Once upon a time, Timothée Chalamet learned to rhyme (and play guitar and speak) like Bob Dylan for the big screen outing A Complete Unknown. It’s a performance that’s been gaining him a lot of notice during awards season, including a coveted 2025 Oscars nomination. But him learning to play like Bob Dylan before filming was apparently a far more secretive endeavor than I would have guessed.
This information is coming to us from Larry Saltzman, a freelance guitarist and session musician who also happened to be hired for the coveted gig of teaching Timothèe Chalamet to jam. However, the professional didn’t really even know what he was signing up for when he said yes. He told Rolling Stone that he was literally asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement before the movie went into production and ultimately hit the release schedule.
They didn’t tell me who it was. With these non-disclosure agreements, they don’t want people blabbing about it. I’m not on Facebook, you know what I mean? I have none of that kind of stuff. After three or four or five phone calls, they finally said ‘it’s Timothée Chalamet.’ I really didn’t know who Timothée was. They said ‘it’s Bob Dylan music.’
Mr. Saltzman was cool with that level of information at the time, telling the outlet his older sister had been a huge Dylan fan from the very beginning. That was specifically the music he'd grown up on with a cool elder sibling in the house.
While unclear for a time about all the who, what, when, where, and why he was teaching Chalamet how to perform classics like “The Times They Are A Changin’” and “Hard Rain,” Mr. Saltzman started creating a process for breaking down the songs for the young actor. Honestly, the whole thing sounds like it was quite the doozy, but one that paid off by the time James Mangold's movie hit the big screen.
My Dropbox file on this is ridiculous. My Timothée/Dylan Dropbox folder is intense. For each song, I would obviously have an MP3, and then I had this program called Transcribe where you could play it and you could slow it down. That was really helpful. You could zero in on whatever you needed to focus on. For each song, I had a Read Me document with different YouTube videos that I wanted to watch, and then I would have lyrics with chords, like a folk way to do it. I wrote things out with probably a few little words of encouragement here and there. Each song had its own thing.
The music teacher ended up ordering Dylan songs by what he felt was "level of difficulty" and he and Mr. Chalamet got to work. They started with "Masters of War," which only has a few chords, and things got harder from there. The actor would go on to perform 40 of Bob Dylan’s classics in A Complete Unknown, which takes Dylan fans from his pre-fame days though his famous electric set at the Newport Folk Festival. He did all this without ever actually meeting Dylan.
A Complete Uknown reviews have been solid, and there are entire fan threads dedicated to Chalamet’s performance in the movie. One thing that’s struck me about each of them is the fact fans can’t even agree on which Dylan classic the young actor does best. There’s so much he did that’s true to what Dylan has done in performances, it’s pretty amazing to look back and realize how much work was put into so many songs.
While musician performances from Rami Malek and more have been transformative, a lot of times with music biopics like this, we might get an actor lip syncing and/or learning just one or two songs to pull of a performance, but A Complete Unknown is all Timmy. He recently won a SAG Award for the gig, and made no bones about what he wants his Hollywood legacy to be, stating, 'I want to be one of the greats.'
No one could accuse him of not putting the work in.
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