Timothée Chalamet reveals the Bob Dylan song that gave him his “way in” to biopic
As he prepares to unveil his interpretation of Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet has revealed that the song ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ was his key to playing the folk-rock icon.
Chalamet will be donning the classic Dylan hairdo and sunglasses for the film A Complete Unknown, which chronicles Dylan’s days from being a folk singer in Greenwich Village to becoming a leading figure in the folk-rock movement after going electric on albums such as Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited.
When working through different songs in Dylan’s trademark husky voice, Chalamet said that ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ helped him understand what to go for, telling Zane Lowe, “For me, it started out with the music and this song ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. That was my way in. I thought, ‘Well this is rock and roll.'”
Coming from Highway 61 Revisited, the studio version of the track has been praised as one of Dylan’s most vitriolic songs. Though Dylan has never revealed who the character of Mr Jones is in the song, many of his fans have interpreted it as an indictment of critics who sought to put him in a box after watching him switch from traditional folk music to electric rock.
Chalamet went on to say that he resonated with Dylan’s anger at the time, continuing, “It’s acidic. It’s like battery acid. I was listening to folk music like ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ and was thinking, ‘Wow, this has got some edge here.'”
In addition to portraying the life of the rock and roll legend, Chalamet inhabited every aspect of the role, including playing guitar and singing in Dylan’s trademark rustic tone. The actor said it was interesting trying to capture Dylan’s style of guitar playing, including favouring a lot of downstrokes to get the right urgency for the song.
When internalising the power behind the music, Chalamet also saw parallels between the civil rights movement going on around the time of Dylan and today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Despite his history of writing political material, the actor also appreciated Dylan’s ability not to be “virtue signalling” whenever he sang, remarking that he wrote songs about key historical figures like Emmit Till because it was part of his artistry.
That led him to go even further back to those who inspired Dylan, such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Each of them showed snapshots of their internal conflicts through song.
A Complete Unknown arrives in theatres on December 25th, 2024.
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