Timotheé Chalamet Belts Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in ‘A Complete Unknown’ Trailer

· Rolling Stone

In the A Complete Unknown trailer, Timotheé Chalamet’s Bob Dylan faces the pressure to define himself as his music career reaches stratospheric heights. “Two hundred people in that room and each one wants me to be somebody else,” Chalamet says in the trailer.

By the end of the trailer, released Tuesday, Chalamet goes electric, performing “Like a Rolling Stone” to a raucous crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

A Complete Unknown follows 19-year-old Dylan’s arrival to New York in the early Sixties, the Minnesota folk singer’s sold-out concert halls and chart topping songs, along with the history-making electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Elle Fanning stars as Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie Russo, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Edward Norton as folk legend Pete Seeger, and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash. Additional cast members include Norbert Leo Butz, Dan Fogler, and Scoot McNairy.

The film’s director James Mangold (Walk the LineFord v Ferrari) has previously defined A Complete Unknown as an ensemble piece, rather than a Dylan biopic, in order to demonstrate the folk musician’s layered personality. In a conversation with Dylan ahead of the film’s production, Mangold described the film as a guy choking to death in his hometown of Minnesota, skyrocketing to stardom, and choking to death again before running away. And Dylan agreed.

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“I didn’t want to turn Bob Dylan into a simple character with a simple thing to unlock that then makes you go, ‘Ah, now I get him,'” James Mangold told Rolling Stone in July. “I don’t think that’s possible, having gotten to know him. I also think it’s pretty clear he spent most of his life trying to avoid that exact act by anybody. Which is an act of, by nature, reduction — reducing someone to a simple epiphany, a plot-point Freudian history of their life.”

The film releases Christmas day.