How Timothée Chalamet ‘Pushed the Bounds’ to Play Bob Dylan in ‘A Complete Unknown’

H e’s traveling through the north country today. Eighty miles from Canada, where the winds, it’s been said, hit heavy on the borderline. As his rented Toyota pickup truck reaches a tree-shaded suburban intersection, he kills the engine and bounds out into late-January air. He’s layered a down jacket over a gray sweatshirt, the hood yanked over his mussed brown hair. His destination is a boxy, cream-colored little house on the corner, down a walkway framed by twin shrubs. To its left is a newish street sign: Bob Dylan Drive.

He spent the past hour and 20 minutes navigating an iced-up Highway 53, fishtailing enough between Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota, to send the insurers of at least two major Hollywood fran­chises scrambling for Xanax. But Timothée Chalamet is on a mission, and this pilgrimage is one of his final quests.

He was supposed to have four months to get ready to play a young Bob Dylan onscreen. Instead, thanks in part to a pandemic and a few Hollywood strikes, he’s had five years. It’s all gone pretty far. He started off hardly knowing a thing about Dylan,and ended up a self-proclaimed “devoted disciple in the Church of Bob,” dropping references to outtakes (1963’s “Percy’s Song” is an obsession) and Dylan-bootleg YouTube channels. “I had to push the preparation, the bounds,” he’ll tell me, “almost to psychologically know I had pushed it.”

He’s been working with a vocal coach, a guitar teacher, a dialect coach, a movement coach, even a harmonica guy. At one point, he wrote out Dylan lyrics on sheets of paper and taped them to his walls. Chalamet brings his acoustic guitar to the singing lessons, where he’ll sometimes, without warning, show up talking in Dylan’s voice. In the film, A Complete Unknown, which opens Dec. 25, we’ll end up hearing Chalamet singing and playing entire songs, for real, live on set. “You can’t re-create it in the studio,” he argues later. “If I was singing to a prerecorded guitar, then all of a sudden I could hear the lack of an arm movement in my voice.”

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Chalamet grew up worshiping Kid Cudi, with “dead-on-arrival aspirations of rapping” in his own right. He’s still a devoted hip-hop fan, but now he’s rewired his brain so profoundly that he’s starting to get into the Grateful Dead. And even as he shot other movies, Chalamet never quite left Bob Land. On his phone is a video of him on the set of Dune singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” in Paul Atreides’ intergalactic pajamas, and a photo where he’s playing guitar in his Willy Wonka outfit.

A white-haired 82-year-old named Bill Pagel emerges from the house to greet Chalamet. Pagel, a retired pharmacist and perhaps the world’s leading Bob Dylan collector, bought the place in 2019. Dylan lived here with his family between the ages of six and 18, and Pagel is quietly turning the house into a full-fledged museum in its former occupant’s honor, restoring it and filling it with items from his collection. Chalamet spends an hour in the house, sitting in the very bedroom where a young Robert Zimmerman gazed out at snowy ground and pondered his future. He shuffles through a collection of 45s Dylan actually owned — Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly.

Chalamet ducks out for a scheduled tour at the local high school, where he sees student actors rehearsing on the very stage where Dylan played with his teenage rock & roll band. Even the Steinway piano he bashed away on is still there. When the teens in the drama club realize who’s watching their rehearsal, they freak out, and Chalamet spends a while answering their questions.

Before leaving town, he heads back to the house one more time, this time trailed by three young women who jump out of their car, seeking an autograph or a selfie. Pagel hustles him inside, where Chalamet takes in a key artifact hidden away in the basement: a drawing Dylan made circa 1960 on the back of his copy of an album by the archetypal protest singer Woody Guthrie, who wrote “This Land Is Your Land.” The young Dylan, in the process of remaking himself in Guthrie’s image, sketched himself on a road to New York, marked with a “Bound for Glory” sign. At the end of the path is a drawing of Guthrie.

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Dylan was manifesting his actual future in the Greenwich Village folk scene, not to mention the eventual plot of an awards-season Hollywood biopic that would attract a generational heartthrob more than 60 years later. In January 1961, in a moment vividly reenacted, with some light fictionalization, in A Complete Unknown, Dylan found Guthrie at the New Jersey hospital where he was being treated for Huntington’s disease. The upstart took out his guitar, and sang for his hero.

