Searchlight Pictures released its first official teaser trailer for upcoming Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown on Wednesday—and while Dylan fans can be a tough crowd, Timothee Chalamet is being praised for his portrayal of the singer as a young man. As director James Mangold promised, Chalamet does his own singing in the biopic, Pitchfork reports. In the trailer, he sings Dylan's 1962 song "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."
The movie, which tells the story of Dylan's early years as a musician, starting when the then-19-year-old arrived in New York City in the early 1960s, is due out in December. According to the official description, it culminates "in his groundbreaking electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965." Mangold tells Rolling Stone that because of delays including "false starts with COVID," Chalamet, 28, "really had a kind of incubation as a musician that was years in happening."
"I think he does an incredible job of growing the character up, because one of the things I think that will be startling is, most Dylan fans don't focus on the boy in the newsboy cap who's arriving in town," Mangold says. "And Timmy really carries this character from a 19-year-old boy telling tales of working on the carnival into this person that we recognize as an icon." The Independent reports that fans were fawning over the portrayal of Dylan by Chalamet, whose other recent movies include Wonka and the Dune films. One fan asked, "Is there anything Timothee Chalamet can't do?" (More Bob Dylan stories.)