Timothée Chalamet performs 40 Bob Dylan songs in the biopic

Timothée Chalametwhich plays the role of Bob Dylan in the new biopic “A Complete Unknown” he fell perfectly into the role of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter for literature, also making the purely musical part of the role his own.

In a twenty-minute promo, producer Fred Berger reveals that Chalamet learned and performed 40 of the folk hero-turned-rockstar’s songs live. “There are 40 songs in the film that he performs,” observes Berger. “On the guitar, on the harmonica and singing live, take after take.”

“It was important to me to sing and play live,” adds Chalamet. “Because if I can actually do it, why should there be artifice? And I’m proud that we took this leap.”

The film, which hits theaters on Christmas Day, follows a young Bob Dylan as he establishes himself in New York’s 1960s folk scene after meeting his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy).

Other figures from that period also enter the narrative, such as Dylan’s girlfriend, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and friend Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). Like Chalamet, each actor sang and played their own instruments.

“Boyd somehow made the performance his own, it feels as authentic and real as Johnny Cash, but he puts his own energy into it,” the Wonka star says of Holbrook.

In addition to charting Dylan’s path to fame and the upheaval caused by his move to electric, the film also chronicles his love life and love triangle with Baez and his pre-fame girlfriend, Sylvie Russ (played by Elle Fanning ).

For her part, Fanning was impressed by Chalamet’s commitment to live performance. “I got goosebumps,” the actress says in the promotional short. “You can see how much love and how hard he worked and how much he cares about doing things right.”

Barbaro tells the Entertainment Weekly website that she was equally impressed by Chalamet. “It was really amazing to see him perform these songs,” he says. “Having worked so hard on my 11 songs, knowing that he had so many and that he had learned to play and sing them all, and the amount of work it took to get to the point where I was, knowing that he had a entire film on his shoulders, I was truly amazed by how he approached each song and each performance.”

The film strives to be true to the era in every way, using authentic microphones and instruments from the era. “We shot the movie one hundred percent live,” says sound mixer Tod Maitland. “No earphones, no timing or anything.”

As writer-director James Mangold says, “It’s a movie about music that’s unadorned and authentic.”