It was the beginning of the improbable four-year journey the film chronicles, in which Dylan became Guthrie’s artistic heir, igniting a generation with the raw prophecy of his imagistic lyrics and the countrified snarl of his voice, before strapping on a Fender Stratocaster and transforming into something else entirely. Along the way, he was mentored by Guthrie’s friend and fellow folk singer Pete Seeger (played in the film by an impressively unrecognizable Edward Norton), fell in love with the young artist and political activist Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo in the film, and played by Elle Fanning), and dabbled in a musical and romantic coupling with fellow singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), whose fame initially eclipses his own.

Unlike so many other Sixties heroes, Dylan stubbornly kept on living, molting through phase after phase as the decades piled on, and he’s not done yet. But his very persistence may obscure just how much he changed the world in his initial run, including that Dylan-goes-electric moment, which was really a gradual, multiyear transformation of style and subject matter, from acoustic protest songs to thunderingly abstract rock. Many assumptions we take for granted about popular music across genres — that superstars can be unconventional vocalists, that pop can be a vehicle for deep personal and political expression, that lyrics can be poetry, that artists can transform radically between eras — have roots with Dylan’s work from 1961 to 1965. His impact went way beyond rock: Artists from Stevie Wonder to Nina Simone covered his songs, and as George Clinton recently reminded me, even the sound and lyrics of Motown changed after “Like a Rolling Stone.”

It’s been suggested that Dylan is too mysterious, too alien, for the kind of linear narrative A Complete Unknown attempts, that he could only be captured by a movie like 2007’s I’m Not There, which kaleidoscopically splits his role among multiple actors. The new movie’s director and co-screenwriter, James Mangold, already added the best kind of Hollywood gloss to Johnny Cash’s life story in his last music film, the Oscar-winning 2005 biopic Walk the Line. (More recently, he served as Steven Spielberg’s handpicked successor, directing last year’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.) Mangold refuses to believe that Dylan’s world-shaking genius means he can’t be shown as a human being, an idea he mocks in the voice of a clueless critic: “How do you write about Bob Dylan? It’s not eclectic enough! You should be bleeding about Bob Dylan!”

That said, it’s hard to overstate the challenge the filmmakers faced. “People are deeply protective of Bob Dylan and his music legacy,” Chalamet says, “because it’s so pure in a sense, and they don’t want to see a biopic mishandle that.” Not to mention that he was playing, in his understated words, “someone who wasn’t a straightforward person,” an artist who’s always taken a certain glee in shrouding his true self. On top of that, he had to manifest much of that performance musically. “He never wanted to take the easy way out,” says Chalamet’s guitar teacher, Larry Saltzman, a high-end session musician who toured for years with Simon and Garfunkel. “If I presented something to him like, ‘OK, this is the real way, but there’s a little bit of a shortcut,’ his answer to that was always ‘Don’t show me the shortcut.’”

Chalamet eventually sends Mangold a photo of Dylan’s hand-drawn map, and the purity of its hero worship underscores the director’s point that maybe Bob isn’t so elusive after all. “It’s really just an act of admiration and love,” Mangold says, pondering Dylan’s journey. “This young man shows up. He’s inspired. I mean, it couldn’t be less complicated.”

In that map, and his entire time in Minnesota, Chalamet also starts to see something in Dylan he recognizes, a feeling he’s not afraid to acknowledge he once had himself: “You’re connected to destiny. But that connection is fragile.”

“You’re connected to destiny. But it’s fragile.”

T imothée Chalamet doesn’t look anything like Bob Dylan right now. Here in New York, in the last days of August, he barely looks like Timothée Chalamet. A Complete Unknown wrapped 10 weeks ago, and on the other side of the country, Mangold is leading a postproduction sprint to get the movie out for its Christmas Day release. Chalamet is already preparing to shoot his next project, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, in which he plays a 1950s ping-pong champion. Accordingly, he’s cut his fluffy hair, which turns out to have held at least 25 percent of his essential Timmy-osity. The stubbly mustache and goatee he’s grown knock off another 10 percent. When he sneaks into a chaotic, overcrowded Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in Washington Square Park a couple of months later, hair still cropped, goatee gone, mustache grown in further, he somehow looks less like himself than the guy who wins.

