A complete natural: how Timothée Chalamet nailed Bob Dylan’s most complex composition
The biopic genre is a positively exhausted one. With a cookie-cutter approach, it’s often two hours of nostalgia porn that gives us a glimpse into the mind’s eye of our cultural icons that we automatically pass it off as good. While James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown hones in on a more concentrated period of time in Bob Dylan‘s life, offering a more nuanced take on biographical storytelling, the individual performance of Timothée Chalamet prevents the film from blandly slipping into a sea of pastiche.
Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald, the film focuses on Dylan’s rise to folk fame in 1963 with his debut record, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and his subsequent abandonment of the genre in pursuit of innovation with his electric-blues-inspired sophomore record, Highway 61 Revisited.
While Dylan’s defiant personality and subsequent fraught relationships with his peers and partners take centre stage within the story, the dispute over his creative innovation centres around his guitar playing, whether acoustic or electric. With Chalamet insisting that some of the film’s musical scenes were recorded as live takes, his ability to not only play the guitar but do so in a way that imitates Dylan was imperative to the film’s success.
To do so, Chalamet enlisted the help of guitar teacher and session pro-Larry Saltzman. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Saltzman spoke of those early sessions with Chalamet and the obvious brilliance he was in the presence of: “When he got to my place and we had our guitars in our hands, I asked if he’d played, and he said just a little. He kind of knew one or two chords and formed a couple of chords, and that’s what he did. I could tell he was just very musical right away.”
When it came to performing one of Dylan’s most iconic songs, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’, which showcases his signature finger-picking style, Chalamet reportedly took to it like a duck to water.
“It blew my mind to revisit it,” Saltzman said. “And it’s a really fast tempo. I was intimidated by teaching it to him. I was intimidated from playing it myself. He wasn’t intimidated by it. He just did it. It has a little funny hammer in it that comes around every once in a while. Sometimes Bob would maybe vary the pattern. But in the middle of me explaining it to him, he’s already playing. I mean, it wasn’t playing like at tempo and perfectly, but he’s already like going.”
In a section of the movie that celebrates the pared-back composition of Dylan’s music, it’s an inherently brave thing to do as an actor, as there is simply nowhere else for the music to hide. And it wasn’t the only time Chalamet pressed for the film’s creative direction to follow this methodology.
In an interview with Variety, director James Mangold spoke of Chalamet’s defiance to pursue authenticity in the tender scene between Dylan and his idol Woody Guthrie. Set in the movie’s early stages, it follows a young and green Dylan, who has newly arrived in New York City and makes a beeline for Greystone Hospital to visit Guthrie. In a hospital room so silent you could hear a pin-drop, Chalamet as Dylan plays ‘Song to Woody’ and, much like ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ performed it live.
“We shot that in the first five or six days,” Mangold said. “And there was a whole backstage thing with Timmy saying, ‘I want to try it live.’” He continued, “And he was phenomenal. Not only that, he proved the brilliance of the method.”
Mangold said. “There’s this moment where he finishes that song, and he holds a note and just keeps hitting the low string on the guitar over and over again, and he’s just his eyes are kind of boring into Woody, and he’s just holding this note, and it gave him chills.”
It’s an artistic choice that, to the untrained eye, is somewhat unnecessary. The inclusion of a recorded track in the scene may have worked just as well. But for me, it’s less about the direct result of these individual scenes and more about the overall goal of Chalamet’s creative commitment.
As the film entirely suggests, Dylan was an uncompromising artist and refused to give away an inch of authenticity in place of commercialism. For Chalamet to envelope himself in Dylan’s world and mind, small ripples like this help develop a bigger swell in his overall performance. It is a performance that showcases not an artist who can be a simple impressionist but someone who can relate to the very soul of Dylan and convincingly carry his torch of artistic authenticity.
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