In the Future, Everyone Will Play Bob Dylan in Hagiographic Biopic

Timothee Chalamet stars in a James Mangold biopic about everyone's favorite dead musician that's still alive.

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Searchlight Pictures

Back in the early days of FilmDrunk, I vaguely remember reviewing I’m Not There, a sort of Not Biopic of Bob Dylan. Or as IMDB describes it, “ruminations on the life of Bob Dylan, where six characters embody a different aspect of the musician's life and work.”

It starred Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and a bunch of other very famous actors and personalities as all these different aspects of Bob Dylan. Todd Haynes has since gone on to direct Carol, Wonderstruck, May December, and a bunch of other movies that I’ve liked or mostly liked, but boy did I hate this Bob Dylan movie. I don’t have anything against Bob Dylan, in fact I like a lot of Bob Dylan music even though I’ve mostly avoided it, but I’ve always found it hilarious the degree to which people (Boomers, I assume?) seem incapable of appreciating this man without pretending he’s Merlin the guitar wizard. Can’t you just enjoy the sound of a harmonica without turning him into a primitive deity? (I admittedly don’t know that much about Bob Dylan, but what I do know about him makes me think he would hate this all this puffery as much as I do).

Pop culture always treats Dylan like was the hippie Nostradamus, and not just sixties Eminem (ie, a guy who was really good at rhyming words and making the music of his generation, which is, in my opinion, a very fine thing to be that doesn’t require dressing up in hyperbolic nonsense).

Anyway, this is all an extremely long and probably obnoxious preamble to the news that there’s an actual, straightforwardly biopic version of a Bob Dylan biopic coming out, and it just dropped a trailer today. It’s called A Complete Unknown and it stars Timóthéé Chálámét (I can never remember which syllable has the accent, so I thought I’d cover my bases) as Bob Dylan. Edward Norton and Elle Fanning are in there too playing some other people. It’s set for release in December (aka, during “awards season,” which should tell you about the studio’s hopes for it).

Obviously I have my own reservations about the entire biopic-industrial complex, but this doesn’t feel like the kind of movie you should make about a guy while he’s still alive, does it? Then again, James Mangold directed it, and he does mostly solid work, including directing Walk the Line, which was sort of the ur-music biopic (along with Ray), and was about Johnny Cash and released while Cash was still alive.

Still, I have to think a Johnny Cash movie in 2005 was fresher material than a Bob Dylan biopic in 2024. It’s kind of tough when your subject is already so recognizable as a Halloween costume. Everything about Chálámét as Dylan in this looks like Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis (which is on my personal shortlist of Favorite Movies Of All Time), only without the magical cat that makes Inside Llewyn Davis such a perfect movie (also, Oscar Isaac could sing his ass off).

Per the official synopsis:

Set in the influential New York music scene of the early 60s, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN 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.

I’m a few generations removed from Dylan fandom and even I feel like I’ve already heard this story 12 times. ‘member when Dylan went electric? Blew our minds, maaan! (I’m imagining this in the voice of Otto the Bus Driver from the Simpsons).

Anyway, the trailer. It’s set to Edward Norton’s voiceover and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (good song), with Timóthéé Chálámét actually singing. Which he will presumably do for most of the movie (the kind of parlor trick on which most biopics are based). I think a really funny idea would be to dub present-day Bob Dylan’s voice over all the songs and vocals, but I assume that joke’s already been made.

Anyway, just when I felt like I’d gotten over the knee-jerk annoyance at the sight of the Kwisatz Haderach in full Bob Dylan cosplay, we get to hear Timothee Chalamet doing Dylan’s speaking voice. Oh Lord. He really went for it, didn’t he? Everything in me kind of screamed NO NO NO. He’s going to need to go to method actor reeducation camp to un-Dylan himself after this, like Austin Butler did with Elvis.

There’s a thing that biopics do (I’m thinking Carey Mulligan in Maestro, Natalie Portman in Jackie, Kristen Stewart in Spencer) where the actor studies tape of a public figure’s public speaking voice and then they kind of blanket apply it to every situation. The assumption that the subjects don’t have private lives, that they talked the same way in all situations, always rings costumey and phony to me. David Oyelowo in Selma is a nice counter-example, where it felt like he underplayed some of Martin Luther King’s more well-known speech tics and gave us something recognizable, but still partly unexpected.

Trailers are not movies and all that, but hoo boy. That little snippet of Dylan talking feels like they went full tribute act with this one.