We meet in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, where Dylan once lived; in the film, there’s a poster-worthy shot of Chalamet on a misty evening in front of its vertical neon sign, in full Dylan-in-’65 regalia. It feels a lot less iconic when we stroll by it in broad daylight, with Chalamet dressed like a college kid, in cargo shorts and a long-sleeved white T-shirt, tasteful gold chain around his neck, brown Yankees cap pulled low. The only reminders of his preposterous level of celebrity are his Nike Field General ’82s, a reissue he sing­lehandedly popularized when he showed up to an NBA game in a prerelease pair last year.

We head west on 23rd Street, crossing Eighth Avenue, with Chalamet casually dodging bikes like the Manhattan native he is. It’s an overcast weekday afternoon, and the streets are crowded, but somehow, no one even glances his way. “This feels like home,” he says. “I feel good.” He has a meeting later with Safdie — who was relieved to learn that today’s interview was about Bob Dylan, not his apparently top-secret ping-pong project — and has to fly out to France soon for the birth of his older sister’s first child. Nevertheless, Chalamet is palpably relaxed as he strides along, hands in pockets. Finishing the movie after all of this time has got to help, but he swears he never felt burdened by it all. “This is the kind of pressure I want in my life,” he says. “This is the kind of pressure I love.”

Near the beginning of the film, Dylan meets Guthrie in his grim hospital room, where, in one of the film’s deviations from fact, Norton’s Seeger happens to be already visiting. Bob introduces himself with the name “Dylan” for what may be the first time in his life, with a subtle mix of defiance and hesitance. Then he plays “Song to Woody,” one of Dylan’s first great songs, start to finish. It’s a make-or-break sequence in more ways than one, and it happened to be one of the first major scenes Chalamet shot. Even as the film’s Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Seeger are judging Dylan’s performance, the audience is doing the same with Chalamet. In the finished movie, it all works, down to the guitar picking, the sweat on Chalamet’s pallid forehead, and the subtle prosthetic on his nose. “His performance,” says Norton, “is off-the-charts great.”

“I went home and I wept that night,” says Chalamet. “Not only because ‘Song to Woody’ is this song I’ve been living with forever, and I felt like we brought it to life, but also because I felt like I could take myself out of the equation. The pride I was feeling had no vainglory in it. I just felt, ‘Wow, this is like old-school theater or something.’ We’re, like, bringing life to something that happened, and humbly and bravely going on this journey to hopefully bring it to an audience that otherwise wouldn’t know about it. That felt like an honorable task.”

He first encountered A Complete Unknown, originally titled Going Electric and based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, in an emailed list of potential projects, before Mangold was attached. At that point, Chalamet had a fairly vague idea of Dylan as a distant figure music fans were obligated to revere, an artist beloved by a childhood friend’s dad. Initially, Chalamet simply liked Dylan’s look. “On a quick Google, there was something behind the eyes, you know?”

He soon learned that Dylan at first saw himself as a rock artist, but ended up a folk-music superstar, before winding his way back to rock stardom. Chalamet quickly mapped that scenario onto his own experience. The way he likes to see it, Dylan, for all his reverence of figures like Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Odetta, used the folk world as a sort of back door. “If he couldn’t become Elvis or Buddy Holly immediately,” Chalamet says, “he found Woody Guthrie and stuff that was a little more accomplishable, and happened to be really good at it. And that immediately hit a bone with me.”

Chalamet became a movie star with roles in indie films that punched way above their weight commercially, playing a sexually awakened, fruit-violating teen in Call Me By Your Name, a virginity-snatching jerk in Lady Bird, a tortured young addict in Beautiful Boy, a lovestruck suitor in Little Women. But as a kid, he obsessively rewatched The Dark Knight, and quiet dramas were never his dream. He auditioned for action franchises, movies like Maze Runner and Divergent, and failed every time. “I would always get the same feedback,” he says, with real pain. “‘Oh, you don’t have the right body.’ I had an agent call me once and say, ‘I’m tired of getting the same feedback. We’re gonna stop submitting you for these bigger projects, because you’re not putting on weight.’ I was trying to put on weight. I couldn’t! I basically couldn’t. My metabolism or whatever the fuck couldn’t do it.”

He was a brilliant young actor with an extraordinary knack for choosing rich indie roles, but he was also taking what he could get. “I was knocking on one door that wouldn’t open,” he says. “So I went to what I thought was a more humble door, but actually ended up being explosive for me.” Chalamet eventually found his way into the Dune movies, and he unabashedly sees his turn as a sandworm-riding space messiah in the year 10,191 as his own going-electric moment. His earlier roles, he says, were “so personal and vulnerable. There’s an intimacy to that work that I hear in Bob’s early music, in his early folk songs.” He pauses, and seizes the metaphor. “And then eventually you want to use different instruments.”

