Film Performer of the Year Timothée Chalamet Dove Into the Unknown

Consequence's 2024 Annual Report continues with the announcement of Timothée Chalamet as our Film Performer of the Year for his role as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Watch the interview via YouTube, or listen to it on the latest episode of our Consequence UNCUT: Annual Report podcast, available exclusively on Amazon Music. Also, see where the movie landed on our list of the 25 Best Films of 2024.

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When Timothée Chalamet dove into the making of A Complete Unknown, he didn't think he'd end the process with a deeper understanding of who Bob Dylan is. "I didn't have that expectation," he tells Consequence. "That's the short and true answer."

After all, how much can we really learn about anyone from a movie, especially a movie focused on a musical icon who has spent his entire career cultivating an air of mystery? Written and directed by James Mangold, A Complete Unknown (now streaming on Hulu) is very conscious of this issue — even its title nods to the dilemma. How do you play someone unknowable?

For Chalamet, the answer was immersion. After the actor originally signed on to play Dylan, numerous factors, including the pandemic and the 2023 guild strikes, meant that he was able to spend a great deal of extra time preparing. "I had years to... Work's the wrong word," he says. Instead, he was able to "sit and be in this material, and to genuinely find my way in and around it."

He doesn't just mean the particulars of learning to play guitar and sing like Dylan. Rather, he spent the extended pre-production delving into "the time period. The other artists that influenced Bob, the artists Bob influenced with his early work, the early work that didn't make it onto albums, the early work that was amplified through bootlegs. Early performances, early interviews, all the documentaries, everything, everything."

Chalamet says that "there was no truncated process about this. I didn't have the three or four months that usually feels quite generous before a movie. This was much more than that. There were the literal, more technical sides like the guitar-playing or the harmonica-playing or physicality stuff that I could grind my teeth in. But more impactfully, to me, was just getting to find my connection with the music and with the figure that is Bob Dylan."

The result has already gathered no shortage of critical and awards attention: As of being named our 2024 Film Performer of the Year, Chalamet has also been nominated for a Golden Globe and received a special accolade from the Gotham Awards, in addition to recognition from various critics groups. Edward Norton, also receiving his own acclaim for his performance as folk legend and activist Pete Seeger, was equally impressed.

"I was delighted at just the depth of his focus and seriousness, it's everything," Norton tells Consequence. "As a comrade in arms and an ally, he was creating, through force of will and insistence and environment, an investment in the work. That doesn't always happen, and I loved it."

Something that Chalamet calls "fantastically" helpful was collaborating with the rest of the cast, each playing other notable figures in Dylan's life from 1961 to 1965. "This is really an ensemble movie in my estimation," he says. "It's as much about Greenwich Village in that time period, and the characters on screen like Johnny Cash or Joan Baez, or Sylvia Russo or Pete Seeger, and how they impacted Bob and how they impacted him in different periods as much as he did them."

Chalamet adds that "everyone carried the flag of their character — in other words, everyone fiercely defended their character and what their point of view would've been. It brought truth to what the scenes and the story needed, because when this stuff was happening in the '60s, Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo and Pete Seeger… They didn't feel like they were in the Bob Dylan movie."

Monica Barbaro says that while she was "such a Timothée Chalamet fan before," playing Joan Baez opposite him gave her a whole new appreciation. "He worked so incredibly hard on this. I have so much respect for everything he did for this film, and I think he's well deserving of all of the positive feedback he's getting now."

Like the other actors in the film, Barbaro also faced the challenge of building up her musical proficiency so she "could feel confident enough to sing these songs live. I didn't have any singing or guitar experience prior, so for me it was just about really getting to a place where I felt like I could properly represent all of what Joan was — she was such a skilled musician."

Aptly, the first time Barbaro and Chalamet met face-to-face was for a music rehearsal, after they had both been preparing on their own for some time. "That was a career highlight for me," she says. "It was just incredible to trust the accompaniment of our mutual guitars and have our siloed musical training come together and make these gorgeous harmonies. Such a lovely experience."

For her, connecting first through the music felt like the right choice. "There are certain situations where it helps to grab a coffee with a person and get to know them," she says. "In this situation, I think it was perfect that we didn't meet until we had a greater understanding of the music. We had a really deep understanding of who we were portraying and we could sort of just trust that all of that work would come together and we could be present with the scene. Our personal lives were out of the way, and we got to really just experience the moment as authentically as possible, as our versions of Bob and Joan."

Looking back on the filming experience, Barbaro particularly loved getting to perform "It Ain't Me, Babe" with Chalamet. "We did that at a point in the film where we were just very confident in our music skills, and we had both performed a lot for live audiences... It was this whirlwind, excited moment where we had only so many takes, and it was just infused with life and a lot of fun."

