown, rather than telling a traditional cradle to grave story, will focus in on Dylan’s decision to “go electric” in 1965, after kick-starting his career as a heavily political, acoustic folk artist, as described in Elijah Wald’s appropriately named book, Dylan Goes Electric!

Read more: New Joker: Folie À Deux trailer hints at the film’s musical aspects

This trailer though, seems to be going in another direction, lingering on Dylan’s wunderkind status and his relationship with Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo. Does this mean the project’s seen a change in direction, or is the trailer just designed to introduce Dylan before we get into all that electric-powered mumbo jumbo?

With a December release date penciled in, A Complete Unknown will be beating Sam Mendes’ upcoming quadrilogy of Beatles biopics to the big screen, and coming off a wave of pretty successful box office hits in the genre, including Bob Marley: One Love and Amy Winehouse flick Back To Black.

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