He also related to the idea that Dylan’s story, and his art, can’t be boiled down to any particular trauma. Unlike Cash or, say, Dewey Cox, he’s unburdened by his past, doesn’t look back. Dylan has never once had to think about his entire life before he plays, and neither has Chalamet. “I related to the feeling that my talent could be my talent,” he says. “I could draw the picture of an unconventional upbringing. I grew up in arts housing, Manhattan Plaza, which is a funky way to grow up. I could try to paint it negatively to you. I could try to paint it positively, but it’s a bit of everything. It’s nuanced.” His point is that it doesn’t matter. “I don’t need to point to some thing in my youth. Your talent is your talent. The thing you gotta say is the thing you gotta say. You don’t need the Big Bang.”

E lle Fanning has been acting since she was three years old, but she’d never been this excited for a rehearsal before. During preproduction for A Complete Unknown, an assistant sent her an itinerary for the week, casually mentioning a rehearsal with Mangold … and Bob Dylan. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’” she says via Zoom, her blue eyes sparkling. It’s a Sunday afternoon in October, and she’s relaxing in her hotel room in Norway, on a day off from shooting a movie with director Joachim Trier. “I was thinking about all these things to say and ask. I was picking out my outfit. ‘I’m meeting Bob Dylan today!’”

“I went home and I wept that night. This was a song I’d been living with forever, and we brought it to life.”

The creators of A Complete Unknown are hoping the movie births a whole new generation of Dylan aficionados, and believe it or not, there are already some Bob-is-babygirl Gen Z stans on the social media fringes. But Fanning, 26, was way ahead of them. She’s been a fan since age 13, when writer-director Cameron Crowe introduced her to Dylan’s music on the set of We Bought a Zoo. “I wrote ‘Bob Dylan’ on my hand every day in middle school,” she says. Playing Dylan’s first love, then, couldn’t have been more perfect for her: “It’s like I manifested this part.”

As she steeled herself to meet her idol that day, Fanning opened the door to find Mangold, bearded and authoritative-looking. Next to him was Timothée Chalamet. No one else. The confusion was simple: In the interest of immersion, Chalamet was listed as “Bob Dylan” on the production’s call sheets, and a game of telephone had ensued. “I’m probably the first person in life,” Fanning says, “to be let down by having a rehearsal with Timothée Chalamet, right? Like, the first girl in history.”

While he certainly wasn’t on set, the real Dylan was, in fact, involved in A Complete Unknown, and even has an executive-producer credit. During the pandemic, he had several meetings with Mangold in Los Angeles, and eventually went through the screenplay, line by line. “Jim has an annotated Bob script lying around somewhere,” Chalamet says. “I’ll beg him to get my hands on it. He’ll never give it to me.”

“I felt like Bob just wanted to know what I was up to,” Mangold says. “ ‘Who is this guy? Is he a shithead? Does he get it?’ — I think the normal questions anyone asks when they’re throwing themselves in league with someone.”

Mangold won’t say it directly, but Fanning says she was told it was Dylan himself who wanted the film to avoid using the real name of his first New York girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who died in 2011. She was an artist and activist who introduced him to left-wing politics, inspired “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” among many other songs, and appears on his arm on the cover of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. In Dylan’s eyes, Rotolo was “a very private person and didn’t ask for this life,” Fanning says. “She was obviously someone that was very special and sacred to Bob.” Nearly 60 years after they broke up, Dylan was still protective of the woman he once called “the could-be dream lover of my lifetime.”

Even though the character is renamed Sylvie Russo, her arc is one of the least fictionalized in the film — a scene where she challenges Dylan on his name change and secrecy matches Rotolo’s accounts in her 2008 memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Dylan personally added a line to the screenplay for his character during one of their fights. “It was something like, ‘Don’t even bother coming back,’” Fanning says. “We know the arguments were real, so maybe he was remembering something — or regretting something that he said to her.” (In the film, Russo laments the idea of returning from a European trip to “live with a mysterious minstrel,” and Dylan, whose first album flopped, retorts: “Mysterious minstrels sell more than a thousand records. Maybe you just don’t come back at all.”)

