Watch Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in new trailer for ‘A Complete Unknown’
A new trailer has been released for James Mangold’s upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as the legendary singer-songwriter.
The new clip is the second trailer to be released from the upcoming film, which is set for release in the United Kingdom on January 17th, 2025. The movie follows Dylan as he makes his way in New York after moving from Minnesota as a 19-year-old in 1961 and the unlikely road ahead that awaits him after he unexpectedly becomes a huge star.
Set over a four-year period, A Complete Unknown charts his sharp rise from obscurity to musical messiah status, exploring how Dylan inspired a generation with his powerful protest songs and the burden of that weight placed on his young shoulders.
The official synopsis reads: “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.”
The first scene of the new trailer sees Dylan walking the streets of New York armed with his guitar before engaging in a conversation with his mentor, Pete Seeger. It also sees him begin his relationship with the character Sylvie Russo, based on Suze Rotolo.
At another point in the trailer, Dylan shouts out Joan Baez in the crowd at an early performance, telling the crowd, “How about that Joan Baez, folks? She’s pretty, sings pretty. Maybe, a little bit too pretty.” It then cuts to a shot of the pair kissing as their romance gets underway.
It also provides a glimpse at their relationship, as Dylan is seen telling Baez, “Your songs are kind of like an oil painting at the dentist’s office,” who responds by saying, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.” The pair are then pictured performing together at Newport Folk Festival in 1963, singing a duet of ‘Girl from the North Country’.
Towards the end of the new clip, it shows Dylan as a highly-successful artist, who is no longer playing in dimly-lit bars in Greenwich Village, and frustrated at his newfound position in the music industry. While in a room full of important business figures, Dylan angrily remarks in a voiceover, “There’s 200 people in that room, and each one wants me to be somebody else.”
Towards the end of the trailer, Dylan begins to revolt by plotting his infamous set at Newport Folk Festival in 1965, which saw the singer-songwriter go electric for the first time.”
What to expect from the Bob Dylan biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’?
Speaking on the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast in July, director Mangold noted of A Complete Unknown: “I am not here to say I am making the Jon Meacham definitive biography, that’s not my job. My job is to kind of explore the specific aspect in Bob’s life and the people around him and this moment in America, to be honest, this ground zero in New York.”
Mangold also revealed his first conversation with Dylan about the movie, “It’s really interesting, y’know Bob, one of the early things, the first time that I sat down with him, and it was such an interesting question because he said, ‘What’s this movie about, Jim?’”
The director continued: “I didn’t have an answer, but what sprang out of me was, ‘It’s about a guy who is choking to death in Minnesota and leaves behind all his friends and family, 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. He smiled, and said, ‘I like that’. Essentially, that’s what I’m telling because you need a north star.”
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