What we know about the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic (2024)

DULUTH — As Bob Dylan's 83rd birthday was being celebrated here in his city of birth on Friday, the Jersey Shore was abuzz with recent sightings of a handsome young man in 1960s folkie costume. The young man is actor Timothée Chalamet, who is playing Dylan in a new movie set at a pivotal point in the musician's career.

The movie is titled "A Complete Unknown," a reference to the lyrics of Dylan's 1965 signature song "Like a Rolling Stone."

It's directed by James Mangold, a high-profile director whose most recent feature, "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," also had a Duluth connection: It featured packs from Frost River, which sued over alleged customer confusion when the studio behind the film cut a promotional deal with a competing gear company.

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"A Complete Unknown" isn't expected to have any extended scenes set in Minnesota: It finds Dylan in his late teens after he's already landed in New York. Mangold has described Dylan's pilgrimage to meet the dying Woody Guthrie as being part of the story, so maybe we'll get a parting glimpse of Dinkytown if we're lucky.

Still, Chalamet — riding high on the success of the blockbuster "Dune" franchise — did visit Hibbing in January, on a research trip in preparation for his role as Dylan. (Chalamet was not, despite some confusion and satire on social media, seen visiting the Duluth Public Library or skateboarding on its plaza.)

The filmmakers also had the kind of help they couldn't get from latter-day students at Hibbing High: their project has the blessing of Dylan himself, who offered "recollections" and "wisdom," Mangold said in a statement when filming for the movie began in March.

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According to Mangold, Dylan —who went so far as to personally annotate a copy of the script — approves of the movie because it's not so much a standard biopic as an ensemble piece about the 1960s music scene at a moment of transition.

Other stars will take the roles of Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), Alan Lomax (Nick Offerman), Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) and a character named "Sylvie Russo."

Dakota Fanning, whose previous rock biopic experience includes playing Cherie Currie in "The Runaways" (2010), will portray "Russo," who Harper's Bazaar describes as "a thinly veiled version of Suze Rotolo." Rotolo was a girlfriend of Dylan's in his early New York years, widely recognized for her appearance with the artist on the cover of the album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" (1963).

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The film's arc will reportedly follow Dylan from his Greenwich Village coffeehouse days to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when the artist bucked expectations and "went electric" in what's now regarded as a defining moment of the rock era. (In fact, an earlier title mooted for the movie was "Going Electric.")

New Jersey will stand in for Rhode Island in the Newport scenes, which seemingly will include some footage of "Dylan" riding a motorbike: the pastime that would bring an end to the meteoric phase of his career when the star went into temporary seclusion after a 1966 accident. Parts of New Jersey are also standing in for Woodstock, New York, where that accident took place.

One of the most intriguing revelations to date is that Chalamet himself will be providing his character's singing voice. According to the actor, Dylan's manager supplied him with 12 hours of unreleased Dylan recordings from that era to help him prepare. Among those recordings are the "Minnesota tapes," a series of DIY recordings made in Dylan's home state in 1961.

"People are going to be shocked because you're going to think you're hearing Bob Dylan sing," the actor's vocal coach told People. The coach, Eric Vetro, likened Chalamet's success in the role as akin to what Renée Zellweger did when portraying Dylan's fellow Northlander, Judy Garland, in the movie "Judy" (2019).

Longtime Dylan fans will be watching to see whether "A Complete Unknown" will successfully introduce Dylan's music to a new generation. Evidence of how some younger fans perceive Dylan comes from a Glamour article about the movie, referring to Dylan as "the guy your dad loves" and clarifying that "he is still alive, despite what some people often think."

They'll also be ready to compare the new movie to the large and growing oeuvre of films about or starring Dylan. To date, the closest thing to a conventional Dylan biopic is anything but: "I'm Not There," a 2007 Todd Haynes movie that takes a kaleidoscopic view of the artist's life and involves six different Dylanesque characters.

There's also plenty of documentary evidence of Dylan's mid-1960s pivot, including Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" (2005), featuring interviews with Dylan, Baez, Rotolo and many others. The best-known cinematic portrait of Dylan at his dizzying peak is D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary "Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back" (apostrophe intentionally omitted).

No release date for the new biopic, backed by Searchlight Pictures, has yet been announced.

Arts and entertainment reporter Jay Gabler joined the Duluth News Tribune in 2022. His previous experience includes eight years as a digital producer at The Current (Minnesota Public Radio), four years as theater critic at Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages, and six years as arts editor at the Twin Cities Daily Planet. He's a co-founder of pop culture and creative writing blog The Tangential; he's also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Minnesota Film Critics Alliance. You can reach him at jgabler@duluthnews.com or 218-279-5536.