Fanning’s deeply felt performance keeps the Dylan-Russo relationship at the emotional core of the film, complete with a gorgeous farewell-through-a-fence scene that seems destined for a future magic-of-movies montage. The sequence, in which Dylan lights two cigarettes between his lips and hands one to Russo, nods to a famous bit in the 1942 Bette Davis classic Now, Voyager. Fanning and Chalamet each watched the movie the night before they filmed it. “Timmy cried watching the movie,” Fanning says. “I was like, ‘You cried? All right, softie!’”

Fanning herself teared up involuntarily the first time she heard Chalamet sing on set. “We were in an auditorium, and I was sitting amongst all these background artists,” she recalls. “Jim would let Timmy come out and give the crowd a whole concert. He was singing ‘Masters of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ and I was like, ‘Jesus.’ All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that. So perfectly done, but it wasn’t a caricature. It was still Timmy, but it’s Bob, and this kind of beautiful meld. That gave me chills.” Afterward, she heard some of the extras debating whether Chalamet was lip-synching. “I tapped them on the shoulder and I was like, ‘He is singing. I know he’s singing!’”

B efore the shoot, Fanning was warned that Chalamet would “keep to himself” on set, except with her. They already knew each other well after playing a couple in 2019’s A Rainy Day in New York, and staying close also suited their characters’ relationship. Monica Barbaro, whose Joan Baez has a spikier, more contentious fling with Dylan — “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob,” she tells him in one postcoital scene — didn’t meet Chalamet until a week before production began. When she did, he was already dressed in Dylan’s clothes. “I had a lot of friends,” Barbaro says, “who were like, ‘Have you met him yet? Have you met him?’ But it just felt like the right thing to wait and just meet in the context of these characters … the way she saw Bob.”

Barbaro, who played the only elite female fighter pilot in Top Gun: Maverick, emphasizes that Chalamet wasn’t so Method that she had to call him “Bob” (though Mangold says sometimes he chose to). “It wasn’t so full-on,” she says, laughing. “It wasn’t ‘Don’t look him in the eye’ or anything like that. We said hi, gave each other a hug. I was like, ‘I just saw Dune!’”

But on set, Chalamet did stay “in his own world,” Barbaro says, “in a way that I think Bob often was as well. And it was actually really conducive to the dynamic between Bob and Joan.” Once, when the two actors started chatting as themselves between takes, Mangold noted that Chalamet’s Dylan voice was slipping. “And at that point,” Barbaro adds, “I think we both were just like, ‘Nope, no more talking!’”

Chalamet did a lot of that kind of thing, trying to keep his headspace clear. “He was relentless,” says Norton. “No visitors, no friends, no reps, no nothing. ‘Nobody comes around us while we’re doing this.’ We’re trying to do the best we can with something that’s so totemic and sacrosanct to many people. And I agreed totally — it was like, we cannot have a fucking audience for this. We’ve got to believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that protective.”

“I related to the idea that my talent is my talent. The thing you gotta say is the thing you gotta say.”

Chalamet says he learned how to set a tone on set from his former co-stars. “The great actors I’ve worked with, Christian Bale on Hostiles” — Bale, in his younger days, infamously took umbrage at distractions from his work — “or Oscar Isaac on Dune, were able to do that,” he says, “and guard their process, particularly for something that’s really like a tightrope walk.” For Chalamet, part of it was an effort to erase the burdens of stardom and return to how it felt “when people aren’t curious about how you go about your work, because they don’t know who you are yet. Which is how the experience was for me on Call Me By Your Name.”

He can sound almost plaintive as he tries to make all of this understood. “It was something I would go to sleep panicked about,” he adds, “losing a moment of discovery as the character — no matter how pretentious that sounds — because I was on my phone or because of any distraction. I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him. So while I was in it, that was my eternal focus. He deserved that and then more.… God forbid I missed a step because I was being Timmy. I could be Timmy for the rest of my life!”

There was no stopping the fact that the exterior shots were plagued by amateur and professional paparazzi alike, something that’s happening just as much on Marty Supreme as it shoots in New York. It certainly threw off other cast members. “That was a lot to navigate at times,” Barbaro says, “to have a bunch of people watching, iPhones out, and be like, ‘It’s 1961. I’m walking down the street with a suitcase and no phone.’”

