The odds were stacked against Timothée Chalamet long before those set photos trickled online.
By just signing up to play Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s forthcoming bio-drama “A Complete Unknown,” the 28-year-old megastar willingly placed himself in the crosshairs of Dylan’s most devoted fans — who, let’s be honest, are not easily impressed.
When paparazzi pics of Chalamet dressed in character seeped onto social media, the response was largely negative. Dylan fanatics, or Dylanologists as they self-identify, lost faith in the project and picked apart every detail of Chalamet’s Greenwich Village getup, and a photo of the actor wrapped in an enormous (and rather hideous) scarf quickly became meme fodder.
But then the trailer came out, offering a two-minute glimpse of Mangold’s vision set to Chalamet’s rousing rendition of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and cynical skepticism seemed to morph into cautious optimism. (In “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” didn’t Dylan himself warn “writers and critics who prophesize with your pen” to not “speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin”?)
As expressed in a dozen separate interviews with Variety after the “A Complete Unknown” trailer launch, some of the world’s preeminent Dylan experts — including authors, critics, scholars and podcast hosts — were taken by Chalamet’s commitment to the role, and largely impressed by his singing voice.
And while many of them still have reservations, they acknowledge that they aren’t the target audience for “A Complete Unknown,” and there is a seemingly unanimous enthusiasm about the fact that Chalamet will introduce legions of young people to Bob Dylan. As Erin Callahan, host of the “Infinity Goes Up on Trial” podcast, puts it: “If the film is great, it’ll be wonderful. And if it’s bad, it’ll still be great.”
Below, read segments of Variety’s interviews with Dylan experts around the world, edited in conversation with each other.
Evan Laffer, co-host of the “Jokermen” and “Never Ending Stories” podcasts: Before the trailer, the anticipation for “A Complete Unknown” had been negative. There had been a readiness to be disappointed.
Anne Margaret Daniel, music writer and professor teaching a class on Bob Dylan at The New School: The set photos did not calm me down very much. Timothée Chalamet looked very clean.
Ben Burrell, Absolute Radio presenter and host of the “Bob Dylan: Album by Album” podcast: A lot of Dylan fans were worried about it. I don’t know if Timothée Chalamet was the most popular choice.
Ray Padgett, author of “Pledging My Time: Conversations With Bob Dylan Band Members” and writer of “Flagging Down the Double E’s” Substack: From the Dylan people, I saw a lot of mockery. And to the limited extent I was looking after the trailer came out, what I saw was mostly positive. I saw a lot of enthusiasm from Dylan people.
Craig Danuloff, host of the Dylan.FM website and podcast: The Dylan community was pretty skeptical. Now I’d say about 90% of the fans on Twitter — and they’ll complain about anything — are very positive about the trailer.
Erin Callahan, professor and host of the “Infinity Goes Up on Trial” podcast: How many times have I watched the trailer? I lost count. I would say at least 20 times, if not more.
Steve Jenkins, director of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla.: There’s a mix of real excitement and anticipation. Maybe some of the old guard are doing a slight bit of eye rolling, but it’s also premature. It’s just a fun thing to talk about. Dylanologists will gleefully dissect and analyze any bit of Dylan activity.
Callahan: With Dylan, there are multiple communities, and I straddle between the fan community and the academic community. There has been more criticism among the academics. On the fan side — they’re called the Dylanologists — they’ve been enthusiastic.
Danuloff: There was a gradual progression of information that made the hardcore fans slowly realize, “Hey, maybe this is going to be OK.”
Ian Grant, co-host of the “Jokermen” and “Never Ending Stories” podcasts: There are some people who are against the movie and are not willing to cut it any slack. At the same time, there are others who are just excited that there is a Bob Dylan movie with Timothée Chalamet.
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Padgett: I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about it before seeing the trailer, to be honest, but I thought Timothée Chalamet was a really good casting choice.
Laura Tenschert, host of the “Definitely Dylan” podcast: He is very charismatic and is obviously an amazing actor.
KG Miles, author of “Bob Dylan in the Big Apple,” “Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas” and other books: My kids had made me sit and watch “Dune” and things like that. These aren’t films that I would typically watch, but I think Timothée has enough charisma as an actor, and that’s the important thing. He’s got that star quality.
