See Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in First Trailer for ‘A Complete Unknown’

Searchlight Pictures has dropped the first full trailer for A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s upcoming biopic of legendary musician Bob Dylan, starring Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet and set for a December release.

Set in the influential New York music scene of the early 60s, A Complete Unknown follows 19-year-old Minnesota musician Bob Dylan’s (Chalamet) meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts – his songs and mystique becoming a worldwide sensation.

Written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, the film is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric” and was originally titled Going Electric. A Complete Unknown borrows a phrase from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” culminating in his groundbreaking electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

In the trailer, we see essentially what the behind the scenes paparazzi shots snapped of Chalamet during the films production earlier this year as he walks the streets of Manhattan, passing Dylan’s favorite spots including Cafe Wha? and Hotel Chelsea and we get Chalamet’s rendition of Dylan’s 1963 protest song “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” all shot in the warm brown light of Phedon Papamichael’s cinematography (Ford v Ferrari, Walk the Line) and again the production design of François Audouy (Ford v Ferrari, Logan). A brief look at a possible love triangle between Dylan and Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez and Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo, a fictionalized version of Dylan’s then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who appears on the album cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”

The film also stars Academy Award nominee Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, P. J. Byrne as Harold Leventhal, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie, Dan Fogler as Albert Grossman and Will Harrison as Bob Neuwirth.

From Searchlight Pictures, A Complete Unknown is produced by Michael Bederman, Fred Berger, Bob Bookman, Chalamet, Alan Gasmer, Alex Heineman, Peter Jaysen, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Mangold, Andrew Rona and Jeff Rosen.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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