Chalamet doesn’t want to complain about it. “That, you can’t do anything about, truly,” he says. He likes to tell himself it’s a good thing, because it means people “care about the shit you’re working on to some degree.”

They also care about him, of course. From the outside, at least, Chalamet seems to have navigated his fame with unusual elegance. He dates Kylie Jenner, but mostly in private. He’s more famous than any influencer, but posts less on social media than Dylan himself lately. In the film, though, his Dylan is besieged and traumatized by celebrity, and Chalamet’s portrayal of the paranoia, fear, and isolation it brings on seems notably real. When I raise the topic, he’s silent for a good 20 seconds, says he could give a 45-minute-long answer, and then dodges instead. “I just don’t want to use those words, ‘isolated’ and ‘fear’ and ‘paranoia,’” he says, sounding slightly paranoid. “I just think it’s not the correct way to go about the fortune and blessing that it is to work, whether they ring true or not, and bring attention to that kind of feeling-state. Even if it’s valid, it’s not really somewhere I want to go.”

His early life is thoroughly archived, thanks to growing up under the eyes of an online panopticon that spares no one. We have pictures of him cuddling with his high school girlfriend, Lourdes Leon; a 2012 talent-show performance of him rapping as Lil’ Timmy Tim to a comically rapturous audience of female classmates has more than 5 million views on YouTube. But part of him seems to yearn to be more enigmatic, more Dylan-like. He may also know it’s not really possible, which is perhaps why he pulled the incredibly un-Dylan move of popping up at that look-alike contest. In our interviews, he veers between can’t-help-himself confessional torrents and extreme caution, with little in between.

“We can relate to each other in the sense, like, we’ve been doing this for so long,” says Fanning, reflecting on Chalamet and the film’s depiction of the burdens of fame. “People do feel like they have an ownership of you. How are you going to break free of that, or how do you carve your own path?… Would we say Timothée’s rise to fame is the same as Bob’s? Maybe. It’s all relatively similar, right? You’re young and then something hits, and then it’s like an explosion.” She laughs. “But we do know Timothée’s name is really Timothée Chalamet, and I think we know where he grew up, and we’ve seen photos of his mom. And he has a sister, and didn’t he go to LaGuardia” — New York City’s celebrated performing-arts high school — “or something? We know that! You are not a mystery.”

C halamet still hasn’t met or talked to Dylan, though he’d love to. But Barbaro did have a chat with the real-life Baez. “I kept having dreams about meeting her,” Barbaro says, sitting on a studio couch in the same building on the 20th Century Studios lot where Mangold has been editing the movie. She needed prosthetics to match Baez’s teeth, but naturally has her cheekbones, and still exudes some of her character’s brunette earthiness in an oversize denim jacket over a skirt and leather open-toe sandals. “And I’m not really a person who’s like, ‘I had a dream about it. I must go follow,’” she says. “I was so immersed in research, and it still felt like there was something missing in not approaching her. It just felt like there needed to be a connection made.” When she did get Baez on the phone, the singer and activist told her she had been hoping Barbaro would reach out.

Barbaro felt almost guilty about taking part in relegating a legendary artist to a love-interest role, however artfully portrayed. “Her life is so much more significant than just the part it played in Bob’s life,” Barbaro says. “She deserves her own biopic, limited series, whatever.” Baez herself helped Barbaro get over it. “At one point, she was like, ‘I’m just in my garden, looking at birds.’… I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, you don’t live or die by what this movie says about you.’” Barbaro’s Baez, true to life, carries herself as Dylan’s peer, sparring with him onstage and off. Their dynamic is real enough that a scene where the two cultural icons bicker in their underwear feels almost transgressive, like something we’re not supposed to see.

In real life, Dylan was initially a lot more interested in Baez’s younger sister, Mimi, a character who inevitably had to be excised from the narrative. “I just couldn’t,” says Mangold. “If you have all these people, you end up with a parade. Let’s say 40 percent of the movie is music, right? Now you only have 75 minutes left, including credits, to tell the human story. It’s incredible how fast you have to pick and choose what you investigate.”

Barbaro pushed back on even minor factual alterations, down to the fact that there’s no evidence of them ever actually singing “Girl From the North Country” together, and the inclusion of multiple scenes of Baez and Dylan holding dual guitars in duets, when in reality Baez would let Dylan handle the playing. “Jim was like, ‘I just love that image so much.’” Or, as Mangold puts it to me later: “You can’t make it like a Wikipedia entry.”