Daniel: Timothée Chalamet is an immensely gifted young actor. I’ve enjoyed him in just about everything I’ve seen him in — except for “Wonka.” I’ll stick with Gene Wilder, thanks. But, hey! He looked like he was having fun doing it.
Steven Hyden, music critic, author and co-host of the “Never Ending Stories” podcast: Bob Dylan is such a weird presence on screen. The way he talks, the way he moves, the way that he is simultaneously awkward and totally charismatic. I’m skeptical that any actor can really nail that.
Grant: If I had been dream-casting the film myself, I probably would have sought some sort of complete unknown — pardon the pun — to play Bob. But at the same time, it’s a business decision, so that was never going to fly.
Michael Gray, pioneering critic, author of “Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan” and leading authority on Bob Dylan: A lot of people online are quite entranced by the whole idea of Hollywood and glamor and film stars in a way that I’m not. I think some of the enthusiasm has less to do with Bob Dylan than you might assume.
Tenschert: My main criticism is that Timothée Chalamet is a bit too tall to be playing Bob Dylan.
Hyden: We need a little guy to play Bob Dylan.
Grant: When I saw the trailer, honestly I was pleasantly surprised, coming in with the preconceived notion that this was going to be one of these cornball, made-for-TV quality type films that many other rock biopics have been recently. It doesn’t seem to have that flavor to it.
Laffer: There’s been a general sense that this could have been a lot worse. I’ve seen a lot of, “Oh, wow, it actually looks all right.”
Gray: There has been a surprising amount of enthusiasm.
Miles: I think most Bob Dylan fans, even the most cynical Bob Dylan fans, will be pretty excited now.
Burrell: I’m a repressed Brit, and very rarely do we get excited about anything. But when the trailer finished, I did a little cheer.
Grant: Timothée looks better in the trailer than he did in some of the set photos, where he was wearing that hat and scarf. The scarf in particular was upsetting to people. Obviously that’s a bunch of weirdos on the internet overreacting to things. But it looks better in the moving image.
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Laffer: Visually, it reminded me of Bob Dylan’s oil paintings. The cinematography has that kind of lush, not particularly inspired look. That glossy, Hollywood version of Americana.
Gray: He didn’t look quite enough like Bob Dylan for my personal taste, but I can see that in that period, he has a number of Bob Dylan phases to get through.
Jenkins: The camera loves Chalamet, so he certainly looks good as Dylan.
Callahan: He looks as much like Dylan as I think someone could, except for maybe Cate Blanchett.
Tenschert: I don’t think they should have gone for the prosthetic nose. I don’t think that was necessary.
Daniel: For some reason, the prosthetic nose doesn’t look like Dylan’s nose. I don’t know if the movie is going to catch the same criticism that poor Bradley Cooper got for “Maestro,” but that was surprising to me.
Callahan: Timothée has clearly done the work. He has Dylan’s mannerisms down.
Daniel: The way he strums, the way his right hand is moving on the strings, is perfect. He’s obviously watched a lot of footage of Bob performing.
Jenkins: What we hear of snippets of him performing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” sounds good, quite respectable.
Padgett: I was impressed by the voice. For the first second or so, before they showed him, I was like, “Is that Bob?”
Grant: His singing voice sounds as good as we could hope for. I’m sure it’s cleaned up in some ways, but it sounds pretty legit, pretty natural.
Tenschert: He does a good job avoiding the standard Bob Dylan impression and goes for something more genuine.
Callahan: He’s done the early-career phrasing very well, and the tonality of it.
Burrell: He’s pretty much got the cadence nailed on, and that’s the hardest thing to get right with Dylan.
Danuloff: Not only does he elongate words in the way Dylan does, but he also drops down and there’s this roughness, this certain sound in his voice, that’s exactly how Dylan would do it. It’s a particular bit of authenticity relative to Dylan’s singing in that period.
Laffer: If nothing else, his dialect coach has done good work. In the middle of the vowels it sounds like Timothée Chalamet, and then he sticks the landing. It’s all about how the words end. Mountiiins. Highweeeys. The thing that easily could have been messed up wasn’t.
Danuloff: The way he sings “highways” sounded really correct, and it was such a subtlety and a nuance.
Daniel: I was annoyed that he put a “G” on “darling” He should say, “my daaarlin’ young one.” Bob never put a “G” on anything at that time. The song is not “Blowing in the Wind,” it’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” So, I kind of winced at that.
