Since James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown was first announced over four years ago (!), we’ve had plenty of time to theorize about how Timothée Chalamet might embody the lead role. The preparation has been substantial: Timmy has spent years now learning to play like Bob (carrying around a Gibson, taking guitar lessons!), sound like Bob (linking up with his Dune co-star Austin Butler’s Elvis prep team to hone his vocal tone!), and even, in some circumstances, dress like Bob (albeit in a Hollywood-hotshot, Courrèges-and-Dior sort of way).
Filming finally commenced on A Complete Unknown in New York City over the weekend, and paparazzi captured a first look at Chalamet in costume as an early-career Dylan. Sure enough, he looks about how we might have imagined he would. In the shots, Chalamet wears a rumpled corduroy jacket and a mustard knit scarf with blue jeans, worn-in leather boots, and a snap-buttoned biker cap, which was indeed a signature Dylan accessory in the early 1960s. (The film’s costume designer is Arianne Phillips, whose recent work includes other mid-century-period films such as Don’t Worry Darling and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.)
Based on the character’s tattered guitar case and dusty rucksack, it looks like these photos could have captured the establishing moment of, as Mangold told Collider last year, “a young 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with like, two dollars in his pocket and becoming a worldwide sensation within three years.” It’s a crucial trope in any biopic, when the ingénue-protagonist arrives in the big city: a nobody who just made it to the place where he will become somebody.
There is lots to look forward to, costumes-wise and otherwise, on the A Complete Unknown front. Personally, I am most excited to see Chalamet don the pistachio-green polka-dot shirt that Dylan wore when he famously “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. If nothing else, this dotted shirt will look great alongside a screenshot of the printed shirt that Chalamet’s character Elio Perlman wears in the final-credits scene of Call Me By Your Name.