The actress’ biggest challenge was trying to approximate Baez’s singing voice, a more classically beautiful instrument than Dylan’s. Barbaro had hardly sung in public before, let alone in a movie, so she was terrified. Like Chalamet, she worked with vocal coach Eric Vetro, who trained Austin Butler to play Elvis Presley. And she was a whole lot less finicky about overdubs — after I’ve already seen a cut of the film, she was about to take one more pass at her performances, trying to get Baez’s wide vibrato just right. Even so, she doesn’t expect to impress Baez herself. “She’ll probably hear this and go, ‘Nope!’”

During the film production, Barbaro was also shooting the Arnold Schwarzenegger Netflix series FUBAR, where she plays his daughter. As it turns out, Schwarzenegger is a Baez fan, and his first concert was one of her late-Sixties performances. “Play for me,” he said, and Barbaro found herself singing “Don’t Think Twice” for the Terminator.

“God forbid I missed a step because I was being Timmy. I can be Timmy for the rest of my life!”

E dward Norton stepped in to play Pete Seeger at the last minute, after the actor originally cast, Benedict Cumberbatch, had to drop out. That gave him a mere two months to prepare for a role that required both a complete physical transformation and performances on the banjo, an instrument he had never played. Sipping coffee in a Malibu, California, cafe not far from his house, Norton says he’s not looking forward to discussing his process. “If I’m sitting in front of a fucking camera,” Norton says, “and someone’s saying, ‘So, talk about how you learned the banjo, or you fucked up your own teeth, or you shaved your head’ or whatever, they are asking you to explain the trick before you’ve done the trick.… And you go back and look at Dylan in 1962. The guy is 21 years old. And somehow he knew then: You don’t let people behind the fucking curtain.”

But let it be known that Norton did fuck up his teeth for real, allowing a dentist do something unfortunate to his mouth to approximate Seeger’s crooked smile. And he did shave his hairline back, and did translate his extant guitar skills to the banjo as best as possible in two months, though there’s inevitably some trickery on the harder parts. And he did manage, as much as Chalamet did with Dylan, an eerie replica of Seeger’s real voice. He’s since had his normal teeth restored and regrown his hair. At 55, he’s still Fight Club-fit, and the way his ice-blue stare intensifies in passionate conversation is familiar from a couple dozen movies.

Seeger, born in 1919, was nearly a generation older than Dylan, combining music and activism since the younger man was a toddler. (Baez told Norton that Seeger was too formal to be comfortable with hugs from his young friends, a detail Norton uses amusingly onscreen.) He was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, pushed to the margins of the culture. So while the film’s Dylan and Seeger have a closer relationship than the real-life ones did, there’s no doubt that the actual Seeger was overjoyed to see Dylan reaching kids by the millions with his early protest songs. Norton shows me a photo on his phone of Seeger and Dylan sitting side by side on a trip to the South, and another where Seeger is watching Dylan perform to a huge crowd, his face alight with paternal joy.

But Dylan was, in the end, loyal mostly to his own artistic urges, rather than to any particular community or set of politics, which broke both Seeger’s and Baez’s hearts. “It turns out Dylan is in fact a musical artist, not a political figure,” Norton says. “Pete Seeger’s integrity is totally different from Dylan’s integrity, and when they parted ways, neither fundamentally reduces the other.” Norton clearly put something of Bruce Springsteen, his friend of 30 years and a Seeger disciple, into his performance, in the glimpses of flintiness he shows behind the public face of affability.

The final break between the two men, while Dylan was onstage with a full-on rock band at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, is one of the most mythologized and factually muddled moments in Sixties musical history — always presented as the actual “gone electric” moment, even though Dylan had a rock band in the studio with him as early as 1962’s “Mixed-Up Confusion,” as well as half of Bringing It All Back Home, released four months before Newport. Not to mention that “Like a Rolling Stone” was already charting at the time of the festival. But the crowd, at least part of it, did boo him. And at least in the most archetypal version of the story — which the movie leans into, hard — Seeger was deeply offended by Dylan’s decision to drown out his own lyrics, and violate the festival’s communal, rootsy spirit with raucous noise.