While Dylan's increased fame is depicted in the film, Chalamet didn’t approach the project as an exploration of celebrity. Instead, he says, "I saw it as a young artist who burgeons, and whether as a consequence of fame, or other things in his life, it was increasingly challenging to express himself."

Chalamet found he definitely connected with Dylan when he felt that "people were trying to pull him from his art — because I guess the movie's interpretation is that his mind's eye was often on his art. I think about it in the scene where Bob's writing 'It's All Right, Ma,' or in some of the scenes with Sylvie Russo, who Elle Fanning brilliantly plays. I definitely felt that, playing it, so I hope it comes across." He laughs.

Dylan’s commitment to his craft is, in fact, the bedrock on which Chalamet’s performance is built. We first hear him perform not for a large crowd but for his idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in a hospital room, his eyes wide open and a little nervous. Yet as success rushes in, the walls come up, the sunglasses come on, and his focus on his art becomes absolute, in a way where his initially quiet non-conformity takes on a deafening volume.

It's maybe a spoiler for the movie but definitely not a spoiler for history to say that A Complete Unknown ends on Dylan's iconic performance at the Newport Folk Festival, a seismic moment in music history infamous for Dylan’s convention-shattering decision to play electric instruments on stage. For Chalamet, ending on that point made sense because "it was a definitive moment in Bob's life, and I think it was a definitive moment in American pop culture at that time. It was sort of the gates getting flung open — and, in the eyes of the folk community, a moment of blasphemy."

Plus, he says, "from a more objective point of view in 2024, [it was] the moment where rock and roll re-exploded in America. The commercialized sort of watered down rock and roll of the fifties had tremendous artistic value in a sense, but was maybe more top down and aimed at a certain young demographic and was seen by the folk community as something to push sales and make money."

Norton says that Mangold's interest in depicting Newport '65 was "more [about] why would such a thing cause so much emotion? And backing it up out of that to say what happened in that short period, that was so fertile creatively, where pop music and even what was rebellious counterculture music was really woven in with the politics of the time and the social change of the time..."

He pauses. "[Mangold] always talked about collisions. Dylan, in his mind, was like a pinball in a machine hitting Pete Seeger and hitting Joan Baez and hitting Johnny Cash, and all these things lit up from these collisions. I love that idea of Dylan as a force within an emergent moment that bloomed and ended very quickly."

Chalamet notes that the music Dylan played at Newport "to today's ear would seem like part of culture and lore and the fabric of America. But at the time, it was really groundbreaking, and it was something I had to wrap my head around. And I hope audiences wrap their head around [the fact that] so much of the music we listen to today was being born in this moment. Bob doing that at Newport in some ways was the first punk moment — not literally, but sort of as an expression."

It's all part of the legend of Dylan, which proves much more interesting to explore than perhaps the hard truth. "Jim [Mangold] was a great psychiatrist for all of us because I think he liberated us from documentary history," Norton says. "He almost characterized it like a fable — 'a complete unknown,’ a person arriving and all that. Everything that happens when someone's talent is propelling them through other people. Jim let us be the people, but interpret them too."

It all connects back to the title, and the idea that Dylan is never meant to be understood. "I don't think [Mangold], in his script or in the film he made, was particularly interested in trying to pick the lock of Dylan — who is in many ways a musical mystic," Norton says. "When a person from the age of 21, as an artist, says 'I am not inclined to let you behind the curtain,' and keeps that up for 60 years..." He laughs. "You've got to respect [that]."

Continues Norton, "I think Jim does respect that, that what's most interesting about this person is not who were they, really, but more how did this happen? Because it didn't come out of nowhere. It was the product of touchpoints with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger — these people had this kind of wild shared value in a very small subculture, and these things bloomed up out of them. And that is in some ways, to me, more interesting than some sort of secret psychological insight into Dylan."

It results in a movie that isn’t the secret origin story of Bob Dylan, but a portrait of the era that led to the rise of an artist like him. And through Chalamet’s fierce on-set dedication to keeping his character’s secrets, we get an inkling of understanding as to why Dylan himself cultivated those secrets in the first place. Not too much understanding, to be clear. The sunglasses do come off from time to time, but the mystery remains.

For his part, Chalamet believes that the title represents "a strong encapsulation of the unknown that Bob Dylan remains.” That’s why he loves it. Sure, during production, the film was known as Going Electric, and Chalamet feels like that "could have also been a great title."

"But," he continues, "the great thing about A Complete Unknown is that it encapsulates the figure that Bob is."

A Complete Unknown arrived in theaters on Christmas Day. It is now streaming on Hulu.