Disney and Searchlight released the first teaser trailer for the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic titled A Complete Unknown. The trailer features Timothée Chalamet as Dylan himself, portraying the folk icon walking through the streets of New York, passing by his well-associated Chelsea Hotel, and performing his song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, sung by Chalamet himself. The trailer, narrated by Edward Norton who will be portraying Pete Seeger, friend and mentor to Dylan, summarizes the upcoming of Dylan’s monumental career and his part in it.
According to Deadline, the film is “Set in the influential New York music scene of the early 60s [and] follows 19-year-old Minnesota musician Bob Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts – his songs and mystique becoming a worldwide sensation – culminating in his groundbreaking electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.”
James Mangold directed A Complete Unknown, and in 2023, he was featured in the Happy Sad Confused podcast and assured fans that he spent a lengthy time with Dylan to make sure he got the story right. Dylan approved the project himself and Mangold states that he “personally annotated” the script. Additional crew members include Michael Bederman, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, and Andrew Rona as executive producers.
Chalamet spent hours upon hours listening to Dylan’s songs to prepare for not only the role of Dylan but the singing that came along with it. It was reported that Chalamet hired vocal coach Eric Vetro to help him become the folk sensation. Vetro was known for his work on the Elvis set training Austin Butler.
Mangold also told fans that this project won’t follow the typical format of other musical biopics, stating, “It’s a kind of ensemble piece about this moment in time, the early ‘60s in New York, and this 17-year-old kid with $16 in his pocket hitchhikes his way to New York to meet Woody Guthrie who is in the hospital and is dying of a nerve disease.”
Alongside Chalamet and Norton, the film will star Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Nick Offerman as Alan Lomax, and many other actors portraying important figures in Dylan’s life at the time.
A Complete Unknown will be released in US theatres in December of this year, with releases in the UK the following month.
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