Everything to Know About Timothée Chalamet’s Turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown

“How does it feel? To be on your own/Like a rolling stone,” Timothée Chalamet belts onstage, his signature curly mop frizzed out on the top of his head. No, this isn’t his latest musical performance à la “Statistics” or Wonka. It is a scene from the official first trailer for the James Mangold-directed Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. The much-anticipated film is set to be released at the end of 2024. Here, everything to know so far.

Who is in the cast of A Complete Unknown?

Chalamet isn’t the only marquee act in the film. While he plays Bob Dylan, Elle Fanning stars as his girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (the director told Rolling Stone that Fanning’s character is a renamed version of Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s real-life girlfriend from that time period. Rotolo was featured on the cover of Dylan’s 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). Monica Barbaro, of Top Gun fame, plays musician Joan Baez, with whom Bob Dylan had a long musical (and romantic) relationship. Edward Norton plays the folk singer and activist Pete Seeger. And Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash—the subject of Mangold’s previously directed biopic, Walk the Line.

What is the plot of A Complete Unknown?

The film starts with Dylan’s 1961 move from Duluth, Minnesota, to New York’s West Village, where he created some of the best works of his career. The movie ends shortly after his legendary performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Along the way, the first official trailer suggests there will be a strong plotline concerning Dylan’s complicated relationships with Baez and Russo; the musician was historically known to be a womanizer. “[The movie is] certainly following Bob, but I’m much more interested in the wake that this person has left on others as much as I’m interested in unpacking who he is in some kind of conventional movie-Freudian way,” Mangold told Rolling Stone. “That’s why Elle’s character and Pete Seeger, Edward’s character, and Joan Baez, of course, and many others are more than just passing through in a kind of Hall of Presidents pageant. They’re significant players coming in and out of the movie. They all were instrumental in [Bob’s] journey in the years between ’61 and ’65, but they all also interacted with him in different ways that are prisms and keyholes to different aspects of who Bob might be.”

Was Bob Dylan involved in A Complete Unknown?

Yes. According to the Rolling Stone article, Mangold met with the iconic singer-songwriter, now 83 years old, to consult him on the film. “The first time I sat down with him, Bob said, ‘What’s this movie about, Jim?’” Mangold told Rolling Stone. “I said, ‘It’s about a guy who’s choking to death in Minnesota, and leaves behind all his friends and family and reinvents himself in a brand new place, makes new friends, builds a new family, becomes phenomenally successful, starts to choke to death again—and runs away. ‘I like that,’” Dylan replied.

Is there a trailer for A Complete Unknown?

The first teaser for A Complete Unknown dropped on July 24, followed by an official trailer on October 8. That clip shows a young Bob Dylan moving to Greenwich Village from Minnesota, where he meets both Sylvie and Joan Baez. It particularly centers on Dylan and Baez’s relationship, with the pair singing together on-stage, harmonizing “Girl From the North Country,” and talking about writing music. At one point, Chalamet-as-Dylan lounges shirtless in bed with a guitar slung over his chest and tells Baez, “Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist’s office.” She shoots back, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.”

As Dylan’s fame grows, he becomes uncomfortable with the demands made on him. “They just want me singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for the rest of my goddamn life,” he laments shortly after a scene of being chased by crowds of fans through the streets of New York. The trailer reaches its climax with Dylan’s infamous turn from acoustic folk to electric rock, when he released 1965’s “Like a Rolling Stone”—which, like, the other songs in the film, Chalamet sings himself. “This is gonna piss some people off,” a music industry exec says, and in fact, it did. The clip shows people booing, fighting and yelling “turn it down!” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan first debuted his new sound. “I’m not sure they wanna hear what I wanna play, Johnny,” Dylan tells Johnny Cash at the end of the clip. “I wanna hear it,” Holbrook’s Cash says. Watch the full trailer, below:

Does A Complete Unknown have a release date?

On August 6, it was announced that A Complete Unknown would hit theaters on December 25, 2024, making it a prime movie-going experience for families over the holidays.