Gray: His singing voice is admirably accurate, not as an imitation but as a representation.
Burrell: It doesn’t sound like a parody. It sounds enough like Dylan for you to accept him as Dylan, but not so much like Dylan that he’s doing an impression.
Miles: Does he nail the voice? God, you could be picky about it. But he does it seriously well. He gets across the passion and the soul in Bob Dylan’s voice without making it sound like karaoke.
Daniel: When the camera came around him and he looked up and blinked like that — that’s perfect. That’s exactly Dylan onstage at the time. When he sang, “Haaard raaain,” I said, “Oh, yeah!” Not only is he doing it well, but he’s having fun.
Hyden: I like the strategy of having him sing live as opposed to having a voice piped in that’s been recorded in a studio, or having him lip-synch Bob Dylan’s voice.
Grant: It’s a daring move, not only because it’s hard for any actor to sing in a movie but because he’s taking on some of the most famous stuff that’s ever been sung or written. That takes some chutzpah.
Padgett: What got me excited was seeing these famous places from Dylan lore recreated like that. Seeing Cafe Wha? and the street scenes of the Village in the ‘60s… the period piece of it all.
Jenkins: There seems to be a real attention to period detail and accuracy.
Danuloff: This is a five-year period in the early ‘60s. It happens to be that every five-year period since then is equally interesting.
Laffer: It’s a shame we don’t get to see a more compelling era represented. There’s something costumey about this period. It feels like ancient history. There’s so many other periods of Dylan’s life that feel more vital or mysterious.
Burrell: I’d love a film about Dylan making one of his ‘80s albums. I’d love it, but everyone else wouldn’t, apart from maybe me and six other Dylan fans.
Grant: The movie is not for me, and it’s not for anyone who self-identifies as a Bob Dylan fanatic. To freaks and nuts like me, this period of time is maybe one of the least interesting periods of time to spend two hours exploring in a dramatic motion picture.
Laffer: The odds are stacked against Timothée by being asked to represent this period that is so untouchably iconic.
Padgett: The movie isn’t really for us, and that’s OK — us being the Dylan superfan.
Tenschert: I think the film is a really exciting opportunity for new people to discover Bob Dylan as an artist. He has had such a long career, and it can be quite intimidating to figure out where to get in. A film like this is a great opportunity for people to connect with what is charismatic about him and what is special about him.
Hyden: If I don’t end up liking the movie, but it ends up bringing a bunch of people into the fold and introducing Dylan’s music to a wider audience, I’ll look at that as a net positive.
Burrell: We’ve had the esoteric, slightly strange films like Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There,” but there hasn’t been a big, broad Dylan biopic. I’m definitely on board.
Tenschert: Versatility is strongly associated with Bob Dylan. He recently released a song called “I Contain Multitudes.” So I understand why some fans might struggle with the idea of a biopic that purports to tell a definitive version of his story — that might become “canon” in the eyes of the culture — because a film can never be as nuanced as real life. But there is absolutely room for a more linear biopic.
Grant: Either it’s going to be a really well-put-together and loving portrait of a man that I care about very deeply, or it’s going to be a trainwreck that’s fun to ridicule. But I’m holding out hope that it’s going to end up being more of the former than the latter.
Hyden: My expectations for this movie is that it is going to be competently made and well-acted, and ultimately be unexceptional. I think the chances that this movie is actually great are pretty low, but I also feel like the floor is pretty high.
Grant: I’m really hoping it doesn’t turn into one of those “Bohemian Rhapsody” movies. Not that, you know, there’s anything wrong with that…
Miles: If the film is half as good as the trailer is, it’s really going to bring the people in. They’ve done a great job on this. Let’s hope the rest of the film is like that.
Hyden: I don’t think the movie is going to be terrible, and I don’t think it’s going to be great. I think it will be somewhere in the middle, which, in a way, is the most boring outcome.
Jenkins: Anyone who is prematurely saying this is a masterpiece, or that this never should have been attempted… I guarantee everyone will be lining up to see the film when it’s released.
Padgett: I’m going to be skeptical and then be the first in the door, of course.
Laffer: We are going to have a great time, and we are going to see it as soon as we possibly can in theaters.
From Variety US