“It dawned on me, ‘Wow! I think that we’re learning how to do this just how Bob learned how to play’”: How Timothée Chalamet went from a complete guitar novice to become Bob Dylan onscreen

Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in a black-and-white still from A Complete Unknown. He plays a Gibson J-45.

A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold and featuring Timothée Chalamet in the lead role, is a story about the early years of the folk icon, the Minneapolis transplant with an acoustic guitar strapped to his back, who hitches a ride to the Big Apple and becomes the voice of a generation.

It follows Dylan’s story as he searches for the hospitalised Woody Guthrie (who is languishing in Morris Plains, New Jersey, not NYC), performs for him, meeting Pete Seeger along the way, establishing himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene, duets with Joan Baez, and how fame and the siren call of the electric guitar augmented his persona and his art as the story inexorably rolls on towards Newport Folk Festival 1965.