“Every single person I talked to who was there, like literally there at the moment, said that Pete blew a gasket at a level they had rarely seen,” Norton says. Even the movie doesn’t dare include the clearly apocryphal tale that Seeger grabbed an ax to literally cut off the power, but it does nod to the fact that there were axes nearby, thanks to a work-song performance that day. And the movie attempts something even more audacious, bringing in an infamous incident, a certain shout of betrayal from the crowd, that actually happened in the U.K. a year later. “Jim wasn’t interested in doing another documentary,” Norton says. “He was interested in almost a fable.”

“You gotta not take yourself so fucking seriously. Just enjoy life.”

In any case, Dylan himself has always had little interest in literal historical truth. His own memoir, Chronicles, is more postmodern textual game than actual autobiography, and he worked with Martin Scorsese to lace 2019’s Rolling Thunder Revue documentary with an extraordinary amount of fiction. Norton, who’s texted with Thom Yorke about how “punk rock” Dylan’s performances in that film are, finds it all hilarious, comparing Dylan to the “mythological trickster.” “He’s such a troublemaker,” he says, noting the singer’s “obvious pleasure in obfuscation and distortion.”

Norton says Mangold told him that Dylan insisted on putting at least one totally inaccurate moment — he won’t reveal what — into A Complete Unknown. When the director expressed some concern about the public’s reaction, as Norton tells it, Dylan stared at him. “What do you care what other people think?” he asked.

C halamet and I make our way to the edge of the Hudson River, right next to the indoor sports complex Chelsea Piers. We sit side by side on a bench, facing a vast, sunless horizon, dusted with gray mist. That’s when we start talking about destiny. His time in Dylan’s home state, Chalamet says, reminded him of his visits to the French hinterlands. “My dad grew up in the Minnesota of France, you could say,” he says, talking quickly, with urgency. “So I would spend my summers in that region, and I would feel the exact same way. You feel boxed in — and you feel like you have something more to say.”

“I could relate to that so deeply in my own life, my own career,” he continues. He felt pointed toward a particular future, but also that he could be easily knocked off course.  ‘If you want God to laugh at your plans, say them out loud.’ In my early career, even close friends could say something that just throws you for a week. And then, in determination, you gotta put yourself on a certain path. I never changed my name, but I understood it. I felt it in my core in some way.” Why would Robert Zimmerman need to become Bob Dylan? You might look in the mirror, Chalamet suggests, and realize your name doesn’t reflect “the gravitas of what you feel inside.”

When I bring up the weird number of parallels between Paul Atreides, Bob Dylan, and maybe even himself — the whole Chosen One, Lisan al Gaib, messianic fate thing — Chalamet considers the idea quite seriously. “The massive difference in the framing is, for Paul Atreides, the destiny is preordained, and it’s part of his resentment for his status. He feels like it had nothing to do with him, in a sense. And it’s a great source of existential strain. And for Bob, it’s the mischievous joy in knowing, yeah, your talent, your special ability is your own doing, your own gift from God in a sense. I think there’s probably always a pride in that for him.” And why is Chalamet drawn to these savior roles? He laughs, finally. “Hey, man,” he says, “they’re finding me. Not the other way around.”

During high school, he felt like he had to dodge “drugs and alcohol everywhere.” “I felt like I had this little nugget that I had to protect, of potential or something.” He starts talking again about something else he shares with Dylan — that burst of vertigo-inducing fame when they were barely out of their teens. “It’s some shit at that age,” he says. “It really is.” But he quickly changes the subject.

Dylan, of course, cracked up soon after the events of the movie, skidding off his motorcycle into semi-isolation in Woodstock, New York. Chalamet allows that his pandemic time off, which included his own stint in that upstate New York town, served the same function. It was an “imposed look in the mirror, after the slingshot, and feeling like, ‘OK, this is where I am,’” he says. “But equally, you can look in that mirror too long and create a rut that’s not there sometimes.” Fame can increase that danger: “With attention or whatever, it’s like you gotta be extra careful.” He takes a breath. “And also not take yourself so fucking seriously. Just enjoy life.”

He told me more than once that he was all too aware that he would never get to play Bob Dylan again, that the “role of a lifetime” is over. But I point out that’s simply not true — he’s young enough that he could easily reprise the part at some later point in his and Dylan’s timeline.

“Oh, my God,” he says. “Yeah. I’ve never had that thought, but you’re right. If anybody was ever deserving of it, as far as shape-shifting — Rolling Thunder Revue and born-again and Time Out of Mind …” He brightens. “It’s an interesting thought!”